ProductMarketing.com

David on the new rules of marketing

David Meerman Scott takes one minute to summarize the new rules of marketing.

the power of the ebook (part 1)

At Pragmatic Marketing, we're big believers in ebooks. Ebooks establish your authority long before a sales team starts working the deal and will ease the way for the sales team dramatically. 

Our ebooks on The Strategic Role of Product Management and Living in an Agile World are great tools to get things rolling internally. And definitely check out the ebooks from David Meerman Scott, the king of ebooks!

 If you've been thinking that you want to write an ebook, I recommend The Ebook Ebook from Jonathan Kranz. Also check out his 10 Reasons Not to Hire Jonathan. What a kidder.

Uh, Ad-Age. Get with the program!

Wanted to read an article from Ad Age. Got this instead. "Free access" isn't free when I have to give this much personal information for one article.

Idgits! Do you want my bank PIN and web passwords too? Happily in a Google world, I can find the text of most articles elsewhere.

10 Words I Would Love To See Banned From Press Releases

Robin Wauters of TechCrunch laments 10 Words I Would Love To See Banned From Press Releases. with a nice call-out to David Scott's The Gobbledygook Manifesto.

Video: Seth on Marketing

Seth Godin's inspiring talk on "Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department". Thanks to Neil Davidson for sharing it.

Blogs, YouTube, Twitter: Are your customers there?

Many marketers today are enamored with blogging and wikis and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all the new social media outlets. But make sure these tools reach your buyers. My buyers--executives at technology-based product vendors--are reading blogs; my customers are monitoring Twitter via #prodmgmt and #pmi.

Are yours?

The trick to any new technology or media is not whether it's cool; the trick is to find those techniques that are effective in reaching your customers.

If you're not reading blogs (and I think you should be), set up an account at Google, and then subscribe to one of the many blogs featured on Pragmatic Marketing's website, including my own at ProductMarketing.com.

Friday fun: World Wide Rave (free this weekend)

So you've got your Kindle (or your Kindle for iPhone) and now you're lookin' for books! There are thousands of free books on Amazon plus manybooks.net and feedbooks.com. Remember all those classics you were supposed to read in school? Try War and Peace, The Art of War, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Moby-Dick.

Now add a new classic to your Kindle: World Wide Rave by David Meerman Scott. This weekend only, get the book free on your Kindle. 

How else will you create a World Wide Rave?

Are your customers coming to you or are you going to them?

Many vendors continue to see themselves as the focal point of their customers' universe. Remember the "portal" concept? Seems like every vendor wanted to be a your portal to the internet. Comcast, Toyota, Apple, Microsoft... every vendor wanted to be your home page and give you a new email address. The expectation that customers will come to the vendor is rooted in a "vendor centric" mindset. The typical vendor home page emphasizes product and company information. People who attend our Effective Product Marketing and New Rules of Marketing seminars learn a more "customer-centric" approach, designing around personas and problems.

Bloggers expect that people will come to them but increasingly bloggers are going to the people. My RSS feed serves information to over 3,000 people time I post. Pragmatic Marketing offers RSS feeds for upcoming seminars and for all of our blogs.

Honestly, I haven't decided about how much I should put in my feeds. Should I just feed the first 200 words or should I send the whole post? I've decided to do the latter--deliver the whole post--hoping that people who want to know more will eventually come to the site. And this appears to be what's happening. My blog leads people to my ebook, The Strategic Role of Product Management, and ultimately to a Pragmatic Marketing seminar.

What are you doing to connect with customers? Surely you want them to find good information when they come to you but you also want to send information to them. If you haven't already done so, investigate blogging and RSS feeds to get valuable information to them.

Get a free RSS Reader from Google and then sign up for one or more of our blogs.

Update: Hey bloggers! Write an article for The Pragmatic Marketer and get featured on our blog roll.

on vendor claims

Everything eventually ends up on the web, so you should be careful about what you claim as true.

Daya Baran wrote about false claims by Mint.com and Intuit's retort in Intuit Accuses Mint Of False Claims. Apparently, Mint claims that it has gone from 3,000 new users a day to 850,000 users in a matter of months. I particularly like this: after Baran challanged a senior exec with "presented information that was false," the exec said, "Well we are a startup you know..." as if that excused it.

