Web Ink Now

Steve Kayser proves B2B software companies can have a sense of humor

Most marketing and communications programs from business-to-business software and technology companies are dreadfully dry and painfully boring. I mean if some of these companies tried to smile at themselves, their screens would crack.

But guess what? Your buyers, no matter what sort of organization you work for, are people—real people with a sense of fun—not nameless, faceless, corporate drones. Sometimes a bit of the unusual and funny can work wonders.

Steve Kayser is a marketing executive at Cincom, one of the largest privately-held software companies in the world. He’s a master at online marketing and communications, having built the Cincom Expert Access e-zine from zero to 135,000 subscribers. Expert Access is written for senior-level corporate executives, IT and operations managers, and technology buyer committees. Cincom is a global company and Expert Access counts subscribers from dozens of countries.

Humor plays a large part.

Can you think of any other B2B software companies that have a spokes-donkey?

Or can you imagine another company in this market running a lead article in their online newsletter comparing General George Patton to Dog the Bounty Hunter? Steve Kayser does all of this and more and he proves that humor works in the B2B world.

Of course, it's not all fun and games. Cincom is a company that delivers value to its customers. Cincom has achieved 21 straight years of producing more than $100 million in revenue - the only private software company in the world to attain this lofty feat.

Steve proves humor can be used, even in B2B marketing. But it’s tricky to strike the right balance. And if you’ve never used humor before, you’ll need to start small. A spokes-chipmunk perhaps?

Disclosure: I am one of Cincom’s many outside "experts" and my writing occasionally appears in Cincom Expert Access.

Corporate dysfunction at its worst: The B2B tradeshow demo

Steve Johnson has an interesting take on the question: Why demo at trade shows?

For some markets, the tradeshow demo is very important. While I was in high school and summers during college, I worked in a cheese shop. Once a year, I went to New York for the Fancy Foods and Confection Show. Demos were all over the place, many involving tasty treats: Cheese, sausage, chocolate, coffee, and more.

Or imagine the people at Blendtec on a tradeshow floor at a kitchen equipment show. The demo would be only one minute and they would probably pull off something really fun and informative that would sell blenders.

OK, but what about B2B technology companies?

Yuk! Can you imagine anything more boring than a ten minute screen-by-screen demo by a product manager who knows all the leading, cutting-edge features of some mission-critical, flexible, and scalable solution that improves business process using industry-standard technology? Makes me want to scream in disgust!

Yes, I know that there are exceptions. But in my experience, the tradeshow demo is interruption marketing run amok and is often an excuse-fest for both buyers and sellers. The company uses it as an excuse for bad marketing and the attendee uses it as an excuse for lack of interest.

Nearly all B2B technology company tradeshow demos are conducted out of laziness. Here's how the dysfunctional process works and why B2B technology demos are so overused: Marketers don't understand buyers, the problems buyers face, or how their product helps solve these problems because they don't get out into the market. Instead these marketers are holed up in their own offices. Then the tuned out marketing person builds a demo script using reverse-engineered language that they think the buyer wants to hear based not on buyer input but on product features. During the demo they go through each feature in the product all the while spewing superlative-laden, jargon-sprinkled, gobbledygook-filled hype.

Um… This is not effective.

The decision for any marketing initiative should start with buyers and your buyer personas. What problems do your buyers have? How can your company solve those problems with technology? How do your buyers describe the solutions? I think that B2B technology product companies need to re-think the entire tradeshow experience, not just the demo. I’d ask a more fundamental question: Do you need to be at the tradeshow at all? And if so, do you really need a booth?

The web is a free 7x24 tradeshow. Consider a re-focus of efforts to blogging or a content-rich website or other online initiatives to reach buyers.

The mass media aberration: What's old is new again

After I posted you must unlearn what you have learned yesterday, I entered into a mind opening conversation with Brian Clark that started on my blog and then went over to email. Brian helped me to realize something that I had been missing.

The new rules really aren't new.

