# 64 in the Cluetrain Manifesto

I have blogged about this before, so I thought I would bring up another favorite of the 95 theses from the Cluetrain Manifesto.

64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

How many software companies can claim to do this today? Ummmm none…..I don’t see it and if you do, please let me know. When are companies going to wake up and smell the coffee and learn about transparency? When are some going to learn that collaboration works and without some companies will wither and die?

The average IT software buyer doesn’t care or want to know how great you think you are. They want to know what you can do to solve their problems. They want to know if your solution won’t cause them anymore problems. They want/need to hear from those on the inside in a genuine sort of way. They want a trusted vendor, one who is willing to stick with them thru thick and thin. Sorta like a way a marriage should work…communication being the key and most important aspect to a marriage. Sure…your stuff may look all sexy on the web, but talking is one thing.

Some of the best software out there comes from companies who don’t pound their chest about every little thing. They give me access to their folks and let me participate in a real honest to goodness dialogue with them. They don’t frown on me when I mention their competition, they give me a plain and simple answer.

Wake up software vendors..the alarm has been ringing…don’t press the snooze button anymore cause soon you will be late for the party.

Technorati Tags:
software, marketing, software marketing, web 2.0, community, collaboration, cluetrain manifesto, web site, seo, sem, enterprise sofware, IT, IT management, DBA, systems administrator

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Clearspace X from Jive

Our organization owns the Jive Forums edition from Jive software. It appears that Jive came out recently with Clearspace X which is aimed at creating external online communities. I know that Jive has a great reputation in the marketplace and I am wonder what peoples thoughts are on Clearspace X?

I know that Sharepoint offers something similar, but I am also curious if their are any less expensive pieces of community based software that are quickly deploy-able and don’t require a heck of alot of IT involvement.

Technorati Tags:
jive, clearspace x, jive forums, community software, sharepoint, microsoft, online communities

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jive, clearspace x, jive forums, community software, sharepoint, microsoft, online communities

Really bad email marketing….

I receive alot of emails from various companies. Not only am I interested in their products, but I am also interested in seeing how well their email marketing efforts are.

I received the email below from Coco Key Water Resort. It was an image type of email pitching birthday parties at their water resort.

Here are my issues with this email. First nothing in the email is linked. The whole image cannot be clicked on. Even the “Or visit us at cocokeywaterresort.com” is not linked. I can’t even copy or paste the address into my browser. Second, when I try to reply to this email, I get a bounce back saying that the address is invalid. So I notice that the email was sent from a company called Carol Ann Marketing. I go to the site to try to send them an email to let them know this and I can’t . I can either chat with a “live sales person” or call or snail mail them, which is absolutely ridiculous.

Sheraton Chicago Northwest - Please find someone else to do your marketing, cause you are losing valuable dollars in sending totally non user friendly emails.

Carol Ann Marketing - Please change your site and come into 2007 and give an email on your site to send inquiries to other than to sales. Also please learn how to do email marketing correctly.

Coco Key Water Resort - Sorry you had to bear witness to this, but you hired and approved a totally bad email marketing company.

Technorati Tags:
sheraton, coco key water resort, coco key, sheraton northwest, email marketing, bad emails, carol ann marketing, bad marketing, chicago water resorts

Please define “Community”

I need some help. I am getting some requests internally from some people about wanting to build out a community. I have my own definition of what a community is and should be, but I would love to know from folks like you what your idea of a community truly is.

I would like to keep this discussion centered around software. So lets for instance, a .net or SAP or Oracle community. What truly does a community involve and what would be expectations centered around a community based feel.

Technorati Tags:
online communities, communities, software communities, software, marketing, social networks, professional networks

Growing vegetables with marketing.

Marketing is little like growing vegetables. You need to plant the seed with your prospects and let give them water and sunshine (relevant assets) from which to grow. In fact if you give them alot of love one day they will blossom into something big and delicious. Then they are ripe for the picking and you will harvest something great…which is a new customer.

Don’t lose site on trying to always grow new vegetables. Nurture and care for the ones that are already there. They may not be ready all the time to harvest, but it sure beats starting from scratch with new seeds each and every time.

Technorati Tags:
software marketing, customers, prospects, lead generation, white papers, assets, sales, nurturing, demand generation, lead nurturing, campaigns

Protect your marketing efforts

This weekend while driving around on errands, I saw a young guy riding one of those crotch rocket motorcycles. He had a helmet, only it was attached to the side of his bike and no glasses on. For some reason in Illinois we have this really stupid law that does not require motorcycle riders to wear a helmet. So any fool can ride a bike here totally unprotected. Don’t know about you, but I have seen what appeared to be the leftovers of a motorcycle accident involving a young person whom I later found out was not wearing a helmet and was going around 40 mph. To me you have to be a complete idiot to not want to protect yourself when it comes to riding.

