Last week Reuters UK reported that Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) rejected the latest bid from WPP, the world’s second largest ad firm.
Sounds like they’re closer to becoming bedfellows with WPP’s German counterpart, GfK.

I thought WPP chieftain Martin Sorrell covered all the bases as he described his firm’s motivation:

“Growth is being driven by continuous pressure on clients to raise
their like-for-like revenue growth and to optimise their investment
against a backdrop of changing demographics, decreasing product
differentiation, intensifying global competition, the fragmentation of
the media and the impact of digital development.”

The forces at work here are disruptive to say the least. The big agencies are getting pressure from clients to move away from costly print and TV ads and move to more conversational forms of marketing and advertising. It’s not enough to just deploy a microsite and track page views. Customers want real-time information and they’re demanding it on their terms.

If I were a mid-market or large brand, I’d cut down on the one-off microsites and email-based newsletters and move the conversation to more interactive environments. Many companies have figured out that tapping the collective wisdom of their customer base provides huge value. Evidence of this is the large number of customer-driven communities and B2B networks getting sponsorship deals from consumer brands and software companies. It’s likely these communities are where your customers are lurking anyway or they’re building their own versions. Why not engage with them on their terms and in their environments?

I’m not calling for the death of traditional marketing techniques - unless there’s no infusion of 21st Century smarts.

Last week I mentioned the danger to companies that disregard trends in the content management space. I’m going horizontal this time and taking a crack at one of my favorites lines of business — marketing.

Here’s some ways content management is changing marketing:

3: Killing direct mail. I learned years ago that a successful direct mail marketing campaign has a 2% response rate. That would mean that 98% of the papers cluttering our mailboxes are meant to be unused. Whether we consider this a junk mail issue, a snail-mail spam issue, or a green issue, does anyone really need to incur the costs associated with stacks of unread fliers anymore? Deliver your content over a more targeted electronic medium, and maybe you’ll have the added benefit of also annoying fewer potential customers.

2: Improving measurement and analytics. People get Ph.D.s studying and trying to generate ROI models for marketing. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tie back exact dollar amounts to individual marketing campaigns. That said, many of the newer ways to deliver content to target markets allow for immediate and measurable responses. If you have the right content analytics in place to track clickstreams and other behaviors, marketing programs can be tracked immediately, something that helps marketers re-tool strategies in almost real time.

1: Marrying IT and marketing. Marketing always has held the creative types, while technology holds the rest of us geeks. If this split is maintained now, though, the best marketing content won’t be delivered over the latest platforms, and entire market segments may be missed. Mobile applications, targeted e-mails that make it through spam filters, optimized Web sites, and ad widgets weren’t part of marketing history, but are taking over the present and the future. Internal company departments need to work together now more than ever. The marketing types don’t always need to understand exactly how to set up a blog or track feedback, but if no one on the team does, well, what a shame to waste good content.

And BTW, if you like stuff like this, you might want to subscribe my blog at InformationWeek.

Several months ago a content management vendor told me that the oncoming recession was causing it problems with revenue generation. I said perhaps, but it’s also possible its problems were related to the fact that its customers were really angry and really vocal. It’s too easy to blame market conditions without taking a hard look in the mirror sometimes.

For this top 5 list I won’t name any names, but I encourage everyone to try to clean their own closets occasionally. Maybe these items will add up to survival in either a recession or peak market conditions. The top reasons a content management company will go out of business:

No. 5: You forgot to eat your own dog food. I’m amazed at the number of companies that offer content management options while their own Web content and marketing materials haven’t been updated since 1997. If you have the teams that can deliver for your customers, let them practice on your real estate first. Would you buy a suit from a man wearing rags? Maybe, but many people wouldn’t.

No. 4: Your customers hate you. The best technology in the world won’t save you if your own customers tell everyone that you’re a jerk. Please don’t ever tell your customers that it’s their fault if they can’t figure out how to use your products. Yes, content management is not rocket science, and yes, some people are amazingly nontechnical. That doesn’t excuse elitism, and if the words “The customer is just stupid” have ever come out of your mouth, you may deserve to go out of business. It sounds like I’m making this up. I’m not.

No. 3: You try to develop everything in-house. The market is moving fast, your R&D teams can’t always keep up. This isn’t necessarily a weakness — sometimes you need to pick your differentiators and source the other items. If you find that you’re missing release deadlines again and again on items readily available from other vendors or as open source, please evaluate your business model. You’re burning cash for fun, not profit.