Here's something fun. Your sales team has asked you for competitive positioning. And maybe you created an exhaustive point-by-point comparison of your product versus the competitor. Mint.com's competitive comparison is this:

That's all? Yup, that's all.

Mint.com is saying, "We're better because we say so. You know, just believe us. Really. (please)."

In years past, we had watchdog groups that would verify vendor claims. Often you'd see the industry analysts weighing in. Nowadays every blogger is a watch group. In IMDB's discussion groups, you'll see members calling out items obviously planted by PR firms. Items get reposted on Facebook with an editorial. Bloggers complain about--or laugh about--vendor claims on their sites. You can no longer assume that what you write for your sales people or for individual customers will stay "inside."

Assume that whatever you claim will be published. Can you back it up? Can your claim hold up under public scrutiny?

video: World Wide Rave

Start a movement; create ideas that spread. Launch a World Wide Rave!

Video: World Wide Rave by David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott's new book, World Wide Rave, challenges us--you, me, everybody--to start a movement, to create ideas that spread. Enjoy this video about the people who have adopted the ideas from David's book.

And notice this: it's clear he has been preparing for this launch for many, many months, not just "okay, now that the book is almost shipping, let's do some marketing." Friends and colleagues have taken his poster around the world and sent back pictures and videos. Read also his free ebook about how the video was made.

How will you spread your ideas?

on the World Wide Rave

My pal David Meerman Scott is releasing his new book, World Wide Rave, on March 3. You can hear him discuss the book in a webinar with HubSpot today at noon ET and he'll have a featured article in next month's Pragmatic Marketer (sign up here).

A one-page ebook

I was laughing over the 2009 Bad Usability Calendar when I realized that it was a one-page ebook. 12 usability mistakes illustrated on a single page with over 2000 downloads in under a week. David Meerman Scott has convinced me; I am a big believer in ebooks.

Nobody likes a hard-sell! How could you get your customers and non-customers to spread your message? Write an ebook! Explain the three or four (or 40 or 50!) things that you and your company know that others do not.

• Why product management is a strategic role, not a janitorial one. (Have you read my ebook on The Strategic Role of Product Management?)
• Why measuring ROI is not always a good thing as David explained in Lose Control of your Marketing! Why marketing ROI measures lead to failure.
• Why the "old way" of developing products is flawed, giving way for the Agile Manifesto.

How can you harness the power of the web to get customers to tell your message to their friends? (and she told two friends, and she told two friends, and so on and so on...)

David on Marketing ROI

David Meerman Scott writes,

"For many executives, an obsession with ROI is just a convenient excuse to shy away from something new and untested. Yet that's exactly what the best ideas for creating a World Wide Rave are--new and untested. If you're obsessed with ROI measurements that worked in an offline world, then you're just making an excuse. If you worry about losing control of your message, then you're making an excuse."

David has just posted his new ebook called Lose Control of your Marketing! David's ebooks are always a treat for me so I'm gonna put everything else aside so I can start reading this!

Pragmatic Marketing webinars on iTunes

Look ma! I'm on iTunes. Our marketing folks have posted all the Pragmatic Marketing webinars on iTunes.

 

If you enjoy the webinars, please leave a nice customer review on iTunes. Also check out our Tuned In webinars. 
 

Tuned In podcasts on iTunes

Our Tuned In podcasts are now available on iTunes. Download sessions on Tuned In product teams, social media, cultures, buying experiences, and leadership. Since this is my blog, let me specifically point out my two sessions, Tuned In Product Teams and Aligning the Tuned In Process with the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. You can also download these podcasts from our Tuned In web page.

PodCampAZ, Nov 1st & 2nd

We love the New Rules of Marketing and we're sponsoring the podcasting BarCamp, this one in Arizona.

PodCamp is a FREE BarCamp-style community UnConference for podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, and anyone interested in New Media. It was held for the first time from September 8-10 in Boston, Massachusetts and is now spreading across the world.

Podcamp AZ 2.0: November 1st & 2nd, 2008
This year we have more than doubled in size and expanded PodCamp AZ to a 2-day event in order to get the highest amount of interaction between participants and help people answer the hottest new media question… “What’s your source?”

Learn more here.