The same holds true for software marketing. Are you protecting your efforts to ensure that what you do will provide/insulate you against your investment? Here are a couple of things to consider:

1. Have a clear cut goal of your campaign and get the stakeholders to agree to that goal.

2. Share that goal with sales and keep them abreast during the campaign how things are going.

3. Keep an accurate report (heck even spreadsheet) of all your activities, results and compare which ones did the best/worst. Adjust on the fly and have the systems and resources in place to do so.

4. Analyze the data after the campaign, admit your mistakes and celebrate your success. Learn from your failures and set a plan in motion for stakeholders to see on how you plan to reverse your failures next time.

5. Prepare an executive summary of the campaign. Highlight everything and continue to do so for every campaign

While these 5 activities are certainly not everything you should do to protect yourselves, it is certainly a good start. Heck a campaign with no protection is like riding a motorcycle at 90 mph on a slippery road with no helmet….just plain stupid.

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campaigns, marketing, software marketing, helmet laws, motorcycles, illinois helmet laws, reporting, campaign reporting

Expand your senses in marketing…

I was driving my son this morning to summer camp and noticed something that perplexes me. First off, this morning in the Chicago area it was 70 degrees and sunny, which I would consider a darn near perfect morning. On my short drive, I saw 5 convertibles all of which had their tops and windows rolled up. Great weather mornings in Chicago are not as prevalent as in Southern California, so I am totally confused as to why someone would invest in a convertible and not bother to put the top down on such a gorgeous morning. On a day like today, I would love to feel the warmth of the sun and the cool breeze.

In software marketing its the same thing. Why use stale techniques and close yourself off from the rest of the world when the landscape and environment is so beautiful. In marketing, you need to try something new and smell the smells and experience the warmth and excitement of something fresh. Sure, sometimes you might get burned..but it pains me to no end when people in marketing do not want to put the top or windows down to experience something new.

Don’t buy your car if your not going to use it the way it was intended. Consequently, don’t sit around a marketing meeting wondering why your latest campaign didn’t work cause you failed to let in fresh air or fresh new ideas.

Technorati Tags:
marketing, software marketing, fresh ideas, convertibles,

Oceanos Marketing…..

I have been doing what I have been doing for sometime now. I have across alot of “list brokers” in my day. Some are better than others and some just want to “sell you the list”.

About 18 months ago (I think) I get this package sent to my house (which I believe was forwarded by an old director of mine) from this firm called Oceanos Marketing. It was a neat mouse pad and I believe some other neat little trinket along with a very well written letter. Needless to say that as a marketing guy, I fall for alot of really cool marketing techniques. Needless to say, I opened up a dialogue with the president Brian Hession and to make a long story short we (meaning Oceanos) and Quest have a great working relationship.

They take the approach as a consulting firm to what they call “List Intelligence™” I think what makes them clearly different that most firms I have dealt with in the past is that they mean what they say on their about us page.

Anyway, if you are looking for a firm to really give you some excellent service all while keeping your best interests in mind, I highly suggest you check them out.

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oceanos marketing, oceanos, list intelligence, list broker,

The Value of Information

I am a part of a lead management committee at my current position. We were talking the other day about how really the sales guys and marketing folk at my current company are really on the same wavelength when it comes to lead management.

In short we want what they want on one point and that is reliable information on our current database. We want to have intelligent information regarding our prospects and be able to utilize that information to market to folks who just are not at the stage of purchasing yet. I like to call it bench warming. Provide relevant content to folks to keep our company top of mind to the prospect.

The only bad thing is that our information is either outdated, non-existent or all over the place. I can’t stress enough the need for marketing automation. Whether you are a $3 mil, $30 mil, $300 mil or even $3 billion dollar organization, there is a great need to have an marketing automation system. I would rather spend the $600K or whatever installing one of these bad boys and nurture and cultivate my current DB than to go out and constantly hunt for new folks.

Is there such thing as marketing Nirvana? Heck no..but it would make us marketers alot smarter to have relevant and valuable information.

Technorati Tags:
vtrenz, eloqua, marketing, automation, intelligent data, demand generation, manticore technology, silverpop,

Is the customer King……NOT!

Chris has a great post on high tech firms who seem to lack a clear customer retention strategy.

