Everyone likes to believe there is a plan and businesses follow those plans to become successful,  but what I’ve found is that there are a lot of unknowns along the road.  Some of the most successful businesses are the ones that have been brave enough to explore those unknown regions!

Based on that premise I came up with the idea that one’s business is like a space ship exploring some known and unknown regions. And, recently I had the rare opportunity to work with an extremely talented infographic designer (and college Professor), Mike Wirth, to make that vision more tangible.

Below is the result of  the synthesis of our combined efforts and creativity: A HubSpotter’s Guide to the Galaxy!  If you find it interesting, feel free to follow @mikewirth and @prashantkaw on Twitter!

Enjoy!

Data rules the post-information age more so than ever.  In fact the current age, the age of conversation or the age of attention, whatever we call it is conceived of data.  What are we conversing about?  What’s keeping our attention?

Working for a software company, HubSpot, that has marketing analytics as part of it’s main offering I’m a data junkie.  It makes the world go round for me as it does for most others in our industry with APIs connecting services and what not. Das zietgeist!

This has led me to think about data and data usage on the internet in 3 different ways.

1. Data Porn: People love stats.  I mean look at how crazy everyone is about baseball metrics in the United States.  It is insane.  And now days everyone is gaga over growth metrics of Facebook and Twitter.   At HubSpot we refer to this love for data as data porn – information that gets us very excited.

2. Data Ho’s: The data whores are all the companies that like to share their data with the world.  Most major internet companies have APIs so developers and users can access their data and do things with them.  Even at HubSpot we collect interesting information from our Grader Tools and give that away through APIs and some we share through reports.  We are in a new era of unprecedented free whoring of data and everyone is the better for it!

3. Data Pimps: Lastly we have the data pimps which refers to companies that collect and aggregate other people’s data, slice and dice it and push it through social media.  As an example the TwitterGrader tool has analyzed more than 6.5 million twitter profiles, which is essentially Twitter’s data.  We put together a semi-annual report called the State of Twittersphere report where we share this data with the world, no charge in this case!  Another simpler example is Google – what if not data pimping is the indexing of other people’s web pages and offered up to the world for use in their own relevant, ranked way?

So while we may all be in the vile data porn loving, pimping, whoring age, it has definitely kept us attentive in this age of conversation and educated us in a way the Kama Sutra educated the Hindu masses in the art of loving back in the day!

So what kind of data junkie are you?  Can you think of other memes for data?  Share your thoughts in the comments or chat with me @prashantkaw on twitter!

Are you as competitive about retaining the Foursquare Mayorship of your office?  How about the local coffee joint or fast food place?  Friends and colleagues trying to illegally steal Foursquare mayorships – beware.  The Foursquare cops are making the rounds!

In an ultra funny, new, spoof of the FOX network documentary series, COPS, HubSpot has launched a new series or shorts called FourSquare Cops! Follow the adventures of  Detective John Hardy and Officer Frank Ashton.  Tune in every Tuesday at 12:00pm EDT to the HubSpot inbound internet marketing blog, or subscribe to their YouTube page.

Hubspot is my employer and the creator of the HubSpot Inbound Marketing System for small and medium businesses that includes a suite of lead generation and lead tracking software, lead nurturing software, SEO tools and marketing analytics.

Cast & Credits:

Series idea: @mvolpe
Producer and Director: @WoodyTondorf
Starring: @KylePaice, @natehinchey
Guest Starring: @kylejames, @andypitre, @repcor and Richard DeAgazio.

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to see the forest, don’t forget about the leads…

Social media is great for having conversations, engaging new audiences and in general being social. But don’t forget to think about the bottom line that drives your business. It’s easy to get lost amongst the trivial aspects of social media and focus on what matters, like generating leads.

Here are 5 simple things that will help you generate more leads from social media:

1. Get focused: It’s easy to feel the pressure to grow a large following on social networks like Twitter. A smaller but more relevant follower base will do more for you than a large audience not related to your business or industry. At the same time make sure your conversations mix the social and business aspects of your online identity. After all you are in it for networking as well!

