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Marketing is in the Middle: Mike Troiano

It’s time for input from other people again here at SR.  So I decide to dust off a series I start a while back call Marketing is in the Middle.  The last time I did this I got some really good responses from a host of folks:

I’m kicking off this round with Mike Troiano.  So who’s MJ?  I’ve just recently started reading his stuff in last in 90 days or so and he has a straightforward approach to most everything he posts.    For an introduction to his efforts, I would take a look at his how to sell post.    Mike Troiano is currently a Principal at Holland-Mark in Boston. His blog, Scalable Intimacy, also provides a lens into agencies as well, not just marketing insights.   Mike has had a bunch of leadership roles across multiple functional groups throughout his career.  I suspect his insight into multiple groups was key to him being the founding CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Interactive.

So here’s Mike’s take on Marketing Being in the Middle:

What marketing roles have you had and in what markets?

I was a brand guy at McCann, an interactive guy at Ogilvy, a mobile guy at m-Qube, and a social guy at Holland-Mark.

When you look at your career in marketing, what activities have you found most interesting/challenging?

There’s something I find interesting at the intersection of marketing and new technology, so that’s pretty much where I’ve focused my career.

Based on your experience what activities do you think get the most return?
That’s a pretty broad question, and I don’t think there’s a single tactical answer that applies in every case. Speaking generally… I believe in the power of brands, and the common thread across all of my digital marketing work is that it was about leveraging new media to seed, cultivate and harvest relationships.

What do you feel is the most important component of a successful marketing gig?

I’d have to say quality of execution. I think the age of “easy” marketing is over, and the marketing that works today invariably has a lot of moving parts and details to get right coordinate. Managing those details effectively is what it’s all about.

How have you seen organizations change in the last 3-5 years to better support the needs of product marketers, product managers and communications teams?

No, I really haven’t. I think most brands are still trying to figure out what do with the social stuff, for example. Very few have determined how to re-align themselves to take full advantage of that opportunity. I’m sure it will happen, but with notable exceptions, I don’t think it has yet.

If you could design the perfect corporate environment for a marketer to be successful what would that be?

Great marketing organizations have CEO’s that support them, leaders with the courage to take risks, ground troops who focus on quality of execution, systems to measure results and iterate, and passion for real business results.

How far is this from reality?

Pretty far.  I think most marketing organizations have 1 or 2 of those things, really good ones have 3 or 4, and only the rock star teams have them all.

So what’s next?

I think what’s next is companies starting to make the structural, systemic and procedural changes necessary to take advantage of social media. It’s one thing to hire some college kid to tweet on behalf your brand, for example… quite another to inform your product development and other marketing priorities with the insights you’re gleaning on an ongoing basis through Twitter. Sometimes I think most marketing people are still trying to make social media go away, trying to either outsource it or put it in a box at the margin of the business. I think this year we’ll start to see companies really start to view the social stuff as a mechanism to connect with the external reality, and taking full advantage of that potential will require more fundamental changes.

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Blog: Scalable Intimacy

Twitter: @miketrap

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Many thanks for Mike’s willingness to kick off this series with some clarity from the field!!

January 25, 2011 by
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ACETECH Symposium: Whistler – April 7, 2011

Whistler 7
Image via Wikipedia

It’s been an exciting kick off to 2011 so far.  I’m in the process of completing an interview project and I’ve just been added to ACETECH’s annual symposium for current and past CEO’s of technology companies in Whistler this April.

This should be a great event, not just because of it being in Whistler, but because of the environment which ACETECH creates for all the  participants:

ACETECH Symposium is total immersion into the core of how technology business works…and how you can make it work in your company.  From the highs of advanced business concepts to the answers to workday problems, the ACETECH Symposium empowers the CEO for the next day back at work and the next ten years of you career…….Your participation in the Annual ACETECH Symposium will provide new year round learning opportunities:

  • Annual Symposium at Whistler – 3 days of strategy with world class leaders allowing you to benchmark your strategic direction against leading edge trends
  • Best Practices Workshops for you and/or team members to identify and implement models that can substantially improve your company’s performance
  • Ongoing Whistler Peer Round tables moderated by subject matter experts to continue discussion on critical issues identified at the Whistler Symposium

If you are a current/past CEO/president in tech and this event looks like something you might want to attend, I’d really recommend it. I hope to catch up with you there!

January 24, 2011 by
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SCRUM In Marketing: Leveraging Agile Outside Development

When going Agile in development there are definitely challenges both inside and outside the traditional R&D group. The impact of improved velocity in the “manufacturing process” can definitely create bottlenecks in adjacent organizations/process owners.  Some organizations answer these challenges with going towards an Agile enterprise approach.  Others when asked “how can you use Agile methodologies outside of a traditional IT and Development mode?”  may roll out to another group here and there, but don’t go all-in.

