October 18, 2009
John Kottcamp
Uncategorized
#ForresterResearch, agency2.0, B2B marketing, CMO, Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, digital agency, Facebook, Groundswell, Integrated Digital Experience, integrated marketing, Integrated Marketing Communications, Interactive Marketing, LinkedIn, marketing2.0, Peter Burris, SDMA, social media, social networking, Twitter, web2.0
I had the opportunity to speak to the Forrester Research Technology Marketing Executive Council recently in conjunction with the Technology Forum in Chicago. The central theme of my talk was simply stated, as marketers, we need to start integrating social media into the rest of your marketing strategy and programs and stop treating Social Media as some magical new quasi religion.
I do not mean that there are not unique attributes of each of the various new channels, media and technologies that comprise social media; blogs, social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter that we must examine, learn how to use and take advantage of in creating dynamic and meaningful experiences for consumers and businesses alike.
What I do mean is that instead of starting off with the attitude of “I’ve got to get me some of that Social Media stuff,” and invariably jumping right into figuring out which technology you need to buy, install and staff up to support, marketers needs to go back to their overall marketing strategies and figure out how each of the facets of social media can be leveraged to support their strategies, not drive them.
At this Forrester Research event, I had the privilege of delivering my talk on the heels of a presentation by Peter Burris, a research director at Forrester and a really smart and articulate guy. Peter’s theme was based on his recently released piece, Turning Your B2B Web Site Into A Community Hub. His premise, which I completely agree with, is that you need to start looking at how you integrate social media into your corporate Web presence. It is also related to the presentation I did at the Integrated Marketing Communications conference in Kansas City (see my post entitled, It’s time to look beyond Websites and start looking at an Integrated Digital Experience).
I won’t go through my entire presentation here, I’ve uploaded it at SlideShare and I encourage you to take a look. http://www.slideshare.net/jkottcamp/marketing-and-social-media-tmec-oct09
August 26, 2009
John Kottcamp
community marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, SDMA, social media, social networking, User-generated content, Web 2.0
agency2.0, Alaska Airlines, Ascentium, comcast, Customer Experience, digital agency, Groundswell, Huffington Post, integrated marketing, marketing technology, marketing2.0, Metrics, PCC Natural Markets, rei, ROI, SDMA, social media, Social Media Club, social networking, The Seattle Times, web2.0
There was a full article in the Seattle Times this morning about social media. It’s amazing that a major media outlet either just discovered social media as a topic or there wasn’t enough new news to fill the dwindling number of printed pages. But let’s not get on the subject of newspapers and why most journalists seem to be more afraid of social media than taking steps to become the leaders of it.
What I want to talk about is not newspapers and not about what social media is, isn’t or what its good for. I don’t know and I’m supposedly an expert on the subject for my agency Ascentium. What I do know is that I don’t want to see, hear, blog, tweet or otherwise spew about the definition of social media and how it’s going to change the world, or at least our way of thinking about the world. Been there, done that.
It’s time to focus on the reality, not the potential of social media. Look at what Twitter is being used for politically around the globe. See how the Huffington Post has already redefined journalism. And as marketers, let’s start talking about the work we’re at our companies or for our clients. Let’s see what is working and what isn’t. And let’s define success, not at the nebulous level of “building brand awareness” or “increasing reach”. Let’s apply real metrics to determine the ROI of a very broad array of activities, campaigns and applications that we lump under the category of social media.
As president of the SDMA, we created an editorial calendar of the coming year’s series of monthly events. The kickoff event, to be held on 09/09/09 at the Bellevue Hyatt was listed in our working calendar as social media. From there, we went about selecting a speaker(s). It was easy to find some really smart people who could pontificate on social media. In fact, last week the Seattle Social Media Club had a great presentation on “What the f**k is Social Media?”
But we’ve tried to set the bar higher. Our moderator, Blake Cahill, of Visible Technologies, a social media expert in his own right, reached out to his considerable network and looked for marketers who were actually using various social media techniques and asked them for examples of what is and isn’t working in the very real world of corporate marketing.