No. 2: You disregard trends. I’ll say it again. The market moves fast and what’s on the horizon sometimes seems just plain silly at first. But we’ve all heard the famous miscalculation that the world only has need for about five computers — the smartest people have made mistakes. For those who have told me that “Green is just a fad” and “Blogs are overrated,” (both of those are direct, recent quotes) be careful of what you dismiss. Don’t fall behind your competitors because you personally drive a Hummer and wear polar bear fur earmuffs (that’s a green reference, people). Fads and trends have a way of catching on, becoming important, and filling real business needs. Be open to change, and maybe your revenue will grow.

No. 1: Your employees turn over faster than the toilet paper is changed in the corporate restroom. Whether the job market is tight or technology workers seem a dime a dozen, employees are the face of your company. If they’re leaving in droves, or you’re replacing them quarterly, it’s a morale killer and your customers sense it.

Send me your reasons for part two and we’ll post them next week.

Cross-posted on InformationWeek’s Content Management Blog.

VC heavyweight Tim Draper described how differently content is distributed and syndicated into today’s market, which apparently is influencing the way venture firms like Draper Fisher Jurvetson develop investment models.

John Shinal at vator.tv interviewed Draper at the OnMedia Media conference recently about the changing new media landscape.

..it may be a little like a producing company and a little like a venture capital model..but somehow we’ll pull those two things together and end up with a new model for venture investing that none of us has quite envisioned before.

It just validates how the social web is redefining how content is controlled and monetized. If you’re a marketer and not positioning your company to operate more like a media company, you should beware of being replaced.

Whether you say “media is the new creative” (like AdWeek) or simply think the marketing landscape has been turned on its head, the message is the same. Adapt or get left behind.

Laurie Petersen, executive editor of MediaPost, had details recently about a new study (”Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010″) from the Association of National Advertisers and management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton that confirmed just that.

And for the record, I really like the “communications integrator” term. Dissect what you do as a marketer and you’ll find a large portion of your time is spent mapping out how to integrate everything. After all that’s marketing nirvana right? Everyone wants an integrated approach.

What do you think about the five trends below?

Marketing as Conversation:

It’s less about sending a message and more about conversing. More than half the marketers say they plan to increase their PR budgets to help in this regard.

Insight into Foresight:

Technology enhances targeting capability and 80% of marketers surveyed place a high importance on behavioral targeting.

Media is the New Creative:

Distribution and context rivals creative execution in importance. A new role of “communications integrator” is emerging that bridges the gap between media, creative and brand strategy. More than 80% of participants say communications planning capabilities will be critical moving forward.

Marketing + Math + Technology:

Data quality, quantity and accessibility mean that math is everywhere. Leaders are more likely to have the metrics and capabilities to judge the effects of new media.

The Network Effect:

Digital media requires a far higher level of collaboration and coordination across all players. Nearly 60% of survey respondents believe creative, strategic and media capabilities should be rebundled–but there is no consensus as to which type of agency should lead.

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Technorati tags: marketing, marketing+2.0, media, social+media, brand, integrated+marketing, PR, communications+integrator

My tough love for CMOs these days is “adapt or die”. Your required portfolio (as well as other c-suite peers) is changing fast and that change is usually summed up in one word. Digital. The CMO in today’s organization better be a curious technician, a keen analyst, and comfortable building a business case. If XML, RSS, and SaaS look like alphabet soup, you might want to keep reading.

Jeff Gundersen, CEO of Executive Connections, offers some help in a recent Ad Age article where he lays out a digital primer for tech-hungry CMOs. He describes the digital dilemma:

They (CMOs) often don’t have the direct marketing, analytic/segmentation and customer-relationship-management-consultative skills to lead integrated media and marketing programs, combining general advertising, branding, direct, promotion, PR and digital elements.

Today’s marketing world is less and less about stand-alone campaigns that use one medium at a time and more about an integrated approach that speaks to your customers when and where they want. The kicker there is just because you find your market, doesn’t mean they’re ready to engage. Gundersen expands a bit further using the increasingly pervasive “micro” term, used to describe everything from the nature of today’s content to the characteristics of markets.

We are moving toward a marketing world that is driven by a direct-marketing opt-in, predictive modeling and tracking approach. Marketing in the future will not be about the masses but about understanding micro-segments of customers and using tools that enable marketing to get more granular and take campaigns to a one-to-one level.

I heard someone describe it recently as “customers are now looking for marketers instead of marketers looking for customers”. That’s earth-shattering, if not exciting.

