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I’m in Boston at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2008

08 Sep
2008
by in General, Marketing

The Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS08) was organized by HubSpot and it’s their first one and it has been sensational. Great speakers, interesting sessions, and the press room has been a blast. Last night I talked with co-founder Dharmesh Shah, writer of OnStartups, about how great his presentation was at last week’s Business of Marketing conference. Dharmesh did not disappoint today with his SEO Basics seminar and neither did HubSpot VP of Marketing, Mike Volpe’s presentation about Website Redesign strategy. I hope to talk to Mike some more later this evening.

Talked briefly with Seth Godin who kindly signed a book for our Marketing Associate Eric and I also talked with David Meerman Scott who was charming and commented on how his presentation has changed since I saw him two years ago at the Software Developer conferfence in Worcester MA.

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Here is tonight’s TV Junkie. I’m not reposting them here because I’m afraid of getting labelled as blogspam.

Geeks will love that Sarah Connor Chronicles are back and fashion freaks will love that yet another fashion reality show is appearing on Bravo.

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Bostonist: Stars of Software Development and Entrepreneurship at Business of Software Conference

04 Sep
2008
by in Marketing

Joel Spolsky @ Business of Software ConferenceThe Business of Software Conference has been going on at the World Trade Center, part of the Seaport Hotel, for the last couple days. Software architects, marketing and management visionaries, and venture capitalists have provided presentations, roundtable discussions, and networking (aka cocktails and appetizers) for existing and aspiring software entrepreneurs who have come to Boston from all over the world.

Yesterday started off with marketing guru Seth Godin who began with the statement “All marketers can leave the room” to focus his message on “this room full of ‘the smartest people in the room’”. Godin is a cheerleader of the idea of the “remarkable product/company/experience” and is an advocate of “living the story” of one’s ideas and experiences as applied to a business or product. Drawing upon poignant and pointed anecdotes culled from his many books, such at “Purple Cow”, “Small is the New Big”, and “Meatball Sundae” as well as his (hugely popular) blog – Godin put together a dynamic show that other presenters constantly referred to for the rest of the conference.

Highlights of day one were the unapologetic, idealistic, and aggressive business philosophy of 37signals‘ founder Jason Fried (“planning is overrated”), and a lively Pecha Kucha session (yo! next Boston Pecha Kucha Night is 9/18!) where 8 speakers competed for a Mac Book Air – looks like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian was the winner.

Of the afternoon sessions, founder of Cambridge-based HubSpot, Dharmesh Shah was the outstanding highlight. Brilliant, humorous, and self-deprecating, Shah provided a primer on the do’s and don’ts of launching a start-up. Drawing on personal experience gained from launching his companies, as well as his 2 years getting a pair of Masters degrees at M.I.T., Shah put the technical and business issues related to building a business and bringing a product to market into focused, black-and-white terms that one could apply to any product or business, not just software. We’re looking forward to seeing more of Shah at next week’s Inbound Marketing Summit.

Today, the conference kicked off with Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing, a thought leader in the training of product managers. Johnson highlighted pitfalls of product development and hilariously identified the shortcomings of how companies are structured through the use of, among other things, Star Trek analogies “most businesses are like Star Trek (original series) but we want them to be like Star Trek Next Gen. where they are actually competent”. In summary, Johnson is a great spokesperson for formalizing and empowering the role of product manager in any organization.

Boston-based venture capitalist firm, Summit Partners, was represented by Tom Jennings, who ably provided an overview of VC terminology and function. Jennings was followed by software freedom advocate Richard Stallman, who proposed the removal of patents as applied to software products. His interesting and controversial advice with regards to running into patent problems: “there are three ways to deal with a patent: avoid, license, or invalidate”.

Other highlighted speakers today are Noam Wasserman, professor of entrepreneurial management at Harvard with a great presentation on the dilemma that founders face: to cash in and get rich or to stay put and stay king of their company; usability guru Steve Krug; and conference sponsor, co-founder of FogCreek, and blogebrity Joel Spolsky.

Business of Software organizer, Neil Davidson (also co-founder of Red Gate Software) put together a fantastic show with the underwriting help of Joel Spolsky, and we can only hope that they bring it back to Boston again.

Pic of Joel Spolsky @ Business of Software Conference by Tom Lewis

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Marketing 2.0′s David Weinberger Discussion

04 Aug
2008
by in Marketing

[I did this post in mid-September last year, before reading Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" so it's interesting to see that the themes have stayed consistent. IT's also interesting to see that Marketing 2.0 has since left Facebook to start its own online presence which I admittedly haven't really checked in on since I was granted membership. Similarly, Seth Godin just last week launched Triibes.com which is of course very marketing oriented. Will Godin's cult of personality pull through where Marketing 2.0's has failed? Social networking for the sake of social networking has a very short half life. Can Godin attract the people needed to sustain success? I wonder what state Triiibes will be in as of January 2009]

Facebook’s Marketing 2.0 group had a nice Q&A with David Weinberger on Wednesday. There was some discussion about David’s book and the tagging possibilites that are out there but not getting utilized.Here’s some chicken scratch ideas I collected during the Q&A:- Markets are conversations
- Marketing doesn’t have to be a conversation
- The future of the internet is in jeopardy due to controlling forces
- Companies are co-creating products with their customers much more than they used to and this benefits everyone.
- Conversation can be undermined by companies/entities paying people to say good things about them. – The conversation has to be transparent.
- The idea of advocacy marketing is coming about, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as everyone is honest about where they are coming from: who is the hired gun?
- Customers have learned to trust each other more than they trust the business.