Brian (and others who also commented and sent me emails) helped me to understand that from 2,000 years ago, nothing fundamentally has changed. Many generations ago, people communicated with each other and sold stuff (chickens perhaps) at the town square. Even 100 years ago communications was real and personal and authentic. You asked the pharmacist in your town to make you up a potion to cure your ills and you bought your linen at the local dry goods store. Personal opinions mattered.

Instead of making everything "new," the Web has brought communications back full circle to where we were 60 years ago. On the Web you can finally communicate again in the way that people respond to. What people respond to, and the way they make purchase decisions, really hasn’t changed at all.

The Web is a huge town square and blogs are like people who venture into the town pub. People communicate and share ideas and products are sold.

OK, so what's different then?

After World War Two we had a huge aberration in the form of mass media. As people in the United States focused on just three television networks as the primary way they made decisions about soap and cars and fashion, the world of marketing and PR morphed from being personal and authentic to being generic and message driven. Instead of personal communications, mass media was the "new" and communicators (like me I would admit) went a little silly trying to adapt.

So then what happened?

The whole Madison-Avenue-driven (and PR-reinforced) focus on mass media made perfectly sane people stop communicating and instead become kooky with interruption-based advertising to the masses. Even niche B2B technology marketers adopted the mass media concept and dumbed down their offerings into flexible scalable solutions for improving business process and then advertised the "solutions" in generic business magazines, hired expensive PR agencies, and sent massive direct mail campaigns to convince people that they had a problem that technology can solve.

Watching the new TV show Mad Men reminded me how we've really only been doing mass marketing since the 1960s or so. We built up a big TV-centric economy in just a few short decades and now, thanks to the Web allowing us to communicate again, we're breaking down the TV-centric economy even faster than we built it.

Yes, we still need to unlearn what we've learned in the last half century.

But rather than everything being "new," it's more like we're just going back to the way it was before mass culture made us kooky and silly.

Thanks again Brian for pointing me here. You were right all along.

As long as I'm writing about the post I did yesterday I would also like to add that while I do think that Web marketing is making communications "new" again, there is still room for the tried and true. As Kevin Grossman says, "Traditional marketing and PR is still viable and should be included in your business plan (to what degree depends on your business, target market, etc.)" I agree with Kevin that a mention in the Wall Street Journal is extremely valuable. And I also agree with Matt Gentile that PR remains a people business. "Meeting the reporter (in person) find out what they are writing about and tailor your pitch. Have some fun with the new media, but don't forget the basic principles of PR."

Randstad offers virtual jobs in Second Life paid with real money

Randstad is one of the largest temporary and contract staffing organizations in the world. The company has over 2,500 offices and employs over 300,000 people every day.

I think it is fascinating that Randstad is the first HR services provider to open a branch office in Second Life. Randstad offers real jobs "in world" such as positions at ABN AMRO Second Life offices. Employees who work in Second Life are paid in Euros.

Randstad has put together a terrific YouTube video about it’s Second Life office.

Second Life residents can visit the Randstad branch.

Building and Funding Content Technology Companies

Yesterday I attended the SIIA Previews event in NYC. This is a forum for larger information companies and the VC community to have a chance to hear from a dozen or so new and interesting information and technology companies.

Ed Keating, who along with Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex produced the event, said he expects to do the event every year. "I like the notion that we have companies representing all parts of the value chain: Content creators, content distributors, & content protectors," Ed told me. Barry Graubart and John Blossom also blogged the event.

Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring kicked off the event by describing the VC world now. "The mood is upbeat," Dreyfuss said. "Deals are happening. Money and ideas are flowing again. Now VC firms and other investors are investing at one third of the rate of 2000." According to Dreyfuss, the total VC investment (not just technology) was $25.75 billion in 2006 up 12% from 2005. "Where there’s money, there’s hope," he said.