Yesterday’s BusinessWire breakfast was proof that some PR firms do get it. It also proved if the jury’s still out on their capabilities, they’re plugging in the right people to execute. Enter Waggener Edstrom and their new digital duo Jim Olson and David Almacy. Both were asked by BusinessWire to host their so-called “wireside” chat about PR in the Digital Age. I actually Twittered some of the session from my Blackberry Pearl, at one point looking up during a post as Almacy remarked that, “some of you might be Twittering this presentation right now.” I looked up to see a bunch of blank stares. Oh well, nice try David.

Olson, a big brand guy and former VP at Overture, kicked off the discussion with his list of digital trends. One of the things he confirmed was what we’re all seeing happen in front of us — video. As he put it, the web now is in full motion and has a voice. Video is mainstream.

( Jim Olson and David Almacy | Pics taken by Blackberry Pearl)

The second point was the broad notion of “interactivity“, where users are now part of the mix — like it or not. Citing the oft-used citizen journalism term, Olson explained how media companies have had to rethink the way news is produced and delivered.

Individual Addressability was another term Olson used to describe the ability to tailor content to the right constituents. This is a big one in a lot of ways. It brings the Long Tail into the fold and helps all of us get a clearer picture of the impact of our marketing and advertising spend. Olson quoted the old advertising saying, “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don’t know which half!” Well folks, that’s a changing. And that’s the lure of content with digital DNA.

The last few points dealt with the potential ramifications of a growing global internet community and the proliferation of mobile devices. On the former, Olson pointed to statistics showing how China will soon surpass the U.S. with more than 200M internet users. The numbers aren’t so surprising for a country of more than a billion, but the message was more about preparation. Think about the challenges (cultural, technological) that poses for U.S. marketers. Olson was dead on titling the slide, “The Revolution is not being televised.”

The last digital piece he dissected was the mobile movement, drawing a definitive stake in the sand by proclaiming, “Mobile is the new PC”. He reminded us more than half the planet’s mobile devices are in developing countries. A fitting end to his pitch was a quote from GE’s CEO - “I want my communicators to be role models for creativity and innovation.”

David Almacy took the floor next with a little faster tempo. A well-traveled political advisor and former web guru for the White House, Almacy came across as part geek and part strategist. That’s just what the Doctor ordered for the big PR agencies being called on by the big brands.

His White House 2.0 discussion was fascinating. It’s daunting to even think of developing a Web 2.0 strategy for the leader of the free world. Even more interesting was hearing Almacy talk about the early backlash from the President’s office when he launched the first Presidential podcasts. Once the first distasteful threads started to bubble up, he was asked to remove the content from iTunes. But in true web evangelist form, Almacy stuck to his guns, finally winning out after the comments evened out with an acceptable positive and negative mix.

I told my colleagues, we can’t take the podcast down, we’re on the front page of iTunes!

The other thing Almacy knifed through was the bevy of social media tools and services. He obviously caught me nodding as he rattled off all the newest Web 2.0 kids on the block, everything from Digg to Twitter and Pownce. The takeaway though wasn’t being jargon-capable, it was more about curiosity and exploration. As he put it..

I only have a few Tweets out there but I had to see what it was all about. 

And that’s really the sense I got from yesterday’s event. There was a lot of tire-kicking, a lot of curiosity, and heck of a lot of passion. It was apparent the room was full of communicators trying to keep a foothold on the shifting ground beneath them.

A few weeks back we worked an Art Fest in Addison,Tx, helping promote my sister-in-law’s jewelry works. And like any good marketer, my head’s always on a swivel absorbing the ways companies try to reach us. My wife and I liked the fact the Jack FM set-up was green and clean. No emissions, low power usage, etc.

 
And speaking of clean, the other image is from Micro Target Media and comes straight to you from a genuine Addsion, Tx Port-o-Potty. It cracked me up that the PROs — portable restaurant operators — got into the acronym game. But apparently I should have done my homework. PRO is a common term as you can see in the comment thread.

And you wonder why social media and brand measurement is so hot. It took what, less than 48 hours for somebody to track me down. WOW.

 If you want to get the ins and outs of Enterprise 2.0, jump over to the Enterprise 2.0 Rave and check out the program.The organizers have decided to host the event virtually (May 21-22) with webcasts featuring various roundtable discussions.You’ll recognize most of the folks, even if you’re just a casual observer of social media and Web 2.0.

They’ve also assembled an enterprise 2.0 readiness survey you can access here and plan to share the results during one of the sessions.