I especially love this quote from Chris:

“High-tech firms seem to spend a disproportionate amount of money on sales methodologies, growth strategies (incl. training for the entire sales team) and yet very little on programmes and initiatives which foster genuine two-way communication. And yet “The Customer is King” screams the old adage? Rubbish”

Wake up people….its time we start to realize that it takes more to get new customers than sell/treat the current ones like kings!!

Technorati Tags:
software, customer marketing, high tech,

Google Reader…

I have been playing with alot of the features within Google Reader these last few days. It makes an excellent companion to providing some services for folks when it comes to reputation monitoring. Thru the use of technorati watch-lists or bloglines searches and feeding them into the reader you can create a web page to feed this info to folks that are less “technical” or “feed or rss” savvy.

I am trying out a few pilots within my organization and should have a full on report/idea on what the heck I am doing in a couple of weeks.

VIVA REPUTATION MONITORING!!

Technorati Tags:
google reader, technorati, bloglines, reputation monitoring, software

I heard from Technorati….they did block me.

I heard back from their support folks and as it did turn out, they were blocking my IP from accessing their site.  It turns out that they were receiving a large number of queries from my IP in a short amount of time and as such to prevent bots, they blocked me out. 

I guess that it doesn’t help that I have hundreds and hundreds of keyword watch lists for my company set up and I probably overloaded them one day.

All is well with technorati now, their support was great and I am glad we were able to get to the bottom of this quickly.

Long live the internet.

Back in the saddle again with Technorati

Looks like I can access the technorati site again. I was online at like midnight central and still nothing, but this morning, I was able to get to the home page with no issues. I was reading the support forums and it appears that they have had some issues lately, specifically around pinging, but it appears to have worked itself out.

Technorati Tags:
technorati, pinging, ping

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Technorati update…..still cannot access

I wanted to update all of you on this. I can access the support forums of technorati, but I cannot get to their homepage, my profile or anywhere. I have sent and email to their support person, whom we traded some correspondence. I gave her my IP address to see if indeed there is a block on it. However I have not heard back from her in almost 24 hours. In addition, I also posted to their support forums and have not received an answer.

I am also getting the same 403 forbidden error on my keyword feeds into my feedreader.

I certainly hope that this is not intentional, but all things indicate that it is. I hope technorati issues some sort of response to this.

Technorati Tags:
technorati, search, blogging

I have been banned from Technorati…

or at least I can’t get to their site. I wonder if they are doing this intentionally since I blogged about them. I cannot access them from either my work laptop or my mac.

I get this error:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

---

Apache Server at www.technorati.com Port 80

Technorati Tags:
technorati, bloglines, search, keywords, denied access

Another way to confuse people

Chris has a great post on the use of what he calls TLA’s (three letter acronyms) in the use of a webcast invite.

It might have been better to send the invite in wingdings font…then maybe it might have been read.

TIA CH.

TTFN,

AK in IL

Going Open Source..

I am reading the book Wikinomics and on page 90 it has a great quote that I would like to share. “Can proprietary software vendors see the writing on the wall?. We sure hope so. Proprietary software spells rapid obsolescence if these companies don’t find a way to coexist with the peer producers”

The authors were talking about folks who utilize open source to gain business advantage. While I won’t go into too much detail as I think you should run out and read this book, I will mention a few things as to how it relates to a product we have at Quest.

Its called Funnel Web and its a web analytics tool that’s perfect for the open source market. Its a great little tool for small to medium size business who want to analyze their web traffic. I heard a comment on the funnel web discussion community the other day about how they wished Quest would release this into the open sources market and I could not agree more.

While I don’t know the specifics as to why Quest can or cannot do this I will say that if you are a user of Funnel Web or someone that would like to see this go open source, please comment on this blog and I will be sure to share your thoughts with some folks.

Technorati Tags:
funnel web, web analytics, log analysis, open source, wikinomics, web site analysis, web site stats, webtrends, websidestory

Collaboration

“Collaboration: is a process^[1] defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge^[2] and mutual learning between two or more people who are working together,^[3] in an intellectual endeavor,^{[4] [5]} toward a common goal which is typically creative in nature.^[6] Collaboration does not necessarily require leadership and can even bring better results through decentralization and egalitarianism.”

The above is the wikipedia definition of collaboration. I was in church this weekend and the priest was talking about all of the terrible happenings in the world and how people really need to collaborate to help solve alot of the worlds problems. He spoke about the disconnect between the Islamic extremists and the Christians in Iraq. He spoke about the domestic issues in the US specifically greed, materialism and the general disregard for those less fortunate.