Here are some of the more interesting companies (in my opinion) that presented at the event:

Decision Tree Media creates private-label web guides that drive qualified leads to sales channels. The service provides online education to teach people how to use complex products and is used by companies for lead generation. Create interactive guides for products like life insurance or long-term care insurance that then delivers an online offer that leads to an offline sales process. They say that leads close at twice the average of clients’ other lead sources. Traffic comes from Google search. Can plug in video testimonials too.

Generate, Inc. delivers real-time company intelligence with integrated social networking tools to deliver personalized information to business professionals. Generate G2 stands out as a tool for sales professionals and others who need to cultivate high level contacts. With an innovative combination of users’ own personal network of contacts, publicly available information, and premium news, the platform delivers the connections that drive business.

Eurekster empowers communities to own and refine site-based web search. The search and monetization platform enables the passion of community for customers in the social search and collaboration space.

Near-Time integrates a group weblog with wiki pages, team events and shared files in a hosted and secure collaborative environment. It helps people to collaborate and publish on the web and brings together web, intranet and extranet.

Pando Networks offers a free, simple to use application with an unprecedented underlying network architecture for rich-media content delivery. Growing by 30,000 installs a day this is a P2P network for transport of large (and huge) files.

RealTimeMatrix has pioneered break-through technology that enables anyone to get relevant content from the Web the instant it is published.

Attributor is creating a platform that provides transparency and accountability in online content use and licensing for the rapidly growing content economy.

In his keynote presentation, Fred Wilson, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures talked about Does Information Want to be Free? Wilson says that people and companies need to empower the advertising world about what we are interested in so we can receive targeted advertisements. When he said, "What is advertising?" Wilson answered his own question in exactly the way that I would: "The interruption model of advertising doesn't work."

It is interesting that many of the most interesting new companies (in my opinion) that are getting funded today are technologies for delivering marketing related content in welcome, non-interruption-based ways.

The New Rules of PR ebook: Revised and updated for 2007

The New Rules of PR – a new and updated edition of the ebook for 2007 with a forward and newsmaker tips by David McInnis, founder & CEO of PRWeb, a Vocus Company.

When I first released my ebook The new rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly by posting it on my site and my blog and sending a press release out about it in mid-January 2006, I thought I might get a few thousand downloads. Imagine my surprise when the ebook was downloaded more than 15,000 times in just the first week!

Since then, I have been happily watching the wave of interest from this effort and am amazed by the metrics:
> When I first put it out, there was precisely one hit on Google for the exact phrase "new rules of pr." The last time I checked there were over 9,000 Google hits because hundreds of bloggers and online media outlets have written about the ebook and thousands of readers have commented on my blog and others.
> As I write this, it is nearly a year since the release of the first edition and more than 150,000 people have downloaded it (so far).
> An expanded hardcover edition The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly is due out in June 2007 from Wiley (you can pre-order the book on Amazon now).

David McInnis, founder & CEO of PRWeb, a Vocus Company, was among the very first people to download the ebook, write about it on his blog, and help push the viral marketing buzz. David suggested doing a second edition of the ebook and I am pleased that he has not only written a forward for it, but also contributed a series of newsmaker tips. David and the team at PRWeb have pioneered social media tools for press releases such as tagging and trackbacks, so he is the ideal person to put his stamp on this new and improved edition.

Download your complimentary copy of the second edition of The New Rules of PR now.

A press release about the new edition of the ebook went out today. (Hey this is an ebook about using press releases to reach buyers directly, so you should at least check out the press release about it, don’t you think!)

If you read the first edition, welcome back! If you are reading The New Rules of PR for the first time, prepare to learn about a new way to get your organization noticed on the Web.

Spam 2.0 and how to solve the problem

You know when The New York Times writes about a technology issue, it is a big deal. In an article today called Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself, Brad Stone describes the newer techniques of "image spam" (using just an image and not any text that anti-spam software can read) and other tricks that the bad guys are using.

The solution to the spam nightmare is simple. Just charge all senders one cent per email and the problem will be solved. This concept of email "postage" is not my original idea, but I have been talking about it for years. It just makes sense.