Technorati tags: enterprise+2.0, enterprise+2.0+rave, web+2.0, e2+0, tech+events, technology, business+2.0

One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being  driven by social media and powerful search technologies.

(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)

According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.

With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.

The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we  saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares. 

Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it.  The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content. 

The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.

But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is,  they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got  a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.

However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.  

Cross-posted @ The FASTforward Blog

FAST Search & Transfer is betting there’s a lot of folks tired of Google’s chokehold on the internet advertising market. The search provider is pitching to put you in control of your own Ad network. Translation: Quit paying third parties like Google and Yahoo.

The Norway-based company released news yesterday morning of AdMomentum, billed as an alternative to internet advertising’s big three - Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. IDC’s Sue Feldman commented on contextual advertising and described FAST’s Ad platform:

Online ad revenue drives the digital economy, and no one has a lock on that revenue stream today,” said Feldman, IDC’s Vice President for Search and Digital Marketplace Technologies. “Online advertising – particularly contextual advertising – continues to soar. IDC believes that large publishers and ad networks can seize a significant share of this revenue. FAST AdMomentum provides the infrastructure for publishers to manage and monetize their online content. It’s a digital marketplace in a box.

You’re probably thinking, big deal right? Nobody’s catching Google. Even if you’re right, think about how wide open the internet ad market is right now. The scramble for number two or even number five or six in market share is worth billions. I’m sure FAST has done the math.

But I’m thinking there’s more to this battle than just fighting for the big brand websites. What about FAST’s position with enterprise customers?

Some of the world’s largest companies use their technology (much of it behind the firewall) to enhance their information management strategies — the company clearly has a strong brand in that respect. The question is, who can expand the footprint of the enterprise customer first? Will it be Google with its search and bevy of web 2.0 apps or a company like FAST whose genealogy already has a decidedly enterprisey slant.

It seems like there’s plenty of customers who could help FAST chip away at Google’s AdSense. If ACME already has FAST infrastructure, why wouldn’t they pilot FAST? Wouldn’t it be an easy ROI to use an existing backend from FAST while ramping up your Ad resources?

I also think it’s a bit naive to think large organizations will be tied to one Ad platform. Someone mentioned how Google customers might threaten to employ FAST to get a better deal. Not sure it really matters. The smart companies will tailor their advertising strategies so precisely, they’ll quickly figure out Google and FAST can each serve their own purpose. One size fits all is dead.

And what about all the channel and OEM communities that companies like FAST have? To me, those are armies entering the enterprise through all sorts of other Trojan horses — back doors like this.

Speaking of back door entrances into the enterprise, it made me think of a comment I ran across (on Rubicon exec Michael Mace’s blog) from Robert Scoble a while back describing Google vs. Microsoft. Although the parallels may not be the same in scale, I think Scoble paints a scenario that can be played out for all sorts of David and Goliath matchups.

Google hasn’t made an impact on the enterprise yet. And I don’t see them challenging Microsoft or taking money off the Office team’s plate in the enterprise for the next two years. Further out, however, they are positioned to come in and take some business from Microsoft. The first thing Google will do is stop the growth of Microsoft Office. Small startups aren’t going to buy Office anymore, they’re going to use the free apps on the Internet. Is Google going to get Chevron to switch from Exchange? No. Not soon. What they are going to do is add new value that Microsoft can’t, like the Google calendar team showing me how to put my calendar on my blog. It’s really nice. Those kinds of things are what you’ll see enterprise companies start to use in little projects here and there. Google will sneak in the back door, just as Microsoft did 25 years ago with DOS and PCs.

So with the above in mind, what’s it gonna take for FAST to take real market share? Running your own Ad network will take some muscle.

Maybe I’ll have the chance to ask the FAST product managers this week in San Diego about  the platform’s complexity, but it’s not even that. It has more to do with an enterprise’s propensity to outsource all the functions related to web advertising. That’s a big reason so many companies look to AdSense, Panama, and Microsoft’s AdCenter. Outside of producing content, all the stuff related to development, payment, stats, etc., is handled effortlessly, maybe too effortlessly. We’ve gotten lazy and the big advertisers are profiting.

So, are we to the point where corporations are finally ready to act like real media companies? You have to think it’s just a matter of time before internal marketing and PR teams get tired of everyone reaching into the coffer.

Marketing Sherpa has just released their â€œMarketing Wisdom” report for 2007. These are always packed with tips from marketers coast-to-coast and as you might expect, this year’s version includes a lot of social media discussion. From blogs and RSS to search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing, you can see what the best and brightest have to say.  

