*E.g., consulting via the Monash Advantage and predecessor services. Every question on the list below has arisen recently in the course of my work, most of them many times over.

If you run an IT vendor, help run one, or aspire to do so, then I encourage you to give these questions a whirl. If you don’t think the answers are all knowable — either now or for the foreseeable future — it’s still advisable to make working guesses. Flexibility is a virtue — but even so, having a tentative strategy is far better than having no strategy at all. Strategy is to execution as design is to coding. The best time to fix software bugs is before you start coding; the best time to fix a bad strategy is before you’ve committed yourself to executing it. Yes, both the design and the strategy will need to be changed over time; but a smart, internally-consistent strategy is a lot better than a contradictory one, than an obviously hopeless one, or than no strategy at all.

This is a really long post, so I’ll summarize it up here. Explanations of each point follow below.

Positioning, messaging (and product)

Category: We make a _________________________________________.

Core value proposition: It is especially good at/for ___________________.

Architecture/commitment: It achieves this excellence because (we) ____.

Markets and use cases: If you ____________________, you should buy it.

Buyer universe: We sell to ____________________________________.

Competition: They perceive their alternatives as _____________________.

Competitive strengths: Our stuff is superior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Competitive weaknesses: Our stuff is inferior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Influencer perception: Influencers perceive us as ___________________.

Investor perception: Investors perceive us as ______________________.

Sales

Difficulty of adoption: To use our stuff, buyers also have to ___________.

Pricing: Buyers willingly pay us ________________________________.

Sales process: Our sales cycles are managed and closed on our behalf by _______________________________________________________.

Deal-breakers: In some accounts, _______________________________ will prevent us from winning, almost no matter what.

Team

Personnel: We hire people with the characteristics ___________________.

Competition for personnel: People join us because __________________.

Location: They are located _____________________________________.

Technical allegiance: Our offerings are dependent upon ______________.

I’ll explain some of what I mean.

Positioning, messaging (and product)

Category: We make a _________________________________________.

As I’ve described via the layered messaging model, a company actually needs and has multiple marketing messages. Still, there are times you also need a one-sentence description of what you do or make, imprecise though it necessarily will be. If you don’t have this, there will be many situations in which you can’t communicate well, or in which influencers of various kinds can’t pass your story onwards.

Core value proposition: It is especially good at/for ___________________.

This corresponds to the middle level of the layered messaging model. You need to envision generic situations or use cases in which your product excels, perhaps due to its superior features or performance metrics. If you don’t have that kind of excellence, how can you compete at all?

Architecture/commitment: It achieves this excellence because (we) ____.

This corresponds to the bottom level of the layered messaging model. You need to have an idea as to why you’ll have a sustained advantage in meeting your core value proposition. If you don’t have a sustainable advantage, why will you succeed?

Markets and use cases: If you ____________________, you should buy it.

This corresponds to the top level of the layered messaging model. You need to identify specific use cases in which your core value proposition has obvious benefits.

The most natural form these can take is by application; hopefully you can identify applications at which you shine and also particular vertical markets in which those applications are important. Specific, sharply-defined technical use cases can work too. (“If you need to do many-way joins scanning large parts of a 50+ terabyte database, our system rocks!”) But without some kind of easily-identifiable target use case, how can you have effective sales, sales qualification, or marketing?

Buyer universe: We sell to ____________________________________.

To sell effectively, you need to know who will buy. That means types of company or other organization, and it also means job descriptions (even if not titles) within those enterprises. Within the customer enterprise, “who will buy” includes at least who will want to buy, who will pay for the purchase, and who else will have to approve or not-veto it.

Competition: They perceive their alternatives as _____________________.

If you don’t know who or what you’re competing against, how can you be sure you’re doing anything right? Competition can include any or all of:

• Reasonable marketplace alternatives.
• In-house solutions.
• No decision/action at all.