The problem with spam is that it is free to send, unlike print junk mail that requires a payment to the post office to send. Legitimate email marketers with a targeted list could afford to pay a penny per email, but spammers couldn't run a profitable business with such a requirement.

Yeah, I know there are problems with this idea. The whole global email system needs to be updated to accommodate it. And spammers may find ways to work around it. But it is worth it.

Eight Quick Tips to create thoughtful Web content to reach buyers directly

As many smart marketers know, a well crafted white paper, e-book, or Webinar contributes to an organization's positive reputation by setting it apart in the marketplace of ideas. This form of thought leadership based Web content brands a company, a consultant, or a nonprofit as an expert and as a trusted resource.

While each media for getting your thought leadership content into the marketplace of ideas is different, they share some common considerations:

Quick Tip #1: Most importantly—Do not write about your company and your products. Thought leadership content is designed to solve buyer problems or answer questions and to show that you and your organization are smart and worth doing business with. This type of marketing and PR technique is not a brochure or sales pitch. Thought leadership is not advertising.

Quick Tip #2: Define your organizational goals first. Do you want to drive revenue? Get people to donate money to your organization? Encourage people to buy something?

Quick Tip # 3: Based on your goals, decide if you want to provide the content for free and without any registration (you will get many more people to use the content, but you won’t know who they are) or if you want to include some kind of registration mechanism (much lower response rates, but you build a contact list).

Quick Tip #4: Think like a publisher by understanding your audience. Consider what market problems your buyer personas are faced with and develop topics that appeal to them.

Quick Tip #5: Write for your audience. Use examples and stories. Make it interesting.

Quick Tip #6: Choose a great title that grabs attention. Use subtitles to describe what the content will deliver.

Quick Tip #7: Promote the effort like crazy. Offer the content on your site with easy-to-find links. Add a link to employees’ e-mail signatures, and get partners to offer links as well.

Quick Tip #8: To drive the viral marketing effects, alert appropriate reporters, bloggers, and analysts that the content is available and send them a download link.

Thought Leadership: How much money does your buyer make?

"People often ask me, 'Steve, how much should we be paying our product managers?’" says Steve Johnson, an instructor at Pragmatic Marketing, the premier product marketing firm for technology companies. "I used to just throw out a number that sounded about right. But I realized that my estimated salary figure was based on old data, back from the days when I hired product managers."

Because Pragmatic Marketing conducts training for product managers, the company is seen as the experts on all things related to that job function. This situation created a terrific opportunity for some thought leadership. "We realized that we didn't really know current benchmarks, so we decided to find out."

The use of thought leadership based Web content is terrific marketing and may take the form of a Webinar, ebook, white paper, or as Pragmatic Marketing is doing, a survey. Rather than harp about your products, thought leadership content is designed to solve buyer problems or answer questions and to show that you and your organization are smart and worth doing business with. This type of marketing and PR technique is not a brochure or sales pitch. Thought leadership is not advertising.

Johnson composed a survey to gather data from the thousands of people in the Pragmatic Marketing database. "We said, 'if you tell us your salary and other information about your job via the anonymous survey, we will tell you everyone's salary in the form of benchmarks,'" he says. The results were an instant hit with the Pragmatic Marketing buyer persona—product managers—and the survey has become an annual undertaking. “In our e-mail newsletter that goes out to more than 50,000 people, in October we say 'heads up, next month we're doing the annual salary survey.' Then in November we announce that the survey is live and ask people to please take it. We get hundreds of responses in just a few days, aggregate the data, and publish the results on the Web. In 2005, for example, we learned that the average U.S. product management compensation is $90,610 in salary and that 79 percent of product managers get an annual bonus that averages $10,961. But we also learned other information, such as that product managers receive fifty e-mails a day and spend roughly two days a week in internal meetings—fifteen meetings per week. But 50 percent are going to fifteen meetings or more each week, and 27 percent attend twenty or more meetings."

