Friday's Links: This Week...On Monday!

Most Fridays I compile a short sampling of links that have tickled my interest that week. With Thanksgiving and four glorious days of football watching, I regret that this post was delayed until today. With that said...


Can you really see who viewed your Facebook profile? Rogue application spreads virally. - no, no you can't install a program to see who viewed your Facebook profile. Its. A. Trap.

Google buys Groupon for $2.5 billion? - No one knows...but everyone is assuming...

10 Ways to Be a Better Manager - I find myself at bnet.com on a regular basis to read their how-to style business articles.


The Algorithm + the Crowd are Not Enough -just read this compelling post about the limits of the current model for web applications...and the return of the editor? Could it be? Read a sample here:

Why does a page rank first in Google for a particular query? Why does one link stay on Reddit’s homepage for hours while another, with a similar number of votes, fall off in just a few minutes? Why does Facebook show me ads for customer service jobs at Comcast? Why did Amazon recommend buying whole milk with this Badonkadonk Land Cruiser?
If we don’t understand why these suggestions were made, couldn’t that bias us against trusting future recommendations from these services?

Fred Wilson recently  made a compelling case that we shouldn’t invest in something we don’t understand:

…sectors of the venture capital market are filling up with investors chasing returns. And some of them do not understand what they are investing in. I got a call a few weeks ago from an individual investor who wanted to invest in one of our portfolio companies. He asked about the company and from his questions it was pretty clear he did not understand the business very well. He went ahead and made an offer to invest. That scared me.

I’ve been visited recently by a number of foreign investment vehicles, many of whom are investing billions of dollars of sovereign wealth. They all want to get into our funds and our deals. When I talk to them about why, they can’t really articulate a cogent argument about the economic potential of the social web. But they see the returns and want some of them too. That scares me.

I’d argue that some people will find it equally hard, and perhaps similarly foolish to trust suggestion/ranking services whose algorithms they can’t understand. These same people might turn to recommendation sources they can easily grasp and results they can logically dissemble.
My point isn’t that Google, Netflix, Amazon, Yelp or any of the others are doomed. But I do think there’s an opportunity brewing for entrepreneurs, websites and companies to add editorial components to the algo-crowd paradigm.

Chad Bockius, VP of Socialware, new on Straight to the Point

I'm very pleased I got the chance to interview Chad Bockius yesterday for my latest Straight to the Point podcast. Chad has a unique role utilizing social media to market and sell social middleware, a new product category. He is the VP of Marketing & Product Strategy at Socialware, which provides the industry’s first social middleware platform, allowing you to transform public social networking sites into enterprise-grade channels for communication and collaboration.

What did we cover?

• How do you integrate social media activities across a large organization
• How do I address issues like data security and workflow management when integrating socialmedia
• What are the trends in social media adoption over the next year or so

Listen to the show on BlogTalkRadio here.

or just click play...

Happy New Year!! Five Trends to Watch

I'm back in the office working my way through two weeks of emails and I find myself excited. It's 2010- a year that for folks my age conjures images of Roy Scheider on a spaceship heading for Jupiter. It is the future and, space travel aside, there are so many exciting trends happening this year. I hope to share my viewpoint and the opinions of some other thought leaders here on this blog over the next 12 months.

Here are a five things I find fascinating:

1. the integration of cloud computing, enterprise software and social networking to improve sales, marketing and PR business applications and create real, measurable value
2. the continuing impact of mobile computing on businesses and their customers
3. the economic recovery- will it be fast or sluggish
4. will traditional media evolve and save themselves or will they continue to diminish in influence
5. how will the mammoth health care reform bill impact the long delayed computerization and modernization of the healthcare industry

A lot of moving parts for one year! How will it all shake out? Stick around and we'll find out together...

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media but...

Last Monday was the last Webinar in the four part series on social media that I organized with the Software and Information Industry Association. The goal of the series was explore all the business applications that you can use social media for and show real world examples of how this was being done. We gathered a impressive line up of panelists to share their insight and best practices, including marketing executives from BurrellsLuce, Deloitte Services, Jigsaw and Vocus, among others.