Often your top competitor, especially in the early days, is a combination of all three, as your target customers make do by hacking around existing technology as best they can.

Competitive strengths: Our stuff is superior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Be realistic here, or you’ll lead yourself astray. Note that the answers you provide may have different force in different use cases, markets, etc.; that may provide a good guide as to where you have the best competitive chances.

Competitive weaknesses: Our stuff is inferior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Be realistic here too, or you’ll lead yourself astray even faster. Once again, note that the answers you provide may have different force in different use cases, markets, etc.; that may provide an even better guide as to where you should focus your efforts.

Influencer perception: Influencers perceive us as ___________________.

Hopefully, the way you describe yourself and the way you are perceived are aligned. Even so, what people think of you is likely to be only a subset of what you think of yourself. The part of your messaging that other people accept is the part that actually aids your business success.

Few people get their impressions about you directly, mainly:

• Core influencers with whom you maintain significant personal relationships.
• Existing customers whose impression of you comes almost solely from how you perform in their account.

Almost everybody else gets their impression of you refracted through influencers, where by “everybody else” I mean prospects, the people who originally bring you into customer accounts, other influencers, and more. Even those whom you talk with directly, such as sales prospects and press, can be strongly affected by what other press and analysts (or at an earlier stage angels and venture capitalists) have to say.

Investor perception: Investors perceive us as ______________________.

At a minimum, investors (including VCs) and stock analysts are influencers. If you like to have money, they may be more important than that. Different kinds of investor and investor-influencer are most important at different stages of your company’s life.

I’ve seen companies get literally destroyed because the strategy they felt they had to pitch to VCs was different from the strategy they actually believed in executing. Don’t go there. Find the investors that match your strategy, not the other way around.

But the need to get investment can add a degree of difficulty to your messaging and your influencer outreach. And if you can’t figure out what kind of investor would believe in your strategy — well, maybe the whole investing world is correct, and your strategy isn’t really that good after all.

Sales

Difficulty of adoption: To use our stuff, buyers also have to ___________.

If you sell a $10 product that costs $1 million to use, your selling costs are likely to reflect the $1,000,010 total cost of adoption. No doubt they will be a lot more than $10/deal. This is not good.

Cash cost of adoption isn’t the only issue, of course; there’s also time, risk of failure, need for buy-in from other departments, and occasionally even regulatory approval. But in any case, you should:

• Think about what is truly being bought when your customer decides to buy from you.
• Make sure your sales and marketing resources are in line with the magnitude of the true sale.
• Make sure your revenue expectations from a sale are in line with its cost and difficulty.

That you may need to get some of your initial customers and references by selling at a pittance doesn’t undermine this general point; eventually, you do want to make a profit.

Pricing: Buyers willingly pay us ________________________________.

So what can you charge? The answer depends on, among other factors:

• The value your buyers believe they will get from using something like your product.
• Your product’s differentiation versus alternatives.
• The total costs of adopting and owning your product.
• Your customers’ general attitudes toward paying for stuff.

Also, it’s important to consider how customers are used to paying for products they’ll regard as analogous: Purchase? Subscription? Priced per user? Priced per terabyte? You want pricing to appear to them as sufficiently simple, fair, and free of risk or surprise.

Sales process: Our sales cycles are managed and closed on our behalf by _______________________________________________________.

If you can’t describe a workable and repeatable sales model, you don’t have a strategy. Please note that “we’ll sell through the channel” is very rarely a complete answer, at least in enterprise IT. Almost always, you’ll need something that resembles a direct sales force, field or inside as the case may be. Even if you have partners who are collecting leads, managing sales cycles, and signing contracts, nobody else cares as much about selling your product as you do. Nobody else knows as much about how to sell it either.

And the partners who are exceptions to that general rule? They’re typically market specialists — such as vertical market application providers — to whom you have to sell much as you might to traditional enterprises.

Deal-breakers: In some accounts, _______________________________ will prevent us from winning, almost no matter what.