Johnson sees tremendous benefits in survey-based thought leadership. "First of all, the data is really useful," he says. "Now I command the authority to say something like '90 percent of Product Managers have completed college and 46 percent have completed a masters program.' But more importantly, the buyers we are trying to reach to sell training services to, product mangers, recognize us as the thought leader because we have up-to-date information on what’s really going on with technology product managers. And the data that sits on our Web site is fantastic for search engine marketing because anyone looking for information about product managers in technology businesses will find us."

This is a new world for marketers and corporate communicators. The Web offers an easy way for your ideas to spread to a potential audience of millions of people, instantly. Web content in the form of true thought leadership holds the potential to influence many thousands of your buyers in ways that traditional marketing and PR simply cannot.

To embrace the power of the Web and the blogosphere requires a different kind of thinking on the part of marketers. We need to learn to give up our command-and-control mentality. It isn't about "the message." It's about being insightful. The New Rules of Marketing and PR tell us to stop advertising and instead get our ideas out there by understanding buyers and telling them the stories they want to hear. Done well, Web content that delivers authentic thought leadership also brands an organization as one to do business with.

(Disclosure – I am an occasional instructor for Pragmatic Marketing's Effective Product Marketing course.)

The Gobbledygook Manifesto -- Cutting Edge! Mission Critical! An analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke! Just like with a teenager's use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in Web sites and news releases—so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don't communicate very well, you know?

Many of the thousands of Web sites I've analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook adjectives. So I wanted to see exactly how many of these words are being used and created an analysis to do so.

AN ANALYSIS OF GOBBLEDYGOOK

First, I selected words and phrases that are overused in news releases by polling select PR people and journalists to get a list of gobbledygook phrases. Then I turned to Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, for help with my analysis. The folks at the Factiva Reputation Lab used text mining tools to analyze news releases sent by companies in North America. Factiva analyzed each release in its database that had been sent to one of the North American news release wires it distributes for the period from January 1, 2006, to September 30, 2006. The news release wires included in the analysis were Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, CCNMatthews, Commweb.com, Market Wire, Moody’s, PR Newswire, and Primezone Media Network. Thanks to David Hamm, Glenn Fannick and Melanie Surplice at Factiva for their help.

The results were staggering. (Click on the chart to load a larger image). The news release wires collectively distributed just over 388,000 news releases in the nine-month period, and just over 74,000 of them mentioned at least one of the Gobbledygook phrases. The winner was "next generation," with 9,895 uses. There were over 5,000 uses of each of the following words and phrases: "flexible," "robust," "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use." Other notably overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included "cutting edge," "mission critical," "market leading," "industry standard," "turnkey," and "groundbreaking." Oh and don't forget "interoperable," "best of breed," and "user friendly," each with over 1,000 uses in news releases.

WRITE FOR YOUR BUYERS

Your buyers (and the media that cover your company) want to know what specific problems your product solves, and they want proof that it works—in plain language. Your marketing and PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with buyers and to drive action (such as generating sales leads), which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want to hear this in their own words. Every time you write—yes, even in news releases—you have an opportunity to communicate. At each stage of the sales process, well written materials will help your buyers understand how you, specifically, will help them.

Whenever you set out to write something, you should be writing specifically for one or more of the buyer personas that you want to reach. You should avoid jargon-laden phrases that are over-used in your industry. In the technology business, words like "groundbreaking," "industry-standard," and "cutting-edge" are what I call gobbledygook. The worst gobbledygook offenders seem to be business-to-business technology companies. For some reason, marketing people at technology companies have a particularly tough time explaining how products solve customer problems. Because these writers don’t understand how their products solve customer problems, or are too lazy to write for buyers, they cover by explaining myriad nuances of how the product works and pepper this blather with industry jargon that sounds vaguely impressive. What ends up in marketing materials and news releases is a bunch of talk about "industry-leading" solutions that purport to help companies "streamline business process," "achieve business objectives," or "conserve organizational resources." Huh?