The result is a great panel representing brands including Alaska Airlines, Comcast, REI and PCC Natural Markets who are willing and able to talk about what they have learned about social media.
So if you’re interested in going beyond the hype and seeing what social media can really do when applied by top marketers, come join us on Sept. 9, 2009 at 5:30p at the Bellevue Hyatt for the kick off event of the season of the SDMA.
August 21, 2009
John Kottcamp
Ascentium, SDMA
CRM, Closed Loop Marketing, Interactive Marketing, integrated marketing, Customer Experience, branded entertainment, marketing technology, Marketing Automation, Customer Relationship Management, Metrics, ROI, digital agency, microsoft, social media, marketing2.0, ecommerce, agency2.0, analytics, social networking, Groundswell, B2B marketing, SDMA, Ascentium
In addition to my role at Ascentium, I have been privileged to be elected president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, SDMA, and as we kick off our new 2009-2010 season of events I’d like to welcome back all our members, colleagues, friends and everyone that has an interest in the marketing profession.
We’re in the home stretch of summer. Our sub-baked brains are shifting from vacation to back to school, from playing hooky on a sunny Friday afternoon to getting the next proposal out the door. In other words, the fun’s over. But wait a second! Just because it’s no long 103 degrees outside, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to. The SDMA is here and it’s time to kick off another great season of speakers, events, networking and the continuation of our exploration into the art and science of modern marketing.
Last year we debuted a new tagline for the SDMA, “thinking outside the mailbox” in recognition that direct marketing has evolved into integrated marketing. We’ve taken the expertise direct marketers have gained in the areas of targeting, segmentation, analytics and ROI and are applying it to email, online advertising, search and social media. We’re extending brands across multiple new channels like mobile, branded content and the Web. And all while remembering that traditional media and direct still make up the lion’s share of marketing budgets and are evolving just as much as the new media is coming on the scene.
This season, the SDMA is going to mix things up a bit. In response to our success last year in Bellevue, we’re going to host some events on the East side and some in Seattle. We’re going to experiment with different formats including thought leader interviews, competitor panels and bring you real-life case studies showing how companies are using new ideas as well as re-inventing established methods to produce tangible and measureable results for their businesses. For this year’s calendar, visit www.sdma.org/events
In addition to our monthly events, we are partnering with the PSAMA and the Social Media Club to produce the region’s premier marketing conference, MarketMix 2010, to be held on March 10, 2010, at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. Mark your calendars today.
If you haven’t checked us out in awhile, visit our website at www.sdma.org, our groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, or even better, join us for our season’s kick-off on Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 5:30-8:00p at The Bellevue Hyatt for our evening event, “Transforming your Marketing and Customer Relationships with Social Media – Real Tweets from Real Practioneers at Leading Northwest Firms,” with panelists from Alaska Airlines, REI, PCC and Comcast. To register, visit, www.sdma.org/events .
Looking forward to seeing you and having your participation in another great year for the SDMA and for the marketing profession in the Pacific Northwest.
On behalf of the entire SDMA board,
John P. Kottcamp, President
August 20, 2009
John Kottcamp
community marketing, Customer Engagment, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social media, social networking, Uncategorized, User-generated content, Web 2.0
agency2.0, Ascentium, Customer Experience, Digg, Facebook, integrated marketing, LinkedIn, marketing2.0, Myspace, social media, social networking, Twitter, User-generated content, web2.0
I just looked at a very good short video making the case for the importance of Social Media in today’s world. it’s done ala the Shift Happens videos of a couple of years ago and you have to dig into the blog to find the sources of the some of the statements, not all of which appear to be as documented as I’d like to see. However it still is a good way to spend 4 minutes of your day and puts social media into a context most people haven’t grasped yet. check it out at http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/
August 19, 2009
John Kottcamp
Ascentium, CMO, Interactive Agency, Marketing Strategy, microsoft
#ForresterResearch, agency2.0, Ascentium, avenuea/razorfish, Customer Relationship Management, digital agency, integrated marketing, marketing2.0, microsoft, Razorfish, web2.0
I was just reading Harley Manning’s post on the acquisition of Razorfish by Publicis. It’s a good read, check it out. I posted the following comment on Harley’s blog, but thought it appropriate to repreat it here.