Enterprise IT buyers typically go into a product selection process with certain rules or strong inclinations, in areas such as:

• How proven a product or vendor must be in the market (references, financial strength, etc.).
• Which platforms or architectures they want to support.
• What kinds of vendor lock-in they will or won’t tolerate.
• Which specific features they absolutely insist on having.

If there’s something — company size, product features, architectural philosophy, whatever — that dooms you in certain accounts, then you’re not in the business of selling to those accounts until you get the objection addressed. (At some accounts, you never will.)

Team

Personnel: We hire people with the characteristics ___________________.

If you don’t know who you’re trying to hire, and why, you’re unlikely to build a winning team. The answer to “Who?” should always come in at least three parts:

• Character, personality, and approach to work.
• Skills and knowledge.
• Resume demonstrating tests of the skills and knowledge in situations like your own.

All three areas are important, but they’re listed in declining order. If you’re very sure of a match in the first two, the third is unnecessary; if the third area is critical (and it often is), it’s mainly to validate what you think or hope in the first two respects.

Competition for personnel: People join us because __________________.

You don’t just need to know who to hire; you have to be able to hire them. Part of that is telling an inspiring story, and one they think will lead to project and corporate success. Part is corporate culture. Part is terms and conditions of employment. Part, of course, is just finding them in the first place.

Hiring people is every bit as important and difficult a sales job as selling product is.

Location: They are located _____________________________________.

Yes, this really is a core strategic issue. Building your company in the wrong place can doom it.

Some kinds of people are extremely hard to find outside certain geographical areas. For example, a large fraction of the people in the world who’ve done DBMS marketing over the past 20 years did it in the San Francisco area. To a lesser extent, that’s true of DBMS development as well, especially if you add Boston to SF.

Of course, you can operate in a distributed manner — but that puts its own kinds of constraints on the people you can hire and expect to be productive and effective.

Technical allegiance: Our offerings are dependent upon ______________.

Your team doesn’t just consist of your employees and outsider advisers. Even more important may be the outside vendors and projects upon whom you choose to become dependent. If your stuff doesn’t work unless your customers buy a specific other vendor’s stuff too, then that vendor’s strategy — in terms of technology, pricing, positioning, and everything else — pretty much becomes your strategy as well.

OK. That was long. I have an equally long list of more execution-oriented questions outlined as well, but for now I’ll defer turning them into an actual post. Of course, if you’re a client and would like to see my rough notes, I’d be happy to share them.

Meanwhile, as long as this list is, I’m sure there are still other worthy items I left out. What did I miss?

Two things matter about marketing messages:

• Do people believe you?
• Do they care?

It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.

My essential recommendation was:

… the two fundamental templates of layered technology marketing:

Enterprise IT product (proof-today messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Persuasive details
• Customer traction or proof-of-concept tests

and

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture
  

The lower parts of the stack demonstrate differentiation, most directly addressing the “Why should I believe you?” question. The upper parts demonstrate value, answering “Why should I care?” But ultimately, credibility rests on the whole flow of the story, and is no stronger than the weakest of the five layers.

*In the original form I just said “features and metrics”. But truth be told, metrics — speeds/feeds/scale/whatever — are only as important as features in a minority of market segments.

Since then, consulting engagements have shown me there’s actually a third template; happily, it’s synergistic with either or both of the other two. That one goes: 

Enterprise IT product (focus and commitment messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Dedication
• Focus on a specific set of use cases
  

Here “Focus on a specific set of use cases” is a lot like “Commitment to a specific market or class of users.”

Extreme examples of what I mean include:

• “We manage and serve content.” (MarkLogic’s classical positioning, perhaps to be changed going forward.)
• “Our technology does nothing except manage and analyze poly-structured data, and we’ve been doing that for years.” (One possibility for the change. )
• Same thing, but for machine-generated data. (That’s pretty much the Splunk story.)
• “Technology T focused on vertical market V, where our founders previously worked,” where “T” might be business intelligence or predictive analytics or CRM.