2. Answer questions: A great way to build trust and authority without being aggressive with a sales pitch is to answer questions. Listen in on conversations about your industry and answer questions. At times it might be relevant to add a link back to your content to help out the person and generate some qualified traffic for yourself.

3. Add a profile link: Include a link to your company website or your personal blog from your social media profiles. While engaging an audience through relevant conversations, that provides an opportunity for them to learn more about you and your business.

4. Share your own content: A lot of people are happy retweeting content from popular blogs and thought leaders. When you read something share worthy, write an interesting response and share your own links. Not only will it position you are a thought leader, again it will generate new traffic and leads for your business.

5. Use Calls-to-actions: While asking people to sign up for your product or service may not work well, adding a trial or demo call-to-action button on your thought leadership blog post will get your conversions. Make sure that all your content has some call-to-action on it that links to a landing page.

Are you ready to see the forest? How do you plan to use social media for lead generation? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

…Being Social!

This morning I came across this passionate post written by Todd Defren, PR innovator and the principle at Shift Communications.

His observation of the “lack of social” in social media while not new, reminded me of a story my Uncle shared with me about his teacher, Sri Satya Sai Baba.

People visiting Baba would often say, “Baba, I want peace.” To that Baba’s response would be: “Take away “want” (desire), take away “I” (ego). And then there’s just peace.”

It seems like social media marketers and brand ambassadors (me included) tend to easily get forget that as we get caught up in the MEDIA part of social media.  How can we make a conscious effort to ditch the promotional aspects of the space and just focus on people?

So taking a key from Baba, let’s remember to: take away Media (often our agenda), take away marketing (purpose of our work) and just be social.  As Todd aptly titled his post, It’s About the People, Stupid!

If you want to be social, you can connect with me @prashantkaw on twitter!

On Friday I did a webinar with Ellie Mirman on how to promote your business blog using the HubSpot software. I framed the webinar into three ways to think about blog promotion:

1. Passive promotion: The notion here is that you can optimize your site using relevant keywords and over time you will passively attract more and more visitors to your blog.

2. Automated promotion: Thanks to RSS it is now easy to include the feed for your blog into various social media profiles. Above and beyond that the HubSpot software can automatically post tweets and status updates to various social media profiles. This is how technology have help with automated promotion.

3. Active promotion: This is the crux of blog promotion and we touch on how to interact with community and use social networking sites such as LinkedIn to answer questions and get your blog out there.

Enjoy the slides above of view the entire recorded presentation on the hubspot product webinars page.

The mythical Tower of Babel represented an endeavor so great that it rivaled the heavens.  According to the bible, a united humanity speaking a single language participated in the building of the tower.  That’s the future of the world wide web envisioned by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet.

Dr. Berners-Lee in this impassioned TED talk on what he calls Linked Data describes an internet with open databases that can be linked with one another online to facilitate research and learning.  Wikipedia is perhaps a simplistic example of such an entity but at a very minute scale.

Key principles of Linked Data include:

1. Providing valuable information that is structured (or tagged) using meta data
2. The use of URIs to identify sources of information
3. Accessibility to the data by people and user agents via the HTTP protocol
4. The inclusion of links or URIs to additional, related sources of information to faciliate discovery

While it appears Dr. Lee’s vision is humanitarian in nature given he wants organizations to share their information extrinsically to the public at large this idea is valuable to corporations who implement this intrinsically.  This is founded on the principles of Data Democracy which I wrote about on the HubSpot blog sometime back.

If you have any interest in the internet I highly recommend you should watch the video to get a glimpse of the future. It’s great content and really well delivered!

Photo credit: Thomas Thomas

I recently reread Illusions: Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach for the first time in over 15 years.  It is an amazing book and I think everyone should read it!  But, the most inspiring part is the parable in the introduction.

