The Corporate Website is Dead, Continued

Friday Marketing Musings, 28 January 2011

I received some feedback and questions after my post “The Corporate Website is Dead“. So here’s a short overview of where I think corporations will be taking their online presence over the next two years.

I. The sole purpose of the corporate website is sustained brand equity. To showcast and archive corporate stories.

II. Information about products (product marketing, specs, features, price, services & support, where to buy) will move into the social community.

Some implications:

A. N=1.

B. Big, multi-level, content-heavy, pleasing-all-audiences websites will be replaced by dynamic corporate storyboards designed to inspire very specific audiences. It’s 99% storytelling, and 1% social contact information to enable real conversations in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and whatever is the next social fling.

C. All available content will have to be (re-)designed to serve the social realm.

D. No more pushing. The only way content will be accepted, is as part of a meaningful conversation. Harass marketing (sending emails into databases, cold calling on innocent people, even push chat) can not last. The whole concept of permission marketing will become obsolete. So don’t worry about cookie legislation – it doesn’t matter.

E. All widgets will go away. Only content that is genuinely integrated, will be accepted by the target audience. Many companies are pulling social conversations into their corporate websites. Forget about it – for real value, people will look elsewhere.

F. The full potential of video has not been explored yet. We will see live streams, augmented realities, dynamic, interactive video. This will change our perception of reality.

G. Competition will have to be redefined, simply because in a more integrated world, comparing alternatives will not be straightforward at all. Consumers will buy access to meaningful interactions, not just products.

H. Social Search is just another way of saying that people point people to meaningful content and connections. Like in the old days. To keep up, search marketing and Marketing Automation systems will first become super sophisticated, then obsolete and eventually banned by governments (not just the dictatorial ones).

2011: Estimating the Likelihood of Conversion

All marketing blogs that matter agree that 2011 will be about prospect and customer targeting. The Million Dollar Question: How to serve the right content to the right audience at the right time through the right communication channels? Many call the discipline focused on answering this question Content Marketing.

Why? Costs go down, conversion rates go up, and on average, customer life cycles will be extended, which will have a positive impact on overall revenue. A million dollar question, indeed!

In their 2006 Harvard Business Review Article “Knowing what to sell, when, and to whom”, Kumar et al state that “despite the abundance of data that many companies collect, most do a poor job predicting the behaviour of their customers.” They go on to present a rather crazy mathematical function to estimate the likelihood (Li) that a given customer or household (i) will purchase a given product at a given time.

Applying this formula to customer data “ups the odds of successfully predicting a specific purchase by a specific customer at a specific time to about 80 per cent, a number that will have a major impact on any company’s marketing ROI.” You can buy the full article for a mere $6.95 here.

However sophisticated this thinking, it applies strictly to customers. What about prospects? How can we estimate the likelihood of a prospect converting into a customer? By delivering on the promise of Content Marketing.

In 2011, paid, owned and earned media models will be refined to enable companies to move from 1-to-many to 1-to-few communication strategies. Push and pull tactics will have to be re-articulated in the new social marketing paradigm. Marketing Automation systems are designed to gather digital body language and help marketers identify response patterns in order to predict future audience behavior. Lead nurturing and scoring mechanisms will help us understand which prospects are ready to engage. Integration with Sales CRM systems and Customer Data Warehouses will close the loop between marketing and sales and eventually bring a higher return on marketing and sales investments.

Eventually, the content marketing strategist will be able to calculate and predict the likelihood of  a given prospect converting in to a customer. Let’s use 2011 to work on the statistical function to come with it!

How to brief a B2B blog?

Friday Marketing Musings, 14 January 2011

Many companies have a hard time managing their blogs. You can tell by just clicking through any corporate website’s blogger section. They’re all too often not updated frequently, killed by too much “editorial guidance”, not engaging, and too inside-out in their content. Nevertheless, as I wrote last week, you don’t need much more in the online universe than a Twitter stream, some strong blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to create a rich brand experience. So I just wanted to share some considerations around blogs, and how to keep them adding value to your marketing and communications setup.