If you are curious about how companies today are integrating social media into their overall marketing programs for applications like:

• Lead generation
• Enterprise sales support
• Competitive intelligence gathering
• Deal capture
• Distribution partner identification and cultivation
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Executive visibility and thought leadership
• Reputation management
• Employee recruitment
• Team, culture and morale building

...then I highly recommend that you listen to the discussions and check out the slides from the Webinars below.

Overview of Business Applications of Social Media (Audio | Slides)
Social media has already begun the transformation of how we interact, and has the potential to transform the way we do business. Understanding and effectively implementing a social media strategy can have a major impact on how businesses are perceived and how they interact with their customers. Nowhere is this more evident than the PR, marketing and sales departments. In this 90-minute webinar, you'll hear how social media tools can be used in lead generation, enterprise sales support, competitive intelligence management, employee recruitment, team culture & morale boosting, and branding & awareness

Moderator:
Karen Leavitt, CEO, Marketing Fusion

Panelists:
Angela Lauria, CMO, AppAssure
Gail Nelson, SVP, Marketing, BurrellesLuce
Jeff Majka, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group

Enterprise Sales Support - Using Social Media to Support the Enterprise B2B Sales Cycle (Audio | Slides)
With new service-based models and the rise of "freemium", the sales cycle is getting complicated -- and every advantage counts. Social media has the potential to connect these new models to the customers that want them, but how do you implement it? Where do you start? Hear how social media can transform the way you approach lead generation and sales cycle support.

Moderator:
Ian F. Strain-Seymour, Director of Product Strategy & Development, Apogee Search LLC

Panelists:
Steve Lunceford, Director, Public Sector Strategic Communications, Deloitte Services LLP
Adam Mertz, Product Marketing Manager, Jive Software
Jay Hallberg, Co-founder & VP of Marketing, Spiceworks

Using Social Media to Target the C-Suite and Close Deals (Audio | Slides)
Many of your customers are using social media to communicate with THEIR customers. How can you tap into their social media programs? The first step to closing the deal is to conduct a social media audit of your principal prospects. How can this be completed efficiently and comprehensively for a large number of prospects? How can you facilitate social media for deal capture?

Moderator:
Jeff Majka, Director Marketing & Business Development, Strategic Communications Group, Inc.

Panelists:
Steve Ressler, Founder, GovLoop
Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw

Social Media for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Other Traditional PR Activities (Audio | Slides)
Social media should be an integral part of your PR strategy, not just your sales function. To run a successful campaign Marketing, Sales and PR need to be integrated using today's popular social media tools. How can you effectively integrate your social media strategy across the enterprise?

Moderator:
Robert Carroll, VP Marketing, Clickability

Panelists:
Jeff Majka, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group
Kye Strance, Director of Product Management, Vocus
Richard Dym, CMO, OpSource, Inc.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish? Marketing in a Recession

It's conventional wisdom that Americans are moving to a more frugal, debt free society. It's called the "great de-leveraging". Both companies and individuals are fixing their balance sheets by cutting expenses and lowering debt levels. Everyone seems to be caught up in this movement, except, of course, for our dear friends in the federal government.

But I would caution those that would cut too far. History is replete with examples of companies that lost their competitive advantage during downturns by starving their product development and marketing budgets. Here is a great list of examples from Derek Naylor, of Mobile Self Storage Magazine,

• In April 1927, the Harvard Business Review found companies that advertised most during recessions had the biggest sales increases.
  
  
• Companies that had higher sales and net income during the recession of 1974 to 1975 didn’t touch ad budgets. What’s more, they also beat non-advertisers in the two years following the recession’s end.
  
  
• According to McGraw-Hill, companies that increased ad budgets during the 1981 recession trounced competitors not just during the downturn, but also for the subsequent three years.
  
  
• Kellogg’s® pushed their ads through the Great Depression; Post® didn’t. Guess who dominated the cereal market for the next 50 years. Can you say corn flakes?
  