The story starts with a messiah narrating the lives of creatures living along the bottom of a great river.  All those creatures clung for dear life to the bottom of the river to avoid getting swept by the swift current.

One creature however feeling bored and directionless clinging the same old way decided it was time to let go and trust the river current.  His companions warned him and laughed at him but he let go anyway and was instantly dashed against some hard rocks.

However he refused to cling to the bottom and soon the current of the river picked him up again and he started to move downstream.  To all the creatures who lived downstream to who he was a stranger he appeared to be miracle creature and a messiah flying in the current like no other but of course knew better.

A sea of change is taking place in how internet marketing is being done today.  Most companies are sticking to the same old ways of reaching their prospects by barraging them with emails, direct mailers and telemarketing calls, interrupting their daily routines.  However these techniques are not effective and are often detrimental to the marketers.

The new marketing requires us to let go of the old ways (you can go back whenever you like) but you need to experience where the river is going and trust it.  The river in question is 1) how the internet is transforming and becoming flat, allowing smaller and larger companies to compete on equal footing in search engines. 2)  It’s how people are trusting each others’ recommendations in social media to discover new products and services.  3) It’s how companies are creating remarkable content that is being shared in social media and helping them to get found.

Sometimes we just have to trust that the river knows where it is going and let go.  Fellow marketers clinging to the old ways may think you are a fringe case, may discount you as a radical or even choose to worship you as messiah but you know better that it really is all about trusting the river.  It’s time to change our marketing and go with the flow.

How have you changed your marketing recently?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Ice Cream Anyone?

I love ice cream and my friends know that. When someone asks my what ice cream they should buy my response is usually one of the following: 1) You should definitely get Häagen-Dazs ice cream. OR 2) OMG! Go get the Häagen-Dazs Belgian Chocolate Chocolate flavor. It’s to die for!

Now consider those two answers carefully. Which one allows you to make a decision easily if you find yourself knocking on the door of the Häagen-Dazs shop in the Burlington Mall at 6:45 am? If you like if chocolate ice cream (which I insist you should) the info in answer 2) would allow you to just walk up and say: “I’d like a medium cup of Belgian Chocolate Chocolate ice cream with jimmies on top”.

If however my reponse was 1) you’d have to window shop, look at the menu, perhaps leer at the others while they are devouring tasty ice cream till you can make up your mind. The same goes for your marketing.

In a recent blog post I wrote on HubSpot Inbound Marketing Blog I talked about tracking channel effectiveness. Let’s take a closer look at that. Consider the graph below:

Apart from knowing that your site visitors are trending up, how would you know what is driving that effect?

The reality is you get no actionable data from the graph above. You can’t see what is working and what is driving the growth of your site’s visitors. On the other hand the graph below provides some interesting insight:

By breaking down the number of visitors by each source or channel you can see that direct traffic in the graph above was cause for growth in March. At the same time there was a slight decrease in the Webinars channel because there was only one HubSpot marketing webinar in March instead of two.

The marketing takeaway is that you can spot trends by looking at graphs and stats at the high level. However the root cause of changes of trends in in the details. Go granular, dig deep and find out the root cause of your peaks or dips in your marketing reports. You will get a lot more actionable information from it.

Photo Credit: Uniqueo Manio

LinkedIn is one of my favorite networking sites. I use FaceBook and Twitter as well but so far when it comes to professional networking, LinkedIn is the center of my Universe. There’s been a lot of angst with LinkedIn lately and LinkedIn vs. FaceBook comparisons (and I have some strong opinions about that) but I’m going to save that for another post.

Let’s face it. The future of the web pages is to make them more like note books. You need to be able to annotate pages, take notes, mark them up. That was the Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the web — to make it read/write. Most sites on the web are read only but blogs comments, product/merchandise reviews (such as on Amazon.com), social news aggregators such as Digg or Reddit are now read/write.