Download the PDF here.

Sounds like the iPhone’s got all the bells and whistles and as expected, a striking design. Read about it at PCWorld.

The jury’s still out whether the rumors of Kodak’s digital death have been greatly exaggerated. On the consumer side of their business (they do make business scanners and software) it just seems like they’ve been stuck in a lower gear for a while now. But Kodak execs say their current YouTube video exemplifies the hipper Kodak analysts and consumers have been waiting for.

Still, the company may need to hurry up a bit. As IDC analyst Chris Chute pointed out, Kodak is now the No. 3 seller of digital cameras, behind Canon and Sony, and investors are getting impatient with quarter after quarter of red ink. Fourth-quarter figures aren’t in yet, but Kodak’s market share for the third quarter was 14%, down from 21% in 2005, he said.

And I thought this excerpt was funny:

The executives interviewed said they are not sure how the video made its way to the web in December, but the best guess is one or more tech-savvy employees copied it or uploaded it from the company intranet.

Why hide this? Kodak makes it sound like video and the web are foreign to their average employee. Maybe that’s half the problem.

Take a look at this slide show and tell me if you come away as unimpressed as I was. My only takeaway from the weak memorable ads was how traditional advertising continues to get turned on its head by consumer-generated media (CGM). Enter the Chevy Tahoe user-generated campaign. If you didn’t see that debacle coming, you gotta be living underground. Or maybe you’ve just never seen YouTube. Chevy’s only saving grace was actually running all the ads — positive or negative. 

What I can’t figure out is how some of these decisions come about? Was the agency and client simply chasing publicity or was it just a case of the non-existent strategy? (Hint: Don’t always do user-generated media because everyone else is doing it.)

Here’s more evidence that B2B companies are getting smarter about the way their content is used to drive business. Kudos to Caterpillar for seeing an opportunity to repurpose their digital assets and relaunch online.

There’s more to the story however. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of research and market intelligence required to find the right channel or community. Sure you can produce your own niche-oriented videos (narrowcasting of sorts), but being part of the right community of eyeballs is far more important. Once you’ve found the community, how do you become a trusted advisor? That’s where your agency earns their paycheck.

Caterpillar already had a great deal of video assets: training videos and the promotional videos dealers would use to sell the company’s products. Much of the content on the video site will be repurposed, said Carr Davis, Cygnus Business Media’s co-CEO. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to just produce video for the internet as a first run, but [it works] if you have content and repurpose it.”

After I saw the mention of SAP’s social media news release (SMNR) on PR Squared, it got me thinking about a conversation I had with some clients last week.

My premise for pitching the SMNR to them was simple. Let your audience slice and dice your content on their terms. Some folks will download the video, some will pull down a photo. Others might decide to just Digg it and move on. Whatever the interaction with your SMNR, the key is just that, interaction.

It’s fascinating to think how early we are in all of this. Fast forward a few years and think how silly it’ll seem gloating over an embedded video (below) inside of a press release.

As if traditional radio advertisers didn’t have enough to worry about, Google’s now letting select AdWords customers launch audio campaigns. 

From the AP wire story:

Google is betting its technology can do for radio what it has already done for the Internet by automating the process for selling and distributing ads to an audience where the messages are most likely to pique consumer interest. As it does on the Web, Google plans to charge a commission for helping radio stations sell ads.

                                       <<Screenshot via CNET>>  

On the heels of Shift Communications’ social media news release, Edelman just announced their own fancy press release creator. 

And there’s already pundits griping about Edelman’s Shift-like effort, calling it nothing new and copycat-like. But c’mon, how many ways can you really repurpose Digg links and RSS icons to look any different?

The content required to compile social releases is the same — podcasts, blogs, images, technorati, trackbacks — all the usual web 2.0 stuff. The only thing any different is the underlying technology that handles the publishing, things like managing digital assets and rendering HTML. Otherwise nada.

Perhaps Edelman would be better served striking a deal with an open source content management provider and making it (StoryCrafter) available to other agencies.

Shift is ahead here as well.

Shift Communications seems to think so. And while I wish every news item had all the attributes of the so-called “social media” release, the reality is most companies still have difficulties understanding what the hell social media means, much less the components that make up a “social media release”.

I think it’s more realistic to get clients using “social media” in their work process. Once they’re bookmarking, tagging, and podcasting, they’ll be more inclined to use this expertise for outbound PR and marketing activities.

You can download the template here.