Seth Godin Sermon at Westminster Abbey

Well almost...

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending a talk by Seth Godin in the beautiful surroundings of Church House by Westminster Abbey - in many ways an appropriate venue for an inspiring and slightly evangelical afternoon. The session drew on many of the themes from Seth's many best selling books (none of which I've actually read, in all honesty, but I've followed his blog for a couple of years!). The agenda consisted of a 60 minute presentation and then at least the same amount of time devoted to a very dynamic question and answer session. There were some great and very challenging questions and some of Seth's answers were brilliant. I particularly liked his answer to the question about how he gets so much done - "I don't work anything like as hard as you think", he said. But he doesn't go to meetings and he doesn't watch TV - that buys him around 6 hours a day, during which he can get a lot done.

About half the audience were in the B2B marketing space, but there were an astonishingly diverse set of participants - drawing from advertising and media types, the music industry (suits and talent), students and even a Vicar from the Church of England! For me the message that came through again and again was

• Be authentic - if you fake it you'll be found out
• Be remarkable - mediocre products (or people) cannot win any more
• Focus on the possibilities that the web industrial revolution is producing, rather than clinging onto yesterday's model
• Don't expect to win over everybody immediately (or even ever) - focus on the influencers and let the "nay-sayers" feel left out
• Identify and lead tribes who will willingly spread your ideas for you
  

If you've read Seth's books these messages will be already familiar. If your bookshelves are littered with unread books (like mine), then go to Youtube and you'll find a multitude of video clips.

What impressed me more, however, was the authenticity that came across in his own brand. He clearly believes that it's more important what you do than what you say, is driven by a well-developed set of values and wants to help change the world for the better. Perhaps it was not so odd to find a vicar there....

2009's Top 50 Marketing Blogs

There's always a plethora of lists of "this years blogs to watch" around this time of the year. I just stumbled across one from Evan Carmichael (a new author to me - but creating lists is always a good way of promoting your profile in the blogosphere). Some old faithfuls in here (Seth Godin, Marketing Sherpa, Guy Kawasaki) plus several that I've not come across before. Helpfully they've divided them in to different sections.

What additional ones would make your list of must-read blogs - particularly in the B2B space?

Personally I would add Chris Brogan, Marketing Profs Daily Fix and Web Ink Now for starters.

David Meerman Scott's new ebook made me angry - please read it too!

If you don't know of David Meerman Scott, you should change that. He wrote "the New Rules of Marketing and PR" which is a great read, full of challenging thinking. As a pre-cursor to his new book "World Wide Rave" he's just published a free and easily digestible ebook called "Lose Control of your Marketing! Why marketing ROI measures lead to failure"

You should read the ebook - it's got some really great ideas. However reading it made me cross. His suggestion is simple:

Make your information on the Web totally free for people to access, with absolutely no virtual strings attached: no electronic gates, no registration requirements, and no email address checking necessary.

Meerman Scotts assertion is that marketing's role is to spread ideas, and that putting ANY barrier in the way of that simply reduces the number of people that experience your content. Amongst other things he asserts that you should not put web contact forms (name, email capture) onto websites.

While applying these forms of measurement might be appropriate offline, using them to track your success on the Web just isn’t relevant; they don’t capture the way ideas travel. Worse,the very act of tracking leads hampers the spread of ideas. People know from experience that if they supply their personal information to an organization, they’re likely to receive unwanted phone calls from salespeople or to find themselves on email marketing lists. Most won’t bother. In fact, I have evidence from several companies that have offered information both with and without a registration requirement that when you eliminate the requirement of supplying personal information, the number of downloads or views goes up by as much as a factor of fifty.

I hope he's wrong. Many of us have been schooled in the principles of "if you can't measure it, don't do it". We are increasing our efforts to capture names of people who engage with our content so that we can continue to engage with them. This approach flies in the face of that: if we give away something of genuine value with no barriers, people will share it with each other and ultimately connect with us.

What really makes me angry is that I think he may be right.

What's your thoughts?

Demand Generation Summit - the Movie!

My last post referred to the Demand Generation Summit at the beginning of this month. As I was saying in my presentation on the day, it's essential to plan for how you will build upon an activity to maximise the return.

In my opinion, the Demand Generation Summit itself provides a super case study example of post-event activities that many of us could leverage in our own campaigns. We all know that marketing events are expensive - venues, lunches, visiting speakers etc. There are 2 questions that frequently come up in event planning:

1. How can we ensure that the event is the beginning of a conversation and not the end of it?
2. How do we engage with people who weren't able to make the event, or that we don't engage with until after the event has happened?