LinkedIn’s latest read /write feature (that I noticed!) is the ability to capture notes on the profile page for each contact in your network. Your online rollerdex just became more useful. No more switching back and forth between Word or Outlook or your hard copy notes. Live in LinkedIn, email, call, take notes and network away — beautiful!

Over time all these personal notes will behave like tags. LinkedIn’s search engine could use the information behind the scenes to make their search more semantic. If 50 of my contacts have the word marketing in their notes about me, that should help make LinkedIn’s search results for the keyword marketing more relevant. Read/write web helps make it a semantic web!

Now I’m not just happy with taking notes. At some point I’d like to capture all my touch points with my contacts one place. So that means I will need a private wall-to-wall feature like we have in FaceBook to capture online conversations I want to have with my contacts, or access to all the InMail emails passed between me and a particular contact over time.

It doesn’t stop there. Once the LinkedIn API opens up a little more I’d like to pull in conversations I’ve had with my contacts in other media such as FaceBook, Twitter, Gmail/Ymail. Might be useful to see if my contact has Digged or Stumbled my blog articles that I’m pulling into my LinkedIn profile. Some progress on LinkedIn’s part but they’ve still got a ways to go.

OK, so that was totally link baiting because technically this isn’t a mashup in the web 2.0 sense. But from my point of view the blend of works from two talented artists to create something unique and beautiful could also be considered a mashup.

So what’s mashed in this video? While not extra-sensory, this visually stunning footage was inspired by Hans Zimmer’s haunting sound track from the Dark Knight. Apart from daring the waters around the Galapagos islands teeming with all kinds of creatures the creative Darek Sepiolo did an awesome job playing with the brightness to give it a darker effect to go with the theme.

Galapagos from Darek Sepiolo on Vimeo.

Another reason I love social media — we would never have found out about some indy oceanographer whose footage rivals the works of Jacques Costeau and he surely would not have received the recognition that it deserves without it. Also check out Sepiolo’s other video, Sipadan. This would make Charles Darwin proud! Enjoy!

A lot of companies refrain from using twitter and other social media because they feel their customers are not on there.  But what if someone were bashing your company on twitter?  Let’s face the facts — the twitter community has a large reach (and mighty influence), whether it is in social media or outside of it.

Check out this dialog below between @chrisbrogan and @technorati.  Chris had a bad user experience with the Technorati site, vented about it on twitter (without addressing them directly, mind you!) and they immediately responded to it.  How cool is that!

Are you missing opportunities to respond to some bashing or constructive criticism by not getting involved? Are you missing a chance to influence experts or analysts in your field even if your customer audience is not using social media? It’s easy to get involved, get started today and start influencing today!

A happy ending to an extreme case of misconduct by a NYPD police officer who shoved a harmless bicyclist off his moving bicycle during Critical Mass. Unluckily for the officer the entire incident was caught on camera and uploaded to YouTube which spread virally over the internet.

The YouTube footage below was used to indict the officer for falsifying records that the cyclist attacked him first.  It seems the cop may also be charged with misdemeanour assult.  You can view the entire 12 minute video on blip.tv.  Hooray for another victory for social media!

I love the viral nature of social media and here is another classic example.  The 6th photo meme, the new version of the age-old chain letter (remember those snail mail days?).  Choose the 6th photo of the 6th page of your flickr stream and post it along with links to six other people or bloggers you know.

By “tagging” your peeps with links to their sites ensures they find out automatically as most bloggers check their ping backs regularly.  The viral nature of this meme drives more inbound traffic to each person tagged which I think is very clever! Hooray for social networking!

My 6th photo meme is in response to being tagged by Mike Volpe and while I do not have a flickr photo stream, I picked the sixth photo from my sixth online photo album on SnapFish.

The photo below is of the legendary five-story step well, Adalaj near my home town Amdavad in western India.  The architecture is a marvelous blend of Hindu and Islamic styles that adds to the history and tragedy behind the legend.