Less extreme forms include many vertical market strategies, many “we’re t-shirted coders just like you” messages, and McCormack & Dodge’s long-ago pitch “Buy our financial software because we have lots of Certified Public Accountants on our staff.”

The point of such a story is that, if you’re dedicated to solving a particular set of problems, it stands to reason that you’ll put a lot of things into your product to address them that somebody less dedicated might not bother with. Often, that’s actually true, and perhaps to a greater extent than a simple feature list could easily convey. Sometimes, you can even say that your competitors’ features that benefit other use cases show they aren’t as committed as you are, but usually that crosses the line into overhype.*

*It’s rare that having additional capabilities is truly a bad thing.

Variants of the focus-and-commitment argument include:

• “This is all we do.”
• “Everybody in the company is focused on doing this.”
• (Synergy with the proof-today stack) “This is the kind of user we talk to and try to please every day.”
• (Synergy with the sustainable-lead stack) “We made whichever architectural decisions we thought best to meet these needs, even if they wouldn’t be good choices in some other market we aren’t pursuing anyway.”

So why wouldn’t you use a focus-and-commitment argument? First, it might not be true. Second, it might haunt you when you later claim to be competent in other use cases as well. So in some cases you might want to suggest the argument rather than say it explicitly, or at least confine it to individual sales presentations that are unlikely to be quoted later. But despite those limitations, focus-and-commitment can be an important part of a credible and differentiated messaging strategy.

If a marketing activity does not create a lead for you, then it doesn’t belong in your marketing machine.

Or to rephrase that: Storytelling doesn’t matter.

Well, if you believe and execute on that, your company will die (at least if it’s in some area such as enterprise technology). I really mean that. It’s why I tell people that the “Red Hat” approach would doom most companies, and they should never hire a marketing VP whose main claim to fame is Red Hat experience. I’ve been telling people for a few months that I don’t expect VoltDB to succeed, because I expect VoltDB to execute on the kind of belief quoted above.

The three fundamental functions of marketing are:

• Promote a desire to purchase things in your product category.
• Promote your view of what’s important within your product category.
• Promote actual purchases of your product.

A funnel-centric approach to marketing is useful mainly for the third of those three parts. As part of your marketing strategy, it’s great for anybody. It can even work as the whole thing if you’re just pushing a commodity, such as a Linux distribution (Red Hat) or an early-generation application server (JBoss). In those cases, your job really is to get people to switch from the “default” alternative (expensive incumbent and/or do-nothing), and give you money instead. It might also work if you truly don’t have any direct competitors, and are competing mainly for share of mind/share of wallet.

But in most enterprise technology markets, customers pick among multiple alternatives, each with its own appealing story. If you don’t tell your story too, you’ll fizzle and die.

Obfuscate clearly!

Actually, I have not succeeded in finding the edition in which I recall seeing that phrasing. Probably it was the second, which I presume Paul Kedrosky also had. But in a a subsequent edition somebody (presumably White, as Strunk was long deceased) wrote similarly in their name:

Be clear.

Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. … since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, “Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!”

Clarity, clarity, clarity.

What makes me think of this dictum most often is not marketing collateral per se, but rather product naming and description. Worst of all can be the names of particular portions of a marketecture diagram. Now, I am on record as believing that all product category names are flawed. But while some vagueness or ambiguity may be unavoidable, there is no reason for names to be meaningless or downright misleading.

• As a consultant to the technology industry
• As a target of public relations myself

Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.

This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.

There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:

• “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
• “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
• Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
• Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
• Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.

In my capacity as a target of PR, I can tell you that clumsy or excessive “selling” of stories creates a backlash. There are a number of us who are LESS likely to write favorably about companies that waste our attention and time pitching inconsequential stories.  You may get ignored (especially in the traditional press or if you’re a larger company).  You may get mocked (especially in blogs and if you’re smaller outfit). Either way, you probably won’t be happy about the result.