On New Rules of the Web and TV

The history of broadcast and the introduction of the internet gives valuable context to today's development and marketing. TedTalks shares this great presentation by Peter Hirshberg on The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry. In particular, one quote that really struck me was from Nike's head of marketing, Trevor Edwards, who summarizes the New Rules of Marketing this way:

"We're not in the business of keeping the media companies alive. We're in the business of connecting with customers."

Indeed.

overcoming obscurity

How can you make money when your product is available free?

I've just purchased Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It's a clever young adult (YA) novel about being a kid in America in the very near future--with access to so much technology yet victimized by an overbearing government. I'm only six chapters in so far but I love this guy's writing. (Hint: don't read this book if you strongly support the Patriot Act.)

In a case of "new rules" marketing, he is offering the book through the traditional vendors but also via free downloads!

Doctorow explains,

For me--for pretty much every writer--the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

And when you love a book, don't you tell people? And don't you buy a new copy after you lend the old as a gift? I've done that with Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, The Old Man's War, Pillars of the Earth plus Inmates are Running the Asylum, The Deadline, The PC is not a Typewriter, New Rules of Marketing, and others.

The same is true of products. The challenge for most products--and product marketers--is overcoming obscurity. One way for people to find you is to publish. Fill your web site with white papers, ebooks, news releases, implementation guides... rich content written for users and technicians, not just brochureware for buyers.

Just win me over! And then I'll buy and buy and buy.

on viral marketing

"Download our free white paper and enter to win a free iPod."

Some companies just don't get it. By now almost everyone has learned that "download our free white paper" means "give us your email address so we can spam you for the rest of your life." Marketing departments (and their agencies) need to learn that impressions do not have to become sales leads.

You cannot trick someone into buying your product.

What is the formula for success?

Step 1: build a remarkable product. Learn more in Practical Product Management.

Step 2: get your customers to tell their friends. Learn more in The New Rules of Viral Marketing--a new e-book by David Meerman Scott. Download it now; it's free and there's no annoying registration requirement. Forward it with your marketing department.

on corporate blogging

Alan at On Product Management want to know what makes a good “vendor blog”? He writes,

Like many things, there are good blogs, bad blogs, and good and bad corporate blogs. I dislike blogs that are blatant marketing pitches, and it’s clear that readers don’t like them much either.

That's for sure! When will marketing and sales departments understand that no one likes to be pitched? Pitches in blogs and other online forums are like a stranger running into your house and yelling BUY BUY BUY at you!

Alan asks,

What works for you and your blog?

I started the productmarketing.com blog originally to store deep-dive articles on topics from our training classes, ideas that required more analysis than a brief answer in class could provide. Originally the main page was a diary pointing to new content on my site (and others). I found myself writing article-length email replies to a question from class and realized that I should write the article once and distribute it on request. “Here’s the link!”

When I put all the articles online, Google had a field day. All that rich content in one place made the productmarketing.com website pretty attractive to search. The articles provided lots of great, rich content while the blog kept the content fresh. You can read all the details in our web history article.

My challenge of late has been to allocate blogging time with a travel schedule that is virtually 100%. I find it’s really hard to get my mind quiet enough in the cacophony of traveling life to write anything at all. That’s a real challenge when your company’s thought-leader has a “real job” too. Like so much of product management, it can be frustrating when the people you need for content are motivated to do something else.

My current strategy is to schedule a morning for writing before my week starts. I keep a folder on my desktop of topics that need exploration and then just write to whichever topic is most interesting to me at the time. I also need to remember to check to see if I’ve already written an article on the subject! There’ve been times when I say, “Hey, wait a minute! I’ve written this before!!” Silly me.

Our content management software has a handy feature. I can schedule when a post will appear. On those rare days when I’m particularly prolific, I can write a series of posts and then schedule them over the next few days and weeks. I try to post on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have a bunch of stuff.

Our marketing people know the number of visitors to the site and which articles they read but I’ve never been much of a measurement person. I know, I know; it’s heresy... I'm supposed to be.  As much as I know that I’m supposed to use data, I learn through anecdotes. I measure success when people come to my seminar because they read an article or post on the website. That said, our annual product management survey reports that only 9% of product managers use RSS readers while 84% read our email newsletter.

I think Jacob Nielson is right. In Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, he concludes,

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

A blog is a great place to post short notes but schedule some time to fully explore an idea in the form of an article or webinar. If you don’t take the time, you’ll get shallow postings instead of thorough, valuable content.