Now for my tags to keep this meme in montion…

I can’t remember where I read the ancient Buddhist proverb, “Half mat, full mat, a bowl full or rice.”  To me it represents the minimalist subsistence for Buddhist monks.  All you need in the world is half a mat when you are sitting, a full mat when you are sleeping, and a bowl full of rice when you are hungry.  Some might say you don’t need a mat at all, but then again I did not write this proverb.

So what does this have to do with marketing?  Nothing really, it is a lame attempt at an analogy but here is the point I want to get across.  A half mat represents an empty blog or site, somewhere a marketer can place content.  It’s the bare minimum tool any marketer needs today in order to communicate with the world.  A full mat represents a blog full of content.  You need information with keywords so that people can find your blog and learn from you.  And a bowl full or rice represents a head full of ideas so you can create interesting content that people will keep coming back for.

The minimalist human is probably a monk (Sanyasis and Tantrics are probably a little more extreme for my taste).  The minimalist marketer is a publisher, a communicator.  Search engines and social media have made the world flat when it comes to reaching an audience on the web.  If you can publish good content that is interesting (remarkable), helpful (educational) and fresh you can compete with the largest corporations on the internet.  This is the foremost tenet of inbound marketing or minimalist marketing.

What do you think?

Photo Credit: Stefano Liboni

What is inbound marketing? What should we use it? Listen and watch Rebecca Corliss sing her heart out about why she wants to use Inbound Marketing for her campaigns and how she cringes at the thought of Outbound “Interruption” Marketing.

Credits:

Rebecca Corliss (@repcor): Lyrics and Vocals
David Fisher (@tibbon): Accompaniment and Music Recording
Mike Volpe (@mvolpe): Mean Boss Dude in video
Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille): Marketer in video
Pamela Seiple (@pamelump): Marketer in video
Rick Burnes(@rickburnes): Marketer in video
Aaron White (@aaronwhite): Marketer in video
James Vaughan (@J_Vaughan): Marketer in video

Spam email converts at a whopping .00000008% or gets 1 response for every 12.5 million emails. According to Tech Radar while spammers still make money off this conversion rate it makes one wonder how important it is to have a permission based list.

There’s roughly 300 million people in America (some place it at 350 million).  From what I’ve read there’s internet it only 150 million homes but for the case of this example let’s say 250 million people had internet and an email address.  At the measly conversion rate of 1 in 12.5 million I would get only 20 responses by spamming the entire country!  That’s super inefficient.

Even though this example is about spammers it is still important to note that a lot of companies do not employ best practices for permission based marketing and still don’t do a great job at segmenting their lists so their messages are on target.

Permission based marketing is so much more efficient.  First off the end users are not upset to receive a promotion from a service they’ve opted into.  The content is likely to be a lot more relevant and the likelihood of churn from that list even if it is not targeted appropriately is still lower becaue the user probably recognizes the sender.

Marketing guru Seth Godin has written a book on the subject that is so relevant even today and I highly recommend that everyone in Marketing should own a copy of it!

Spam image by Holley St. Germain.

Around a month back BusinessWeek ran this article on how Google was jumping into the fray of grading how influential people are — very similar to their page rank system for grading web sites.  Seth Godin’s new book Triiibes has a very similar message. Tribes are powerful and you should strive to be the leader of a tribe to help the spread of ideas and build a community.

This is taking the “Karma” system used by crowdsourced news aggregators sites like Digg and Reddit to the next level.  Below is an interesting presentation by Digg founder Kevin Rose that I found on SlideShare that shows they are planning to put more emphasis on the “Followers” phenomenan.  The future of sharing and discovery is weighing heavily on how influential an individual is.

If you ask me I think Twitter has a leg up on all of them as the follower system is native to their system and a lot of the most influential people have already congregated around Twitter and started building their following. Plus Twitter is just too cool.  If you would like to discuss this further feel free to follow me on Twitter @prashantkaw.