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

When I see words like "flexible," "scalable," "groundbreaking," "industry standard," or "cutting-edge," my eyes glaze over. What, I ask myself, is this supposed to mean? Just saying your widget is "industry standard" means nothing unless some aspect of that standardization is important to your buyers. In the next sentence, I want to know what you mean by "industry standard," and I also want you to tell my why that standard matters and give me some proof that what you say is indeed true.

People often say to me, "Everyone in my industry writes this way. Why?"

Here's how the usual dysfunctional process works and why these phrases are so overused: Marketers don't understand buyers, the problems buyers face, or how their product helps solve these problems. That's where the gobbledygook happens. First the marketing person bugs the product managers and others in the organization to provide a set of the product's features. Then the marketing person reverse-engineers the language that they think the buyer wants to hear based not on buyer input but on what the product does. A favorite trick these ineffective marketers use is to take the language that the product manager provides, go into Microsoft Word's find-and-replace mode, substitute the word "solution" for "product," and then slather the whole thing with superlative-laden, jargon-sprinkled hype. By just decreeing, through an electronic word substitution, that "our product" is "your solution," these companies effectively deprive themselves of the opportunity to convince people that this is the case.

Another major drawback of the generic gobbledygook approach is that it doesn't make your company stand out from the crowd. Here's a test: Take the language that the marketers at your company dreamed up and substitute the name of a competitor and the competitor’s product for your own. Does it still make sense to you? Marketing language that can be substituted for another company's isn't effective in explaining to a buyer why your company is the right choice.

I'll admit that the gobbledygook phrases I chose are mainly use by technology companies operating in the business-to-business space. If you are writing for a company that sells different kinds of products (shoes, perhaps), then you would probably not be tempted to use many of the above phrases. The same thing is true for nonprofits, churches, rock bands, and other organizations—you're also unlikely to use these sorts of phrases. But the lessons are the same. Avoid the insular jargon of your company and your industry. Instead, write for your buyers.

"Hold on," you might say. "The technology industry may be dysfunctional, but I don't write that way!" The fact is that there is equivalent nonsense going on in all industries. Here's an example from the world of local government. "The sustainability group has convened a task force to study the cause of energy inefficiency and to develop a plan to encourage local businesses to apply renewable-energy and energy-efficient technologies which will go a long way toward encouraging community buy-in to potential behavioral changes." Hmm... What the heck is that? Or consider this example from the first paragraph of a well-known company's corporate overview page. "…[Company X] has remained faithful in its commitment to producing unparalleled entertainment experiences based on its rich legacy of quality creative content and exceptional storytelling. Today, [Company X] is divided into four major business segments… Each segment consists of integrated, well-connected businesses that operate in concert to maximize exposure and growth worldwide." Can you guess the company? Answer here.

EFFECTIVE WRITING FOR MARKETING AND PR

Your marketing and PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with buyers (and journalists). This begins when you work at understanding your target audience and figure out how they should be sliced into distinct buying segments or buyer personas. Once this exercise is complete, identify the situations each target audience may find themselves in. What are their problems? Business issues? Needs? Only then are you ready to communicate your expertise to the market. Here's the rule: when you write, start with your buyers, not with your product.

Your online and offline marketing content is meant to drive action (such as generating sales leads), which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want this in their own words, and then they want proof. Every time you write, you have an opportunity to communicate and to convince. At each stage of the sales process, well written materials combined with effective marketing programs will lead your buyers to understand how your company can help them. Good marketing is rare indeed, but a focus on doing it right will most certainly pay off with increased sales, higher retention rates, and more ink from journalists.

I'll be writing a lot more about this in my upcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR which will be published by Wiley in mid 2007.

Do you have favorite gobbledygook phrases? Comment on this post or on your blog with a trackback and let me know. Larry Schwartz at Newstex has offered "anything 2,0" as in Web 2.0 and PR 2.0 as his nomination. What about you?