He used the word collaborate about 4 or 5 times..and it got me thinking…..take a look at the definition above…I mean really take a look at the definition. I think this word can become one of the most important word of the next 10 years. With Web 2.0 being about users collaborating and sharing etc.. and the ability for people to collaborate in order to solve major issues that plague us a society…I am willing to put my self out there and say that the word collaborate as well as the actions that support the word collaboration can really help solve alot issues as well as bring people who are distant closer together.

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collaborate, web 2.0, issues, socioeconomic, religion, islamic extremists, sharing

A Map of Google Products

Ever wonder how many products Google does have? Yea..me to. Fortunately for us Zorgloob has created a really cool, but ginormous map of them. The cool thing about this is map is that you can actually click on the product and you are taken to a page where you can read what the product is all about and rate them as you see fit.

Pretty cool stuff.

Technorati Tags:
google, map, google news, google alerts, google trends, gmail, google docs, igoogle, google desktop, orkut, google reader, youtube, feedburner, picassa, blogger, google adwords, measure map, google analytics

Sendio I.C.E. Box

A little while ago I wrote about Sendio. The other day, a former colleague of mine contacted me who now works there. Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to be testing out their I.C.E. box and will give all of you my honest opinion. I would like to make it clearly known that Sendio is not paying me to review or test out their technology. Since I manage email marketing for Quest and am always interested in new technology, I thought this would be a great opportunity.

It should arrive here in the next couple of days and I look forward to checking it out.

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sendio, SAV, spam, email, I.C.E. box, sender address verification, antispam, virus

SQL Stan is the man….

At Quest, we created a character known as SQL Stan. SQL Stan is a fictional character but he is “is the embodiment of the collective SQL Server expertise at Quest Software.” We have a bunch of SQL Server experts at our company and we put this out there to see how the SQL Server community reacted to him.

So far the response has been pretty significant and I would like to see what you have to say about SQL Stan. So if you are a SQL Server dude or dudette and have a question about SQL Server, check him out and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags:
sql server, microsoft, dba, developer, sql stan, quest software, marketing, software marketing, database, transaction logs, OLAP, tempdb, NVARCHAR, VARCHAR, Query Analyzer, stored procedures

SAP and “inappropriate” downloads

Tsk tsk……now go to your room.

It appears that SAP’s “TomorrowNow Division” hacked into Oracles support site and downloaded a vast amount of content and other interesting things and used that info to “offer Oracle customers cut-rate support services”. SAP admitted this act, but said that no one at SAP had any access to the data. SHA!

Ummm yea..when will companies learn that everything they do is now tracked and people find stuff out. From the greedy C-Level folks who steal money from the company to lowly marketing folk like me who use IM inappropriately or steal that pad of legal paper to write my memoirs with.

I am amazed at the amount of corporate stupidity that people get themselves into…from stealing to just plain marketing ideas that are so whacked it causes a near collision on the highway of sanity.

Every company has their share of idiocy, its just that some have more than others.

Technorati Tags:
SAP, Oracle, TomorrowNow, stupidity, illegal downloads, software, support, lawsuit, Henning Kagermann

Web 2.0 Marketing is not a bunch of things

Web 2.0 or marketing in Web 2.0 is not just doing a bunch of things: collaborating, community, blogging, youtubing, wikis etc……

It is a state of mind and an evolution that your company is going to need to adopt. Its being vulnerable, transparent and giving open access to those people you deal with. Its alot more than that, but this is a start. Web 2.0 first needs to be recognized in a companies marketing department and then the entire culture where this organization lives needs to adopt a new way of thinking to gain access to the marketplace.

I had several discussions recently about Web 2.0 and marketing within it. One conversation began like this “So…this Web 2.0 thing..can we get into it?” I almost lost it.

Starting a blog isn’t web 2.0 marketing. Starting a “community” (ugh…I hate that word) isn’t web 2.0 marketing. Heck..web 2.0 marketing shouldn’t even be in your vocabulary…just eliminate it from your brain.

Its too bad that alot of people don’t get it or want to get it…..but I am here to change one mind at a time…..its ok….you wont get harmed in the process.

Technorati Tags:
web 2.0, marketing, youtube, wiki, blogging, community, software

Back on the blog train again

After a much needed hiatus of the grind of corporate internet marketing coupled with burnout on several levels, I am now officially back on the blog train again.  So be on the lookout for some interesting info in the coming weeks along with some secrets revealed.  Welcome back….