  
• Stanley® Tools launched its biggest ad campaign during the 1974 recession. Their consumer product division took off. They grew at twice the rate of competitors every year thereafter.
  
  
• Chevy® drove car sales in 1975. Ford® scaled back by 14 percent, afraid of higher gasoline prices. Chevy picked up two percent of the auto market. It took Ford five years to regain the lost ground.
  
  
• In the recessions of 1949, 1954, 1958, and 1961, companies tracked for ad spending cutbacks saw sales and profits fall off. Those who kept ad budgets saw profits increase and kept an edge in the years that followed.
  
  
• Consumer spending has increased during every post-WWII recession, according to The American Association of Advertising Agencies. (OK, maybe this one won't hold water anymore...)
  
  
• When Coca-Cola® increased their worldwide marketing budget to $350 million in 2001, net income went up 22 percent.
  
  
• IBM® increased its ad budgets 17 percent last spring; sales are up 8.9 percent.
  
  
• In 1947, Buchen Advertising tracked the annual advertising expenditures for a large number of companies, correlating spending to sales trends before, during, or after the recessions of 1949 and 1954, as well as sales and profits trends surrounding the recessions of 1958 and 1961. It found that sales and profits dropped off almost without exception at companies that cut back on advertising, and these lags continued even after the recession ended.
  
  
• For the 1970 and 1974 to 1975 recessions, The American Business Press and Meldrum & Fewsmith showed that advertising aggressively during recessions not only increases sales but increases profits. Speaking of the 1970 recession, the study concluded, “Sales and profits can be maintained and increased in recession years and in the years immediately following by those who are willing to maintain an aggressive marketing posture, while others adopt the philosophy of cutting back on promotional efforts when sales appear to be harder to get.”
  
  Regarding the 1974 to 1975 recession, the study stated, “Companies that did not cut advertising expenditures during the recession experienced higher sales and net income during those two years and the two years following than those companies which cut in either or both recession years.”
  
  
• McGraw-Hill Research analyzed 468 industrial companies during the 1974 recession and 600 industrial companies in 16 different industries for the 1981 to 1982 recession. Findings showed that firms which increased or maintained their advertising spending averaged significantly higher sales growth, both during the recession and for the following three to five years than those who eliminated or decreased advertising. As the graph shows, sales of companies which maintained or increased advertising during the 1974 recession showed 132 percent sales growth by 1978, while those who cut advertising were ahead by 79 percent. During the 1981 recession, sales of companies that were strong recession advertisers had risen 275 percent, compared to an increase of 19 percent growth for those companies which decreased spending.
  
  
• In 1982, Cahners Publishing Company & The Strategic Planning Institute studied 2,000 businesses to explore the relationship between market share and profitability, and advertising’s impact on this relationship. As it pertains to our discussion of recessions, the study found that businesses which increased media spending by up to 28 percent had a 0.5 market share increase during periods of recession, and those that increased 28 to 80 percent increased market share by 1.5 share points. During expansion times, however, those that increased media spending up to 28 percent saw a 0.2 share increase, and those increasing 28 to 80 percent also had a 0.2 share increase.
  
  In other words, the study suggested that recessionary market conditions can provide an opportunity for a business to break from traditional budget cutting patterns and build a greater share of market through aggressive media advertising.

So what can happen if you cut the budget? Here is a list from the people at the Opposable Thumbs blog:

1. Your reputation can suffer
2. When times are tough people look for deals
3. If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward
4. Marketing in a recession can give you a competitive advantage
5. Cut advertising, cut market share

Now, there is a silver lining here. The phenomenal change in marketing in the last 3-4 years has been the rapid raise of social networks and the integration of social media into overall B2B marketing strategies. Low cost, easy to track, quick to pay for themselves- my firm has been developing executing social media pilot programs in a variety of industries in the middle of this great recession with positive ROI, expanded budgets and ecstatic marketing managers.

What does this mean? It means that you can invest in marketing w/o having to go to the CFO with a budget request that you know has no chance of getting approved.

What do you think? Are you integrating social media into your marketing programs?