Funny viral video from my company HubSpot on why outbound cold calling does not work for lead generation. Enjoy.

We’ve all heard the term segmentation and that most companies segment their lists using various demographics such as industry vertical, company type (B2B or B2C), size of company by revenue or by number of employees, etc.  For most part this information is collected directly from the end user via conversion forms on one’s website, or, from third party sites where one has posted a white paper and other such asset offerings.

What I’ve found is that a common way of collecting segment information is in ranges.  For example when filling out the “number of employees in your organization” field on a form there’s always a pick list with options like: 1-10 employees, 11 – 100 employees, 101 – 250 employees, and so on.  Most forms offer between 5-6 choices to pick from based on the company’s segmentation criteria.  e.g. 1 to 10 employees may correspond to the VSB (very small business) segment and subsequent ranges would likely correspond to SMB, Mid-cap, Enterprise, etc. segments.

This segment information is critical because your approach to marketing to them should be different.  The smaller companies might have a shorter sales cycle because most likely there are less “influencers” and you probably have the decision maker on file.  Also the follow-up approach by your sales team should be different or at least their pitch should be customized to fit the needs for the size of the business.  So far so good.  We’ve got some data, we know how to use it, it’s pretty effective, life is great!

Problems arise when your company changes the definition of a segment.  Let’s say you discovered that your approach to selling to companies from 1 to 10 employees should be the same for companies from 1 to 25 employees (i.e. their needs are the same). If your original segment ranges were 1 to 10 and then 11 to 100 you could find companies with up to 10 employees in your database but there is no way to identify the additional companies with up to 25 employees.  You’re stuck with bad data, or rather the data is not flexible.

Another problem arises when using 3rd party sites for lead generation.  It’s commonplace to publish white papers, webinars and videos with content syndication sites that have a large reach with your audience.  For most part these content syndication sites have standard forms and segmentation criteria they collect from their registered users.  Chances are the pick list options for the number of employees field does not match yours.  Example: I just got a 1000 leads from this white paper program, but oops the starting employee range on the lead record is is 1 – 250 employees.  Now what do I do?  Should I manually look up each company on the internet and guess their employee size before distributing leads to my sales team?  What if my sales team is broken up by VSB and SMB?  To which team should I give my leads?  I’m stuck with data that is not flexible.

So what do I mean by flexible data? Not data that can be changed easily and rapidly according to one’s whims in order to get the leads out to the sales team.  (That opens up a whole new nightmare!)  By flexible data I mean capturing information so that it can be used even if we change our segment definitions.  If I sell apples and oranges to my customers my data capture options should be: 1) apples, 2)oranges and 3) apples and oranges.  If my picklist was fruits and vegetables, there’s no way I could offer up a special on golden delicious apples to the right people.

So what is a good practice?  IMHO one should try capture exact numbers from one’s audience.  Agreed, there might be a tendency for users filling out forms to round-off numbers.  One might even argue that creating open form fields opens up all kinds of data consistency issues.  Some users will type in numbers, some text, some will use numbers and text.   Also, employee numbers are fluid.  Companies are growing and shrinking all the time (especially in this economy) so you’ll never have a precise number.  Lastly, you’re probably wondering how do I bucket a company with say 42 employees into my SMB category which ranges from 26 to 100 employees.

These are all great questions and any decision you make will probably come with some trade-off.  You could design your form field to accept a numerical values only.  You would need validation rules on the form field.  Although complicated there are ways to automate the conversion of text into numerical values so twenty three or twentythree or twenty-three all displayed 23.  Your field desciption could prompt the user to fill in a number:  Number of employees (enter a value from 1 to 10000).

The bucketing of leads is a fairly easy task.  Most CRM tools like SalesForce.com and even tools such as MS Excel  can be used to populate derived fields.  Basically your segment field would be auto-filled based on the numerical value input into the number of employees field. So my application would check if the value in the number of employees field is less than or equal to 25 and auto-fill VSB into my segment field.  The advantage is if tomorrow I change my VSB definition to less than equal to 10 employees, I can easily convert all my 11+ employee companies to the SMB segment.  That is data flexibility and it suits the changing nature of my business.

