August 11, 2009

Enterprise 2.0 and Marketing Ideas

This is the second part of a collection of ideas that we can implement taken from small businesses patronized during our beach vacation. While sitting on the beach watching the kids ride their boogie boards, the traditional single-engine airplane flew over with the trailing banner stating "Bathing Suits : Buy One, Get One Free at Alvin's Island". My in-laws made a trip to the store but didn't find any bathing suits they liked but did buy a few t-shirts. It struck me that small to medium business must find ways to let you know they are in business and perhaps, just around the corner. This made me take notice of all of the different marketing and advertisements that we might not normally see; the emergency contact numbers magnet provided by the local pizzeria, the local map provided by a chain of restaurants, and the beach umbrellas promoting the souvenir store.

These local businesses understand that if you want customers, you have to keep your name and value statement in front of them as much as possible. Unfortunately, IT and Social Media experts fail to see the need of such low life efforts. In a recent published Social Software Maturity Model, nothing was included on marketing or branding. Once again, they just assume the followers will come to the mountain. Nothing could be farther from the truth. People won't or don't have the time to just sit around and play with social software. As in many cases, if it's not about solving the fire of the day, they won't be interested in it. So why market the software in the first place if people don’t have time. The simple answer is that people will make time for something that creates value or provides engagement. I have seen one implementation that places the last updated social software entries on the corporate Intranet (i.e. Good Idea). The bad news is that many of these entries are just crap updates that the blogger was testing functionality. One time the top three posts were useless titles but no blog content. They would be better served to use a little bit of logic that combines popularity and last update to showcase the content. Marketing has a stigmata associated with it, especially in the engineering fields. But, we need to get over that sentiment if we are to survive the next evolution of IT.

The inventor of Jell-O sold it for $450 because he didn't know what to do with it. Worn out from failure, the buyer tried to sell it for $35 because the customer didn’t know what to do with it. Ultimately, they figured out a way to communicate the vale and utility to the end consumer through cookbook type give-a-ways (i.e. Marketing). Marketing matters and we need to get over our pride and prejudices. I admit that I am a marketing snob, thus I get critical of IT PM folks trying to be marketers. They efforts show their lack of experience and amateur results. However, I also need to recognize that any results are better then none and applaud even the noblest of efforts.

Posted by Todd at August 11, 2009 7:54 AM

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