While I fully agree with Harley that Razorfish was always an afterthought at Microsoft and never made sense as a strategic fit, I’m not sure I buy the idea that selling to Publicis is either good for Razorfish or good for its customers.
I don’t believe the fact that Digitas and Razorfish are different types of digital agencies matters nearly as much as that Publicis and Digital agencies in general, have continued to be almost like oil and water. The problem is not simply possessing enough creative juices, Publicis certainly has plenty, and it’s not just having the technical skills that Digitas brings to the table.
The problem is that the cultures and ultimately the business models of traditional advertising agencies and digital agencies continue to be fundamentally different. And as long as that difference exists, mergers of mega agencies will falter.
Now, if Digitas and Razorfish were to be combined and then spun off, there would be an incredible powerhouse. But in fact, there are already some agencies, including Sapient, and my own agency, Ascentium, that have been building up this balance between great creative and deep technology expertise for several years. So in that context, a merger between Digitas and Razorfish wouldn’t produce a new kind of agency, simply the biggest one of its kind.
But it doesn’t sound like it’s a merger between Digitas and Razorfish, it sounds like another attempt on the part of Publicis to integrate a digital agency into a traditional advertising world. And I predict the outcome will be no better than what we’ve already seen with Digitas. As a marketer, it’s a waste of great talent. As a competitor, it’s great news. Big isn’t always better.
July 25, 2009
John Kottcamp
Strategy, integrated marketing, CMO, Marketing Strategy, Closed Loop Marketing, customer lifetime value, Customer Engagment, Ascentium
CRM, Closed Loop Marketing, Interactive Marketing, integrated marketing, Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, ROI, Customer Lifecycle, marketing2.0, agency2.0, web2.0, analytics, CMO, B2B marketing, Ascentium, Market research, loyalty, Net Promoter Score, Web analytics, zoomerang, surveymonkey
I was thinking about loyalty the other day. I had just sat through a company presentation where we talked about the almost 2 years of experience we have with Net Promoter Score. In the same meeting we also talked about our new Web site and how we were going to start capturing visitor data via our Web analytics tools and then incorporate that data into our CRM system. And at the end of the meeting, the topic even began to cover the piloting of capturing social media data and putting that it into CRM. Wow, that’s a lot of data. But what’s the connection between loyalty and data.
In the past, I’ve written about two distinct ways that connect data and loyalty. First, by applying what I call Closed Loop Marketing, a company can create endless loops of communication between consumers and companies. By opting in, a company can track a Web site visitor’s behavior, match with data captured from offline interactions like events, retail transactions or customer service. Then if intelligence is applied to understand the needs and wants of the customer, a company can reach back out to the customer to advance to dialogue, drive incremental transactions or take care of service incidents, closing the communication loop and advancing the relationship and by extension increasing loyalty.
In other contexts, I’ve made arguments about how companies can begin to use a mix of behavioral data captured online, demographics from CRM systems and transactional data from line of business systems to enable predictive analytics that will optimize response rates, close rates and ROI in general.
But today I had an epiphany. The missing piece has been the role of market research. Traditionally we think of market research as focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research and endless cross-tabs slicing and dicing every possible sort of data. And more recently, market research has been turned upside down with the advent of online surveys like Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey. But what is still in its infancy is the pairing of market research analytic expertise with social media influence monitoring.
So what does it all mean? For over a decade we’ve been hearing about the 360° view of the customer. And this has for the most part meant getting more individual data about a customer to be able to sell them more. But what it lacks, besides the fact that virtually no one has achieved it, is that we need to stop talking about data and start talking about intelligence. Capturing transactional data from online and offline is valuable, but only if someone is looking at that data and gaining insight from it.