3 Things to Work On:
- Specifications (the stats, the metadata, the bones of the product, the facts, stuff that you can be sued for)
- Advocacy Marketing (blogging, forums, lacing up the gloves and stating your case)
- Marketing Materials (is looking phonier and phonier: the challenge for marketers is to improve this)

- Marketing that is going to sound simplified is going to sound insulting.
- Marketers need to get as complex and interesting as the subject matter.
- Simplicity still has value: What is your product? What is your company? This basic message should be simple
- “Control of the message”: what’s left of the idea if someone was to take control of it? Marketing is _not_ in the control business, that’s a way to alienate your customers. Marketing/the Company should be a source of ideas.
- What if there was no marketing? Your employees are already talking, that’s a form of marketing and a potential area of focus.

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Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow”

27 May
2008
by in Book Summary/Review

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Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

This is probably the Bible equivalent of Seth Godin’s works, or at least, a tidy book of psalms. At 137 pages this is one of several more compact books by Godin and this is the one that has “taken off” the most, with people in all kinds of roles in all kinds of businesses assessing whether or not their product, service, or company is a Purple Cow or not.

In the new milennium, Godin started writing shorter books composed of several dozen ”chaplets” of no more than 4 pages each. I love this much more digestible format because you know you’re going to be able to get through the book because each “chaplet” is a digestible idea and you know that you can get that idea in your head, close the book, and head off to sleep knowing that you can pick the book up the next day or several days later to get to these other mini topics.

If you’ve ever read the Tao Te Ching then you know the power of saying a lot with the least amount of words. Some folks might argue that some of Godin’s ideas are truly spiritual but I think he would modestly argue that he’s more interested in revealing the truth rather than a pathway for mortal souls. This 2003 book contains some summaries of previous Godin ideas (The TV Industrial Complex, Ideaviruses, Everyone Is A Designer, etc.) and it’s always wise to revisit those.

There are also many case studies that Godin uses to illustrate a particular idea. Sometimes I feel that this is a bit too simplistic and misleading.There was certainly more than 1/2 dozen paragraphs devoted to many of these business and marketing strategies. But really, you should want to know more than what Godin provides – he’s just identifying the idea and informing us about it.

There are many great messages in the book, many of them are “takeaway points” that Godin puts at the end of each chaplet, some of my favorites are:

“If you could build a competitor that had costs that were 30 percent lower than yours, could you do it? If you could, why don’t you?”

“Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in something new.”

“It is useless to advertise to anyone (except interested sneezers with influence).”

“What would happen if you told the truth?”

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Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing”

27 May
2008
by in Book Summary/Review

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

I’ve been doing a lot of reading to broaden my mind professionally over the last few months. I’m going to write a mini review for each book I complete because:

- to imprint the primary points of each book in my mind
- to improve my writing
- to help others who might read this blog identify books that they may want to read or avoid

I read a lot of Godin in preparation for a day-long Q&A session with him that I attended the first week of September 2007 in New York City. Permission Marketing frames a favorite Godin rule of current existence: marketing isn’t the way it used to be. Godin describes the history and evolution of mass advertising succinctly and with value. This evolution is referred to in many other Seth Godin books as well as regularly in his blog posts.

Companies can no longer guarantee increased revenues by simply increasing advertising. The ratio is getting too tight and the tipping point where revenues can’t cover increased advertising expense occurs sooner and sooner. Dumping money into marketing won’t solve a problem unless a new currency is recognized.

This new currency is the attention of potential customers. Potential customers are the exclusive holders of this currency – they are in complete control (to a significant extent). Godin illustrates the difference between old/industrial/mass advertising and permission marketing. The old way was “interruption” marketing, like television/radio/print commercials that disrupted the content of those media. After more than a half-century of this kind of advertising, humans have learned to tune out the vast majority of interruption messages so something new must be done.

The meat of the book is Godin’s definition of permission marketing and his explanation of the 5 levels of permission marketing (listed in order of importance):

1. intravenous
2. points
3. personal relationships
4. brand trust
5. situation

In going through these five levels, Godin goes on to describe the concept of permission – it’s value, it’s importance, how it can be abused, and how permission is an ongoing process that can be shut off/cancelled at any time by the customer.

Godin provides us with several examples of web marketing failures as well as a series of case studies. One must bear in mind that this book was published in 1999 – some of the examples of poor web marketing are shocking (”Did companies really expect that to work?”) and similarly, even what were ingenious examples about ten years ago seem a bit dated and simple.

The book closes well with a currently valid permission marketing evaluation self-exam as well as a FAQ, both of which are completely usable to date. Despite the dated case studies, this book is very much worth reading for the definitions of permission and the other sections cited above. Permission Marketing provides a good foundation for more current examples that might be found elsewhere in other texts or even in Seth Godin’s blog archives.

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