Marketing Lessons from a Bad Panel

Ouch. I am at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston and the panel on content management systems (CMS) got lynched by the audience via the #ims11 twitter stream. Comments included “the panel is boring”,  “If the Tweet stream was like the Gong Show, we’d be on to the next session by now.” and “the cms panel killing themselves on stage.” They missed the mark with a fuzzy, technology-centric discussion.

In their defense the CMS panel followed a couple of great keynote presentations but I can’t help but wonder what they could have done differently. I am on a panel this afternoon at 3:15pm so the thinking is more than theoretical!

#1 Pay Attention

You don’t need fancy semantic analysis tools to realize the audience was letting out a collective yawn. Unfortunately, none of the panelists were checking the twitter stream so they couldn’t adjust their message. I don’t care if it looks a bit silly, but I’ll be taking my laptop up on stage this afternoon.

The same should apply to your business. It is NOT that hard to keep an eye on some critical keywords on Twitter, Google Plus, etc. A critical comment here or there is no big deal, but a torrent of them probably means you are doing something wrong.

#2 Know Your Audience

The attendees at IMS11 appear to be primarily marketers, not technologists. Most of them are using low end CMS such as WordPress and Drupal. They aren’t familiar with why a company would implement an expensive CMS let alone why one system is better than the next guy’s. Marketers love words like ‘brand’, ‘impact’, ‘differentiation’, ‘reach’, ‘audience’… they don’t love words like ‘personalization’, ‘services’, or ‘scalability’.

Ironically, the CMS panelists talked a lot about using tools to know your audience. What they missed was a very simple look around the room. The most important question they were failing to answer was, “What Is In It For Me?” for 90%+ of the audience.

#3 Remember Why You Are in Business

Congratulations, you have a job at a CMS company because you understand web technology. And, congratulations, you are on stage because you are slightly less scary and generally more passionate than the other technologists in your company. But DON’T make the mistake of directing your passion to your own product.

Passion should be directed towards what your customers are passionate about. In this case, the audience cares about creative, inspirational marketing! Awesome content! More leads! Remind them why THEY get up in the morning, not why you do.

Wish me luck this afternoon.

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Portals, Content & Collaboration Software Goes Social

Today I am at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in Orlando.

I am currently sitting in on a BEA presentation regarding the next generation of enterprise portals. To quote: “popular consumer-based Web technologies will transform enterprise IT.” They are announcing a product called Builder that is a wiki-like product for building situational applications. Kind of like what I have heard described as an “appliki” with components that can be connected to databases/spreadsheets/web service/etc. Looks kind of cool.

However, they are by no means unique in their positioning. Virtually every analyst, presenter and vendor are talking heavily about Web 2.0 and social software for the enterprise. All of the big vendors appear to be weaving social software features into their overall pitch. They are calling it the “consumerization of the enterprise”. I guess that is why we are hearing cool new brand names like Quickr, Graffiti, Runner and so on.

Given the emphasis on these topics I would not be surprised that next year Gartner might rename the conference to the Social Software Summit. May be they will even give it a cool glassy-style logo?

Another observation is that multiple presenters have talked of “rouge user applications such as blogs, wikis and SharePoint”. The contention between emergent usage of social software in teams and the desire to control/manage social software infrastructure at the enterprise level is quite clear. I have described this top-down, bottoms-up contention before… it’s a natural thing that goes in cycles.

Cox Communications are up discussing exactly this situation where they had dozens of separate intranets that they consolidated onto a single portal. They still let departments/locations manage the content applications, but they wanted to provide a common managed infrastructure.

An interesting factoid is that there appears to be very few new solution providers pushing these ideas here. Social software capabilities are being positioned as +1 features to existing platforms from SAP, IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Vignette, etc. I suspect that this has got more to do with the chosen route-to-markets and average selling price of start-ups in this space (web marketing, affordable) vs. these existing players (face-to-face sales, expensive).

One last quote from the presenter: “we know self-service content creation and categorization is not as easy as it could be.” Well… it is good Ephox has a mission!

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