In my capacity as a consultant, I can tell you why you should have realized this all along — unless carefully managed, most salespeople will burn their employer’s long-term interests in order to show short-term results. Outside PR agencies on short-term contracts are particularly guilty of this. What’s more, when they are honorable or astute enough to push back against unrealistic management expectations — as is fairly often the case, or at least so they claim — outside PR folks are commonly ordered to produce-or-else nonetheless. The consequences of such bullheadedness are sad.

One of the top trade press reporters covering enterprise technology keeps telling me that he fears for our country if people seriously think that the trivialities he’s hard-pitched are news. Less hyperbolically, he’s given me names of VERY big companies who get less coverage from him than they would if they sent fewer lame press releases. And when he gives me examples of what he hates, I generally agree, except in cases when I can tell him that a terribly-written press release has obscured what is actually an interesting announcement.

A great selling-style PR person can be invaluable, just as a great salesperson is. Those are the ones who know a few target “customers” really well, who are trusted by those “customers,” and/or who know how to listen to what the “customers’” preferences or needs are. Some people like that can be found inside companies.* But they’re almost nonexistent at agencies these days, at least among those folks who pitch me.

*See, for example, Dian Terry’s organization at Teradata. Ditto Rita Shoor, who despite technically being independent might as well have been an Intersystems employee for the past decade-plus.

If most pure “selling” is bad, then what should you do in PR? The answer is “market”. This post will be long enough without me trying to distinguish among the various kinds of marketing — awareness-building, positioning, competitive de-positioning, lead generation, and so on. But I would like to at least point out that there are different categories of people to market to.

In an earlier post, I distinguished among eight different kinds of influencers. For the purpose of this one, it should suffice to highlight three different categories of PR-centric marketing:

• Marketing to generalist influencers in the hopes they will in turn influence the broad market. E.g., instead of nagging a reporter to write a specific story, you can just focus on building up their opinion of you and your technology, in the hopes they will write favorably about you when it fits their needs to do so. When you do this, your end goal should be quality of mentions, with a secondary emphasis on quantity. I put quality ahead of quantity because ever more buyers don’t focus on news streams at all. Rather, they go out and search for information when they feel they need it, and when they’re doing that you want them to see a reasonable quantity of highly favorable commentary, even more than you want them to find a large number of decent mentions.
• Marketing to specialist influencers in the hopes they will influence other influencers, as well as influencing the general market. When addressing specialized “expert” influencers, you should have two end goals — quality of online mention and quality of word-of-mouth mention. This area is even more skewed to quality than the prior one for multiple reasons, including:
  • Specialist/expert influencers have a wider good-to-bad spectrum of commentary than theoretically unbiased reporters do.
  • Even if you don’t see that in print, it certainly happens in private conversation.
  • Their followers are apt to be focused enough to notice what tone the commentary takes.
  • If they have a high opinion of you, quantity will often take care of itself.
  • You probably couldn’t measure word-of-mouth quantity if you tried (although mass consumer markets may be an exception to that rule).
• Reaching out to the broad market directly.  Google News and other aggregators tend to carry press releases right alongside traditional news articles. And a significant fraction of the top search results on your company name are likely to be your own press releases. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t forgo issuing press releases, especially ones with informative headlines and first paragraphs.

With all that as background, let me now turn to the specific tips that started this all off.