I would love to hear your thoughts and opinion on this.  Please leave me a comment.  Thanks!

Happy Independence Day All!

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I recently came across this great post by Jonathan Block on the Sirius Decisions blog. He hits the nail on the head with his comments on maintaining the quality of marketing databases. Here’s what he says:

• Dirty databases abound despite significant efforts by demand creation executives.
• Most companies focus on trying to clean the entire database at once rather than fix the intelligence that matches the right contact with the right offering
• Database quality is a point in time and all data cleansing projects have an end date.
• The data is cleanest right before the next round of contacts are uploaded into the database.
• Distributed data systems are difficult to maintain and synchronize.

Very simply it’s about the process not the state of the system. No matter how many times you clean your database and bring it to a clean state, unless you create a clean process you will always find yourselves in the quagmire of unclean data. Here are some of his recommendations:

• Create a unified customer database. This helps to avoid integration and synchronization issues, lost responses, incorrectly routed leads, marketing redundancy amongst other issues and drives up the ROI for this activity.
• Couple that with a robust data quality strategy that facilitates segmenting and targeting. Implement best practices around what data points are acceptable (or enough) for your sales and marketing teams to do their jobs.
• In addition to data quality marketing operations personnel should co-own data maintenance along with field marketing and sales. A sales partner is necessary to ensure compliance from the sales side in both the marketing automation and CRM systems.
• Target “ideal” prospects based on macro criteria such as industry or sub-industry growth and maturity, behavior patterns, demographics and regulations. (This could be part of your buyer personas, more on that in a future post.) Putting this into practice helps prioritize contact discovery, account intelligence and maintenance efforts.

So if you implement good practices into your system processes you can avoid a majority of the data issues most organizations face. I will try to touch on some of these best practices such as minimizing collection points, moving records with incomplete data to a discard or holding pile, etc. in a future post.

Last week I was at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, California. Staring at the pylons of this architectural wonder I marveled how the span supported around 2 million car crossings per month!

There were 3 basic processes being supported here — vehicles traveling northbound, vehicles traveling southbound and the trolls collecting a toll. (I’m going to leave out the jumpers because I didn’t see any!) I could not help but think how this was a perfect analogy for Markitechture.

I’d like to think of Markitechture as this giant bridge supported by mighty pillars of technology with a span that helps support 3 fundamental requirements for marketing today:

1. Connecting people to people
2. Connecting people to information
3. Connecting information to information.

Process management is key to both businesses and people (the vehicles) achieving their respective goals. And these goals can be anything from conducting commerce to social networking. So if process management is the span of Markitechture, the four main supporting pillars would be: databases, applications, communications, and content. More on each of these pillars and process management in a future post. Time to go build. Bye for now!

Some of my friends have asked me what I plan to write about in my blog and others have cautioned me that my blog topic is very broad. Blogging is about finding a niche topic and writing about it. Technology driven marketing is a very broad topic and nowadays technology drives everything. True, true, true and true!

My answer to them at this time is that I’m trying to find my voice. Anyone who’s done a lot of writing will tell you that it takes a while to hone in on that kernel that you will love to write about and you can make your own. You can choose to write about something you love, or you can choose to write about something you are good at. And usually the two meet somewhere in the middle and blend to make your unique flavor.

I’m starting with a very broad topic because I love the macro level concept of technology and marketing coming together and I really cannot see marketing execution without some involvement of technology. Specifically, today internet technology has become the backbone of marketing. Perhaps in the near future I could focus on how mobile technology supports all of marketing if that comes to pass.

Beyond that I have several areas in marketing that I love or consider myself an expert like lead generation and analytics and I’m slowly coming up to speed with new media and social media marketing. Will I get more granular talking about interface design and architecture of web assets and how those help drive conversion? Most definitely. I will be focusing on all of these in my blog posts and along the way I will discover my voice.

