Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Social Communications event May 12 (Partner Plug)

I mentioned this once before and this is the final promo. This blog is a media sponsor for the upcoming event below; you can read my policy for media sponsorship here.

One change since last time: I’ll be a roundtable lead at this event. Hope to see you there.

For more information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code MSS for a discounted rate of $95.

Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Time: 8:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Location: The Graduate Center / CUNY; 365 Fifth Avenue; New York, NY 10016
Registration Fee: $145
Website: http://www.bdionline.com/socialcomm.html

About the Event
When social media emerged, many thought it was a fad or simply a communication technology for young people. It's now clear that social media will continue to make a significant impact on how consumers and organizations communicate and operate.  This event will showcase the best examples and case studies from leading organizations including B2C and B2B global 1000 and emerging growth companies as well as non profit, educational, and government entities.

We will cover the following questions:
- Why real-time social media tools such as Twitter are gaining momentum and what's the business case to use them?
- How is the customer service function merging with social media and social networking?
- How do you sell social communications projects and prove ROI to senior management?
- How do you create and participate in communities to achieve communications and branding objectives?
- How do you plan and execute a social communications plan with little or no budget?
- How do you create effective partnerships with new media leaders beyond advertising?
- What are the best examples of how to use social communications to connect internally with employees and stakeholders?
- What are the tools, technologies, and best practices for monitoring and measuring social communications?
- How will the social communications landscape change over the next 6 months, 1 year, 2 years?
- What is the business model of social media?  Who benefits financially?

Case Studies

Coca-Cola Conversations - Connecting an Iconic Brand to its Fans
Presented by: Philip Mooney, Director, Heritage Communications, The Coca-Cola Company
Phil, Coca-Cola's historian/archivist will share his experiences and lessons learned from creating and managing Coca-Cola Conversations, the official blog of The Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola Conversations is a dialogue between the brand and its many fans and consumers. It covers a variety of topics, ranging from Coca-Cola's role in pop culture to brand history to Coke collectibles. Recently the blog has been the mechanism for interactive contests such as "Write Your Own Caption- Thirst Knows No Season"

The MTV Case Study: How MTV engages its viewers for innovation.
Presented by: Diane Hessan, President and CEO, Communispace Corporation
Diane Hessan, president and CEO, will interview Allison O'Keefe Wright, VP Consumer Insight MTV, to share MTV's experiences working with dynamic consumer communities and how real-time feedback from engaged viewers is helping to reshape the way MTV develops new programs.

Tyson: Tweeting & Feeding With Social Media
Presented by: Ed Nicholson, Director of Community and Public Relations, Tyson Foods, Inc.
Ed will share his experiences and lessons learned regarding how Tyson uses social media tools such as Twitter and their Hunger Relief Blog to execute their corporate social responsibility initiatives and build community around a good cause.

Boston College Collaborates With Wikis & Other Social Media
Presented by: Gerald C. Kane, Ph.D., Assistant Director of Information Systems, Carroll School of Management, Boston College
Professor Kane will discuss how BC's Carroll School of Management uses a wiki and other social media to increase communication between faculty and students, as well as collaboration between students. Professor Kane will also share how his students apply similar approaches in current and future private sector employment.

FUJIFILM's ZSPOTNOW - Building Community & Buzz Around Digital Cameras
Presented by: Adam Yates, Group Director, Corporate Communications, FUJIFILM Holdings America Corporation
Adam will share his knowledge about ZSPOTNOW, an online social network for music and digital film enthusiasts. ZSPOTNOW promotes photo sharing and networking through online and offline live concerts in Miami, NYC and Los Angeles. It is a viral platform which has resulted in the achievement of several marketing, sales and communications objectives.

Creating New Revenue Opportunities With Social Media
Presented by: Robin Fray Carey, CEO & Co-Founder, Social Media Today LLC
Robin will share how Social Media Today has collaborated with corporations like Oracle on programs such as TheCustomerCollective.com, an editorial independent social networking platform that achieves measurable demand-generation objectives.

Roundtable Moderators
David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
Robin Fray Carey, CEO & Co-Founder, Social Media Today LLC
Matt DeLoca, Senior Vice President, Sales & Marketing, The FeedRoom
Sandra Fathi, President, Affect Strategies Inc.
Todd Grossman, Vice President of Sales and Client Services, MultiVu
John Havens, Director of Partnership Marketing & Integration, BlogTalkRadio
Peter Himler, Founder and Principal, Flatiron Communications LLC
Bob Huseby, Senior Vice President, Publisher, Wikia, Inc.
Gerald Kane, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Carroll School of Management, Boston College
Stanislas Magniant, Vice President, Linkfluence inc.
Kate Miltner, Social Media Manager, Flightpath
Philip Mooney, Director, Heritage Communications, The Coca-Cola Company
Ed Nicholson, Director of Corporate Community and Public Relations, Tyson Foods, Inc.
Joan Sahlgren, Vice President, Communications, First Book
Julie Wittes Schlack, Senior Vice President, Innovation and Design, Communispace Corporation
Doug Simon, President and CEO, D S Simon Productions Inc
Lloyd Trufelman, President, Trylon SMR
Adam Yates, Group Director, Corporate Communications, FUJIFILM Holdings America Corporation
Sponsors
PR Newswire / MultiVu; Communispace.com; D S Simon Productions, Inc.; Flightpath; The FeedRoom;  BlogTalkRadio; LatinVision; Marketer's Studio; Mashable.com; New York Enterprise Report; New York University; PR News; Publicity Club of New York; Reputation Garage; Social Media Today LLC; Word of Mouth Marketing Association

We have a very limited amount of sponsorship/speaking opportunities available. For more information please contact Steve Etzler at [email protected] or 212-765-8045.