• Press, bloggers, analysts, and other influencers can no longer be neatly separated from each other. Only use PR people who can be trusted with all those constituencies.
• If you must use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, for a conversation that BOTH sides want to have, that’s OK. It’s not ideal, but it’s less likely to actually damage you than some of the alternative approaches to PR are.
• Using PR people to sell a story that the target doesn’t care about is a VERY bad idea. Indeed, it’s commonly worse than using a salesman to sell a product the prospect doesn’t care about. Why? Because there’s more chance you’ll later regret burning the relationship.
• Compensating PR people based on press mentions almost guarantees they will oversell and burn your relationships, unless they are confident they have a long-term relationship with you.  (On your payroll or otherwise.) Otherwise, their short-term motivations are not at all in your best interest.
• The higher your volume of press releases, the clearer your headlines and other writing need to be. The more attention you ask for from each target, the more responsible with that attention you need to be.
• Review pitch emails just as you review press releases. If you do a sufficiently great job of clear headline and topic-paragraph writing, maybe the pitch email writes itself. Otherwise, it’s apt to be botched. A bad pitch email can piss off an influencer even more than a bad press release does, because it often consumes more of their attention. (Vendors really fall down on this point.)
• The worse the press release, the more you need to supervise the pitch process. This is an extension of the previous point. If somebody micromanaged you into a bad release, then you need to micromanage your minions into pitching as if the release had been better.
• And here’s what I REALLY think: Just treat press releases as documents your post online. Press releases get picked up in various places online.  And sometimes they even appear in venues (mainly online) where they look like they’re press articles. So you’re not actually going to stop issuing them. (Sigh.) But the writing you do for your generic online audience is very different from what you should do for reporters and other influencers.

To reach the latter group, the right model is something that’s at least quasi-personal, quasi-straightforward, and quasi-in-depth. In other words, it’s a lot like a blog — or else like a series of truly personal email correspondences. But, given how long this has already become, that’s a subject for another post.

*There actually are a couple of vendors who drown me in press releases without pissing me off. Why? Because those press releases have instantly comprehensible headlines and topic paragraphs. (Typically they’re user success stories without breathless fluff.) I know what I’m ignoring, without having any work to do to ignore it. The reason I mentioned Rita Shoor’s work for Intersystems above is that she’s great at that kind of thing. (Look around my blogs; you’ll see that it’s really rare that I write a story like this one that Rita induced.)

1) Since having a social media presence is about reputation and relationships, it needs to be personal to the individual.  … The approach needs to be custom-tailored to fit the client’s personality and worldview, and the client needs to have a lot of say in the development of this fit.  … Agreed.

2) Having an effective social media presence is different from traditional marketing, and it’s also different from the ways we’ve been using the internet in the past.  True but overstated.  There are three golden rules of social media marketing:

• Make your messages robust.
• Train and trust many of your employees to deliver the message, implicitly and explicitly.
• Trust your employees to show their own personalities without hopelessly undermining the “personality” of your enterprise.
  

The first two have actually been good management practice for decades, and the third one frequently worked as well.

3) Developing a social media presence has to be done gradually.  A client has to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not, listen to feedback from the community, and constantly refine their approach with little changes. Agreed.

4) The social media consulting model is in contrast to the web development consulting model, where you just build something and walk away until it needs to be updated.  It’s also in contrast to the idea that social media consultants exist to give expert advice — if clients think of them that way, they’ll only go to them with the big questions, and try to answer the little questions on their own.  But social media success is in the details, and it’s the little questions that will make or break an online presence. Agreed. I have clients who ask me to review a large fraction of their individual blog posts. I think that’s a great use of my time … but then, I think the same thing about press releases.

Most people are looking for an expert to solve a very specific problem. Some examples from within social media:

• They want to learn how to create content that compels Digg users to vote, which will in turn bring them more pageviews and ad revenue.
• They want to use Twitter to build a bigger profile in their field.
• They want to create a blog that turns readers into customers.

Who are they going to hire, all things being equal?

• The expert in creating and marketing Diggable content for pageviews, or the ’social media expert’?
• The expert in creating super-accounts on Twitter, or the ’social media expert’?
• The expert in business blogging for conversions, or the ’social media expert’?