CRM is primarily a tool of sales people and sales people do not have the time, the background or the motivation to analyze data and turn it into insight. Campaign or brand managers are only interested in their slice of the customer and aren’t really the best choice to be the customer’s advocate.
My choice is to call upon the market researchers. Their skills lend themselves to be good listeners and good ones have the ability to synthesize and extract patterns, critical keys to gaining true understanding of behavior.
So to all of those fellow travelers in the market research space who are seeing their budgets being stripped, there traditional approaches being usurped by self-service tools online and are wondering where their next career move will take them. Start looking at yourselves as the customer advocate and make sure everything you are doing advances your understanding of customer behavior and that you are able to translate that for your businesses or your clients. That will be where you add the most value and this is the key to loyalty.
June 9, 2009
John Kottcamp
User-generated content, Marketing, Web 2.0, web marketing, Strategy, integrated marketing, community marketing, social networking, social media, microsoft, aQuantive, Interactive Agency, Marketing Strategy, Closed Loop Marketing, customer lifetime value, Customer Engagment, ecommerce, Ascentium
#ForresterResearch, agency2.0, Arc Worldwide, Ascentium, B2B marketing, Blast Radius, Cisco, CMO, Critical Mass, CRM, Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, Dell, digital agency, ecommerce, IBM Interactive, IconNicholson, iCrossing, imc2, integrated marketing, Interactive Marketing, marketing technology, marketing2.0, Metrics, microsoft, Molecular, OgilvyInteractive, Organic, R/GA, Random House, Razorfish, Resource Interactive, Rosetta, Sapient, SDMA, social media, T-Mobile, VML, web2.0, Whittmanhart
On Friday, Forrester Research published its Forrester Wave™, Interactive Marketing Agencies – Web Design Capabilities, Q2, 2009. Ascentium was covered for the first time along with other top digital agencies including Sapient, imc2, Razorfish, IconNicholson, IBM Interactive, Organic, Blast Radius, iCrossing, OgilvyInteractive, Resource Interactive, and Rosetta, Critical Mass, Molecular, R/GA, VML, Whittmanhart and Arc Worldwide.
In addition to just being favorably reviewed among such a great group an agencies, we take pride in that Ascentium scored the highest out of all the agencies in the category or customer satisfaction. We credit that in large part to emphasis we have given to growing customer loyalty and constantly measuring it with tools like Net Promoter Scores.
When I joined Ascentium almost four years ago, we were primarily a technology consulting firm with strong Web development skills and some good design talent, but we hadn’t yet made the commitment to become a true full service digital agency. But we got together as a team and agreed that the future was in leveraging technology to advance marketing and to move from advertising to engagement.
Three years and a roster of blue chip clients like Microsoft T-Mobile, Dell, Cisco and Random House, later. We have garnered the attention of the likes of Forrester Research and have grown from a local Seattle-based firm to an agency with offices across the country and internationally as well.
It’s been a privilege to be a part of this journey and to have helped nurture it along the way. It wasn’t always easy teaching technologists and marketers to not only get along, but to actually work synergistically, to create a new model for what Forrester has called, the agency of the future.
So congratulations to all the other agencies featured in the Wave, thanks to all the analysts at Forrester who have seen value in what we’ve created and well done to each and every employee I have the privilege of working with at Ascentium. Just wait for what we have in store for you next.
March 24, 2009
John Kottcamp
Uncategorized
Closed Loop Marketing, integrated marketing, Customer Experience, marketing technology, Marketing Automation, Metrics, ROI, digital agency, marketing2.0, agency2.0, web2.0, B2B marketing, Forrester Research, Ascentium, IBM, Digital Consumer
I just read a very good report prepared by the IBM Institute for Business Value entitled, “Beyond Advertising, Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer.” While the article itself doesn’t contain and new thinking, that I haven’t heard discussed across many of my peer networks and among the analyst community like Forrester Research, what does stand out is that IBM, a technology and business consulting company demonstrates it understands what most agencies and marketing services companies still fail to grasp. What it tells me is that instead of worrying about other agencies, especially the large traditional holding company ad agencies, my real competition is going to become more and more the big consulting firms who see the challenges of marketers for what they really are, business issues, that affect the very core of how a company operates and what will make it successful in the future.