Against Question 1, the organising team have created a Linked-In group. Great move - people who attended can join, people who are referred by colleagues can join, people who stumble across it on Linked-In can join. YOU could join - as the time of writing this there are 73 members. Next step is to really get a dialog going within that group - that is more difficult of course because it requires people to participate rather than just observe.

To answer the second question, BrightTALK was one of the sponsors and the presentations were professionally captured and edited on video and are now available from a separate Demand Generation Summit webinar site, along with the slides. Congratulations to all those involved - I think they've done a great production job. Check it out!

Demand Generation Summit - London November 4th

Yesterday I had the honour of speaking at the first Demand Generation Summit held at Altitude in the Millbank Tower in the heart of London. The event was organised and sponsored by Banner, Google, Eloqua, BrightTALK and MarketOne. Details of the event can be found here.

A few observations from the day...

I think the team did an outstanding job in the preparation and execution of the event - list cleansing, audience generation, pre-event materials, venue selection, catering , agenda were all very thought through and flawlessly executed - hats off to everyone involved.

Amongst the attendees there was a clear desire to exchange ideas and opinions. At one level I think that many of the attendees found it a positive cathartic experience to recognise that the challenges around aligning marketing with sales, creating appropriate content, nurturing conversations, and measuring ROI are shared amongst all of us in the B2B marketing community. We may all have distinct challenges within our own individual organisations but the fundamental issues are very similar.

There is a significant opportunity to continue the dialogue amongst the attendees, and indeed build a community to encourage further discussion and exchange. On the back of the summit a Linked-In group has been setup called the Demand Generation Network. I'd encourage you to join and participate - could be fun and develop into a truly valuable resource.

Several people asked for copies of my slides, and so I've posted them on slideshare. As I said yesterday, I'd hope that you can use some of the content to assess what your current state of health is around conversations with pre-customers (still not comfortable with that word!) and to help you identify those areas that are under your control and those areas where you need so influence other parts of the organisation.

I'd very much appreciate any feedback - either here or in the Linked-In Group.

Using LinkedIn as a Lead Generation Tool

A friend recently asked me "We all periodically do this LinkedIn stuff - but what's it actually for?" Linking up with past colleagues and friends has some value, making yourself available to the advances of recruitment agencies may or may not interest you. But is that it?

However I'm increasingly seeing people use LinkedIn as a way to generate new leads - primarily by creating and joining LinkedIn Groups and developing a profile for your "personal brand" by answering and asking questions within those groups. There's a good article on this by Prashant Kaw over on the Hubspot blog

If you want to keep tabs on the conversations within the groups without having to remember to go to LinkedIn you can have an email delivered to you on a regular basis with a summary of the most recent topics being discussed in the groups. Unfortunately there's rather too much of the "Fabulous marketer seeks work in the Des Moines area" type in many of the groups but there are some useful connections to be made here.

Which LinkedIn Groups do you find the most valuable as a B2B Marketer? What have been your experiences?

An Organic Gardener's Guide to Lead Nurturing

Yesterday I spoke at a seminar organised by B2B Marketing magazine. Rather than use the traditional analogies of dating/marriage that we all use to describe the nurturing approach, I used the topic of vegetable gardening (it's the new rock'n'roll!).

Marketing campaigns produce seedlings, but that's only the start - we need to feed, weed, water, prick out etc at the appropriate time. We also need to ensure that the sales teams want to eat vegetables and are not just red meat eaters. You get the picture?

So my 9 tips for a bumper marketing crop have now become:

1. Grow the right stuff (Align marketing activity with Sales)
2. What's growing and What isn't (Record all your Responses in a client contact-centric view)
3. Follow the instructions on the Seed Packet (Develop "nurturing blueprints" of standardised processes to develop a relationship from an initial response)
4. Apply the right Feed at the right time (Align your nurturing content to the stages of the buying cycle)
5. Are the nutrients being absorbed? (Implement activity-based scoring)
6. Make it easier with a little machinery (Automate the most appropriate processes)
7. Share your knowledge (Integrate your marketing insights with the CRM system)
8. Monitor Progress Regularly (Measure key indicators)
9. Apply plenty of Mulch (Refine and keep learning)

You can find the complete presentation on Slideshare.

Flickr Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tico_bassie/120810354/