On the other hand, people with such narrow expertise are (in most cases properly) pigeon-holed as low-level tacticians.  As I recently noted, social media should not be done in some kind of silo, let alone in a whole collection of silos.

Only the largest or most aggressive consumer marketing organizations will be able to afford and make proper use of the range of expertise Skelliewag suggests.

With mainstream media dwindling at the same time the number citizen publishers is rising, it’s not surprising that individual influencers are becoming a promising target. Even professional editors and reporters are increasingly turning their attention to the blogosphere and Twittersphere as a source of expertise and even news. The first place a reporter goes when looking for sources these days is Google. As a result, popular bloggers are suddenly inundated with media inquiries. This is an opportunity for marketers. Some publications are going even recruiting bloggers to contribute to their branded sites. These financially driven actions are having the effect of amplifying the volume of individual voices.

That’s all very true in the technology world in general, in the enterprise IT world in particular, and very particularly in my own experience. For example:

• I blog for pay for two of the three major tech publishing groups, IDG and TechWeb.
• I am quoted quite a bit by some of the remaining true tech reporters.
• Those quotes can be delivered on the phone (least likely), by email, or just in one of my blogs (usually DBMS2).

To [bloggers and the like], their online outpost is a display of their passion for the topic that they cover. They care deeply about the subject matter and they usually know at least as much as the PR person who contacts them. Often they know quite a bit more.

In the longer form of that, Paul lumps in analysts with overworked and necessarily-superficial journalists rather than thoughtful, reviewer-like bloggers. I wouldn’t wholly endorse that, in that I think the best analysts can combine large aspects of the old-style analyst and new-style blogger worlds. But otherwise, I agree with what he’s saying.

You’d better come prepared to this engagement, because some influencers will take lack of knowledge on your part as an insult. This can capsize junior agency people who aren’t prepared for the depth of questions they will get or the scorn they may endure if they can’t answer.

I’d say that a mouthpiece who pretends more depth than he has — whatever level that may be — is the one who’s in trouble. If you use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, that’s fine. And if you go into a call or meeting unaware of how the influencer wants to to engage — which, realistically, happens a much larger fraction of the time than it ideally should — you’d better be prepared to adapt quickly.

While journalists are expected not to share any biases, bloggers often do what they do precisely because they have opinions to share. Fortunately, a little advance reading can often clue you in to someone’s agenda and even help you decide if they’re worth contacting all. You don’t want to come in with a strong Windows pitch, for example, to a blogger who’s passionate about the Mac. You also don’t want to be blindsided by someone who has made his or her opinions clear and who is offended by the fact that you don’t know them. Again, 15 to 20 minutes of reading can save you a lot of aggravation.

Amen! Worst is when somebody insistently tries to “educate” me on something I already — often visibly — know, or even disagree with. or perhaps just don’t care about.

Unlike journalists, [influencers are] probably not interested in analyst quotes or customer case studies.  It’s more likely they’ll want to talk to the VP of engineering or the CEO than to the head of marketing.

Paul overstates that point a bit. However:

• Few things companies do annoy me more than when they present quotes from my competitors as some sort of authority or, worse, suggest I call those competitors to be educated.
• I absolutely want to talk to somebody who actually understands the technology, rather than being relegated to people who are in “Well, this is what I’m told by the techies” mode. (Ditto “I’ll check on that and get back to you” — that’s a guarantee of obfuscation and lack of opportunity for follow-up.)

The right influencers have as much credibility in their community as product reviewers or analysts.

I’m not sure analyst-vs.-influencer is even a meaningful distinction any more.

Related link

• An example-laden interview with Paul Gillin

• Many of these so-called “experts” greatly overstate their expertise.
• A lot of what passes for social media “success” just amounts to these “experts” getting attention from each other.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:

Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong.

Advertising is only a shallow part of marketing. Classic PR is only a shallow part of marketing. And for the same reasons, the same is true of isolated social media initiatives. Marketing efforts need to span multiple channels, and use them to tell an integrated story.