The only solace I can have is the fact that while the big consulting firms can do a good job of identifying the problems, they are not equipped to actually produce integrated brands, marketing programs and technological infrastructure necessary to achieve the solutions they will recommend. That still leaves an open field to companies like Ascentium and Sapient and a handful of others. But we had better not slow down the innovation we bring to our clients, or Big Blue will be pushing us out the door.
February 7, 2009
John Kottcamp
aQuantive, Ascentium, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft
agency2.0, Ascentium, avenuea/razorfish, Crispin Proter and Bugusky, digital agency, down economy, integrated marketing, layoffs, marketing2.0, microsoft, Razorfish
I just read a few minutes ago that Razorfish, one of the top digital agencies, and one my company, Ascentium’s, chief competitors, announced layoffs of 70 people. This is hours after I heard about Crispin, Porter, & Bugusky, one of the brightest shining stars in the advertising agency world, and a partner of Ascentium, announced layoffs of 60 people this morning. Both companies are considered at the top of the industry. Both excel at creative ideas, well-executed and yet both are taking pretty big hits on the same day. And personally, I know people at both companies from our work together at Microsoft. So what does this mean?
The deep answer is I don’t know yet, but it will make me take a look in the mirror and make sure I’m doing everything at my company so that we don’t suffer the same fate. However the more immediate answer is that this sends a clear signal about the progression of this economic downturn. When good companies make cuts, it’s a sure sign that even in the new digital world of marketing, most of the fat must already be gone, because the industry is cutting into the muscle.
My heart goes out to everyone at these two organizations who is out of a job. They say it’s not personal, it’s just business, but having personally been on both sides of the axe. It’s a lot more personal if you’re the one without a job. Good luck to everyone and let’s hope for the change sooner rather than later.
July 26, 2008
John Kottcamp
User-generated content, Marketing, Web 2.0, web marketing, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, CMO, Marketing Strategy, Closed Loop Marketing, Customer Engagment
digital agency, agency2.0, web2.0
What is Agency2.0? Several of us at Ascentium have been working on the definition of for some time and it is at the heart of how we define ourselves in the future. Last year Peter Kim (who is also presenting with you at MCONN08) at Forrester Research put out a paper entitled, Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency, in which he posited that as corporate marketing organizations reinvent themselves and become customer centric, they will need more and more help from their agencies, not just in traditional ways, but increasing as trusted advisors helping clients “capitalize on emerging channels and technologies.”
This spring he followed up that paper with another good piece called, “The Connected Agency”, where he argued that agencies now need to help their clients listen to customers rather than just shout at them. Peter and I were at a forum together in Toronto in May and spoke about the new role agencies can play helping clients engage with clients, which means multi-directional rather than either the traditional one-way push advertising of most of the last half-century or the bi-directional construct embodied in the 1:1 marketing movement of the last decade.
While I’m not holding up Forrester as the be all and end all in marketing thought leadership, I agree with Peter’s basic tenets that the new style of agency has to be a resource that enables companies to engage. And that engagement is defined by the customer experiences that are generated, managed, monitored and acknowledged by the client. And that it is up to the agency to be a creator of those experiences.
For the agency to be able to create those experiences, they have to be able to bring to bear not only the traditional skills of brand, strategy, research, account planning and creative, but now they need to be able to excel at analytics, technology and business intelligence. This new combination of skills is what defines agency2.0, or at least how we should define it so as to own the space.
Once you’ve defined the space in that way, the agency engagement model you describe of black-box delivery and risk- sharing make sense. I don’t think most marketers are ever very concerned about the internal organization of their agencies as long as they have clear lines of communication and a single throat to choke.
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