Your writing voice is like a business model. Most startups go through a shifting business model till they find one that works and eventually sticks with their end users. At various stages of the business the model has to be adjusted according to market conditions, growing pains, etc. The same goes for writing or blogging. All you can do is keep at it till you find what works for yourself and sticks with your readers and adjust over time. And, it truly is as enjoyable as the thrill of the hunt!

I hope you all continue to keep me company on this journey of discovery.

The other day my four-month old son Vivek was wearing this cute outfit with 3 little figures running down the front. They were of a dog, a rabbit and a bear. Each of them had their choice meal at hand with a line underneath that respectively read: I like Bone, I like Carrot, and I like Fish. Now I’m really a dog person but when it comes to Vivek, I’m papa bear. So I decided that I like fish.

What struck me about that image was its reflection of the state of how consumers think of themselves today. Every person has their unique likes and preferences. I like webcasts but my friend Matt prefers to view PodCasts, I love my crackberry but my friend Kumar swears by his iPhone and so on! In fact people’s likes (and dislikes) are so specific, the latest research* is showing that marketers can double their leads by converting the same assets into multiple media types to feed this unique appetite. (* TechTarget ROI Summit 2008)

Us marketers have also adjusted accordingly by slicing and dicing our end user segments every which way and incorporating persuasion architecture and persona marketing to “convert” each of our archetypes. (The very simplest form of conversion meaning getting them to their destination of choice.) Along the way we can track implicit and explicit data points about these end users’ preferences that help us target them accordingly.

However, at the end of the day the effectiveness of our targeting is extremely dependent on the accuracy of these collected data points and our ability to get our end users to opt-in. Google Adwords and other search-based contextual advertising engines can at best target end users at the point of search. I would get relevant ads for “marketing automation platforms” only when I search for that or similar terms. Would it be useful for Google to know my likes and dislikes even before I start searching?

Perhaps but that’s not what a “generic” search engine is built to do. Imagine that 70% of my searches are related to marketing, would it not be more effective to serve up some semi-relevant contextual ads or show me my favorite searches before the fact? Of course this is a bogus scenario and Google does not require a login where they could tie my searches to my account. All I am doing is demonstrating that the effectiveness of search based contextual ad-serving is limited to the point of search or at best to relevancy and relevancy can still be pretty subjective.

I would like to interject here that Yahoo! did a smart thing by acquiring Del.icio.us. Daily I’m letting Yahoo! know explicitly the kinds of content I have an appetite for, i.e. whether I like bone or carrot or fish. I don’t use Yahoo! search or portal enough to notice that data being used effectively to target me. But at some level I.

Enter FaceBook, an opt-in community where members can explicitly highlight their likes, preferences and demographic information. And on top of that it is a monster of a viral marketing machine. I specifically wrote in my profile that I like the band Counting Crows, and I consistently see an ad for their new album when I login to my account. The relevancy of the targeting goes way beyond the point of search. Tomorrow if I update my musical tastes, I’ll no doubt get a sticky ad related to my explicit taste. And this is just from the end user’s perspective.

From the advertiser’s perspective, through the FaceBook engine they can in most cases with 100% accuracy ensure that they touch not only the relevant choice but also the most relevant demographic. That is the double whammy power of the FB engine. Amazon could be considered very similar in that it knows many of the kinds of the bones, carrots and fish that I am fond of and very effectively serves up that meal when I am on their site. However the viral aspect is mostly absent and honestly, I don’t mind. I actually prefer it that way.

Perhaps in the ecology of the web each of these engines have their own place in the food chain. I use Google to learn from scratch, FaceBook to learn and share with others and Amazon to buy anything I want. But at the end of the day the most efficient system is the one that knows what I like: Bone, Carrot or Fish and that’s where I see FaceBook as the most innovative marketing technology since Google AdWords.