To see why, please consider two of my major themes in this blog. First, successful marketing requires telling a multi-layered story. In principle you can do that entirely through social media, specifically a blog. But if you try, you have to be very careful to sound — Buzzword alert! — authentic. And for most sets of marketing messages, it’s very hard to simultaneously stay authentic, drive traffic through techniques that social media “experts” favor, and lay out the whole story.

If your whole business is selling Make Money Online! advice to fellow cyberschmoozers, please feel free to disregard the prior paragraph. In that realm, thinly-veiled inauthenticity is the message.

Second, marketing needs to reach many different kinds of people. It is rare that one channel is a good way to reach them all. But your communications with different groups, through different channels, of course have to be managed for consistency.

Anyhow, I’m not a “social media expert.” I’m just a guy who:

• By the standards of the enterprise IT sector, is a successful blogger.
• Compared to other people in the enterprise IT industry, has substantial reach on Twitter.
• Makes much of his living consulting about marketing (to the aforementioned IT sector).
• Reads a lot, including about social media.
• Writes a little bit about social media as well.

With that as background, here are some of my thoughts on how enterprise IT companies and other businesses should pursue social media.

• Publish a blog (or multiple blogs). The biggest single reason is that blogs are the least-constrained of all the communication media. You can say whatever you want in a blog, however you want to say it. All other media have unfortunate limitations.
  
• Your blog should have two main purposes — to express yourself and (optionally) to drive search engine traffic.
• Getting regular readers should not be one of the purposes of your blog. The techniques for doing that clash with too much else that you want to achieve.
• In particular, disregard the usual “rules” about posting frequency. Those are irrelevant to the main purposes of corporate blogging. What’s more, your best people don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with that kind of posting frequency anyway.
• Have multiple individuals blogging. Different people in your company have the talent, knowledge, and status to be successful with different styles of blog post. If one person coordinates your blog, however, that’s fine.
• Encourage your senior customer/public-facing personnel to use their choice of personal-page sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace (blech), et al. Think of those sites as steroid-laden business cards. Those sites’ other benefits are oversold, but they truly work for spelling out who you are. Other social media use (if any) should be even more optional, and hence more tailored to your people’s individual personalities.
• Establish a corporate presence on Twitter. It’s a great way to maintain personal relationships with influencers – and to fix them, if for example the influencer is an unhappy customer badmouthing you. (For example, Dell did just that very successfully with me.) And if you’re too small for that to make sense, there’s a good chance you’d benefit just from the interaction with fellow small business folks.
• Send somebody to participate in whichever online forums, blog comment threads, etc. are most important to your target audiences.
  

As for gimmicks and glitz — well, do they have a large role in how you market through other channels too? If so, then it might make sense to get cute in social media as well. Otherwise, play it straight.

Maria Winslow notes that “Open Source” is an example of

Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics:

Bad jargon drowns out good.

Now, I won’t pretend that’s really original with me — but then, it’s based on Gresham’s Law, for which Sir Thomas Gresham apparently doesn’t deserve the credit he gets either.

The idea behind the “Law” is this:   If a term connotes some kind of goodness, marketers scarf it up and apply it to products that don’t really deserve it., making it fairly useless to the products that really do qualify for the more restrictive meaning.

“Predictive analytics” sounded cool, and now covers a fairly broad range of statistical analyses, most of which don’t involve any kind of explicit prediction.   Some “native” XML data stores are dressed-up tourists from either the relational or object-oriented worlds, while a lot of “thin clients” actually do their shopping at Lane Bryant.  “Transparent” connectivity layers tend to be cloudy, and “portablilty” commonly involves considerable heavy lifting.

By the way, Monash’s Second Law of Commercial Semantics is much more technologically oriented:   Where there are ontologies, there is consulting. I first said that at the Text Mining Summit, and it seemed to win immediate, widespread agreement.