Having had the opportunity to deploy Agile across the enterprise over the last several years – I’ll agree it helps bunches.  Focus, transparency and priority setting.    I’m definitely a believer in the benefits, which is why I’m sharing the presentation below.

Here is Kristen Petra’s pitch on how Hub Spot uses SCRUM in Marketing successfully from the 2011 Austin Product Camp/#PCATX.   While I think a Scrum Master role is needed, this is a solid overall intro into on how to use SCRUM outside of IT/development.

Marketing the Agile Way – Applying Scrum Outside of Develoment

View more presentations from Kirsten Knipp

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January 17, 2011 by
(19)

Social Capital Death Match: Brands vs. People

There is no doubt that brands are investing big time in social media based on some articles of late.  Here are just a few of the articles which have gotten me thinking about the influence of companies/brands in social.

The other interesting thing I keep getting a bunch of questions on is, what is the right set of metrics to track in social media.  So with the recent emergence of social capital scoring as the topic du jour, I was thinking maybe this could be a good metric, at least for better understanding context.    These new social capital scoring providers however, have loftier goals beyond relative context, from Klout’s website:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

These new providers are competing for mind share about who’s number is best or what is the best way to even approach social influence.  Since there are multiple providers out there, I decided to look at multiple providers to get a balanced view into social capital for this post, but I really only found 2 which would work.

The main two in the marketplace are Peer Index and Klout, but there are others I guess like Twitter Grader which seems to have a simplistic view of rankings, since all the twitter accounts I analyzed for this piece had a score of 100 which didn’t really help much.   Another source I tried to include was PostRank, but not all the sources analyzed had blogs, so I had to throw that one aside as well.

Net-Net, these emerging social capital scoring sites promise to potentially be the FICO of social, which is certainly intriguing and they are gaining more visibility and in some folks minds credibility, but not in all, as you can see based on the titles of the articles below:

So with all this investment  by companies in social media and the potential to get paid more, then this social capital must be worth something, right?  In fact, it just might be a way for companies and brands to manage their online properties and identities to achieve better results, right?

Markets and Buyers are Changing

No matter what markets you service, the same old stuff isn’t working anymore and there is this really hyped up thing called social media, but what is the best approach for you, your products and your company?  While to many of us in the trenches, it is obvious that marketing is changing it would be hard to see that based on the brands and the brand centric approaches many companies are taking with social.

Where it used to be enough to be a “traditional marketer” who knows “pretty things” and how to position brands – things now require a more pointed approach which targets buyers and leverages domain expertise/product familiarity to quickly achieve results in the market.   If this is something you doubt, check out April’s pitch from Amsterdam – (Marketing is Dead).  If the trend of moving away from big brand approaches is happening, how is this impacting social and how should companies adjust their approach?

So I’ve did a little more digging around and found some compelling research that most people don’t read most of your tweets and how can this impact brands and products trying to break through the noise.  So I decided it’s time for some research/an experiment.   So seeing these three trends: social investment, movement away from brand marketing and the assertion that most tweets just echo out in the ether, I decided to synthesize these trends into something interesting and see what lessons might be gleaned.

Brands vs. People: Social Influence

So I first started with the 5 top retail brands who used Twitter on Black Friday and 5 people who I have actually broken bread with or discussed something with and they needed to also “influence” me in some way.  I could have easily picked 5 “rock stars” or social media ninjas and rigged it, but I thought it was important to put a constraint that they be in my network and that I personally have engaged with these folks IRL.  So the experiment is to look at both of these groups and compare both their Klout scores and their Peer Index scores to see based on some magical influence math who has more social capital – Brands or People in social media.

By using both Peer Index and Klout, I believe I have addressed some of the hub bub on the interwebs with the math concerns specifically, how Klout can’t detect robots well and Peer Index uses a “real” metric, which I assume addresses in some way tweet velocity, @ replies and conversations.  The other item is that Peer Index scores for some are radically different, so I used averages across both services for both the brands and the people.

Social Capital Death Match: Brands vs. People.

Social Capital Death Match

View more presentations from Jon Gatrell.

Conclusions and Questions

As with all data, once you frame it and dig in you typically have more questions than answers on the first cut.  So the conclusions I have are actually more in the form of questions, than conclusions:

  1. Should there be Two Algorithms – one for businesses and one for people? Think FICO vs. Dun & Bradstreet.
  2. Are people becoming more relevant for brands and companies, much in the way products and product marketing are increasingly more relevant to buyers?
  3. Is being real, just really knowing the buyers and the market segment and being able to engage in meaningful discussions and the sharing relevant information with the buyers in the segment?
  4. Can a single algorithm really measure an intangible?
  5. If there isn’t a single metric, will “camps” develop around what score to trust?
  6. Could there soon be such as thing as a “Klout Coach” to help people and companies to increase their capital?

not to get all cliche and stuff, but maybe a brand’s best asset is their people when it comes to social.

December 14, 2010 by
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