Two new European NetApp blogs
Over the last 3 weeks, we launched two new blogs for NetApp in EMEA. John Rollason’s “JR’s IT Pad” will be providing European storage industry insights, targeting analysts, press, partners and competition. Tim Waldron’s “Tim’s Tales” will be more about bridging the gap between business and technical functions within (prospective) customer audiences DMU’s, covering new technology concepts, European customer implementations, storage and data management innovations. John runs Product, Solutions and Alliances marketing for EMEA; Tim is a Business Solutions Architect in our GEO. It took them about 2 minutes to figure out the Typepad Blog Content Management System, so don’t be put off by any concerns there.

Example: NetApp @ Cisco Live Europe 2011
As a side note: Both bogs will be vital in the communications strategy around our Golden Sponsorship for Cisco Live Europe 2011 (London, 31 Jan – 3 Feb 2011). I spent some time this week creating our Virtual Booth for that event in the INXPO virtual event platform the organisation provides as part of the sponsorship agreement. If you can’t travel to London, you can gain complementary acces to our virtual booth here. It holds an event blog, Social Media streams, all kinds of premium content, a live chat box, and a API integration into Facebook Live Stream. Check out the booth during the event, and let me know what you think by sending me a DM in Twitter. Our event hashtag for Twitter is #NetAppCiscoLive (general event hashtag: #CLEU), if you want to keep track early February.

John will be talking to press, analysts and customers during the event, and sharing his insights on his blog. Tim will be part of the stand staff, and reporting on his blog whenever he has some time off from booth duty. We’ll equip him with a flipcam, a photo camera and a notebook to share whatever he thinks is worth sharing. Also, Tim and Paul Sudlow (EMEA Alliances Technical Lead) will be on the panel of an Ask the Expert live webcast that we will be hosting from the show floor. Again, our Virtual Booth is the place to be if you’re interested.

Blogger tactics
The Cisco Live Europe 2011 tactic is a good example of how corporate blogs should be positioned in the market place: avoid overlap in content, create an editorial calendar in support of major marketing communications milestones (product launches, programs, campaigns, events, channel activity), and integrate all blogs with all relevant social media streams you run out there. The blogger team should become a highly skilled team of defenders, strategists, attackers, strikers, thought leaders and educators, finding ever new ways of communicating corporate messaging to relevant audiences, referring to people and content within the corporate domain.

The Corporate Website is Dead

Friday Marketing Musings, 7 January 2010

Blogging is dead, Email is dead, Pay-per-Click is dead, hell: even TechCrunch recently got reported dead. If you haven’t announced anything dead over the last days, you’re just not much of a marketing guru. Don’t we all like to play Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – God is dead! -, just to show our authority and insight into the inner workings of our industries? So let me add another one: the corporate website, as we know it, is dead.

Let’s be fair: outside of e-commerce focused web property, corporate websites are obsolete. Who needs them? Did you recently browse through one, looking for anything other than contact information? I bet you didn’t, and neither did I. You usually already know all the relevant updates in there just by being on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and reading a couple of blogs, don’t you?

Looking at it from a vendor’s perspective: in owned media, some profiles, a Twitter account and a good mix of corporate blogs is all you need to come up with a solid communications strategy and deep audience reach. The rest is up to the people updating the streams with fresh content.

The best corporate citizen spends time representing the company out there, in social space, referring prospects, customers, partners and investors to content and contacts within the company. Nobody has time to go browsing a complete website anyway. My goodness, it’s like reading War & Peace. On paper!

Corporate websites truly are the dinosaurs of the digital age, the fossils of the future, they’re the thing your grand father is still well able to keep up with, they’re the … the… Well, they’re just dead as a doornail! Bury them, dance on their graves, and make sure to tweet while at it!

Rather than on platforms, brand experiences will be created in interaction. Alas, communications will be social only.

This blog: 2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,900 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 18 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 16 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was November 15th with 217 views. The most popular post that day was EMC #FAIL: The End of Competitive Guerilla Marketing .

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were linkedin.com, twitter.com, chucksblog.emc.com, digg.com, and emerce.nl.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for kees henniphof, netapp vs emc, kees henniphof blog, netapp versus emc, and henniphof.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

EMC #FAIL: The End of Competitive Guerilla Marketing November 2010
4 comments

2

@NetApp vs. @EMC – A Small But Significant B2B Social Media Case Study November 2010

3

Over Kees Henniphof February 2010

4

Uw marketingafdeling, overmorgen September 2010
1 comment

5

Relationship branding (2): Content Marketing, Social Media & Advertising October 2010