For more information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code MSS for a discounted rate of $95.

What Do AARP and the 4As Have in Common?

Image by Civil Rights via Flickr

Answer: both of them ditched their official names for their acronyms.

AAAA

Ad Age, April 2009:

President-CEO Nancy Hill told attendees that the group, for years known as the American Association of Advertising Agencies, has officially traded its name for its more commonly used acronym, the 4A's.

AARP

The New York Times, August 1999:

The American Association of Retired Persons is no longer the American Association of Retired Persons. It is AARP, and Horace B. Deets, its executive director, insists that, ''It is no longer an acronym.''

What’s next? The American Automobile Association? The American Anthropological Association? Share your predictions in the comments.

Technorati Tags: aarp,aaaas,acronyms,branding,marketing,associations

Cluetrain 10 Years Later: Conversation over Corporate Sites

It’s been ten years since the birth of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a book I’ve kept on my desk for most of that span. I’ve joined the CluetrainPlus10 project where 95 bloggers are riffing on the 95 theses from Cluetrain.

I’ve got #90:

Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.

The trade shows line goes without saying. I’ll avoid discussing TV sitcoms, as few conversations I have are as entertaining as the hour of The Office and 30 Rock. The last part is where it gets interesting.

Corporate web sites, and sites of all flavors, are increasingly social. It’s coming from a number of angles. Paltalk and Meebo make it easy to chat while perusing and consuming other content. KickApps and Vitrue are among the many technologies that provide social applications that can be incorporated into other sites. Review applications like Bazaarvoice bring conversations to product pages. Ning lets anyone create a social network from scratch.

Then we’re seeing it go a step further where third-party login platforms from Facebook, Google, and now Twitter make it easy for any publisher to create a community around their content, not by creating a community from scratch but by allowing people to naturally take their networks with them. One of my favorite such iterations of this is Glue from AdaptiveBlue turns various kinds of pages, such as for books and movies, into communal discussions. It will also recognize, for instance, a movie page on IMDB as referring to the same as the movie on Netflix or Rotten Tomatoes, so the conversation travels across all of them.

And then there’s Skittles. This is what first came to mind when I saw the Cluetrain thesis. I wrote a bit about “Why Skittles Killed Its Web Site” in March, and this point stands out as especially relevant:

Here's the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

Ultimately, that’s the moral of Cluetrain too. The conversations are more important than the marketingspeak, those controlled one-way blasts. There’s still a place for all that, as millions and millions of consumers want to interact with brands in social channels. But these social channels are where people interact with each other first, and brands, if they learn how, can participate.

Technorati Tags: cluetrainplus10,cluetrain

What Search And Social Media Have In Common

Here's my first Social Media Insider in MediaPost.

What Search And Social Media Have In Common

Is social media the new search?

Pardon the clichéd phrasing, but it's a question I've been hearing a lot lately, and one I am at least somewhat qualified to answer. Last Tuesday, I penned my final and 224th Search Insider column for MediaPost, dating back to mid-2004. For most of that time, I've been with digital marketing agency 360i, where I've worked with marketers from major brands on their social media strategy.

Newsweek runs a feature in the front of the magazine (yes, the paper thing) where it takes two events that are often compared with each other and then analyzes why the comparison works and why it doesn't. The theme is fitting for looking at social media today and comparing it to how search emerged as a viable marketing channel early in the decade.

Why the Comparison Works

According to the Interactive Bureau, in 2001, search accounted for just 4% of the $7.2 billion in Internet advertising revenues. Forrester notes that in 2008, social media accounted for nearly 2%  of online's $23.1 billion.

Why It Doesn't

Looking at the year after is telling. In 2002, search shot up to 15% of online ad spending. Forrester forecasts strong growth for social media in 2009, but it will still account for less than 3% of the total, and in 2014 it will be less than 6%.

Why It Does

Fairly quickly, the search competition matured into a two-horse race between Google and Yahoo, with Microsoft joining a bit later. Currently in social media, MySpace maintains a lead over Facebook for now over Facebook in U.S. users and revenue. As Facebook surpasses MySpace in U.S. users and then revenues, this two-horse race could gain a third entrant if Twitter continues its growth trajectory -- and then gets a revenue stream.

Why It Doesn't

By 2002, it was clear that Google had a business model that was scalable, even if few could predict just how much it would scale. Yahoo wound up acquiring Overture, formerly called GoTo, which established the basic model that Google later adapted. No one knows exactly what the most successful marketing models for social media will be.

Why It Does

Google gained its early traction during the decade's low point for online advertising, as the company defied the doldrums of the dot-com bust and 9/11 attacks. We're in another downturn and social media usage is going through the roof.

Why It Doesn't

If there is any cause and effect related to recessions, it works better for search, where the downturn led marketers to consider more accountable direct response media. Social media is generally best suited to branding.

Why It Does

Search engines quickly established the distinction between paid and natural results. In other words, there are the listings you pay for and the listings you work for (plus some will appear organically). Similarly, social media is now often classified as paid media -- a buy of any kind from banner ads to virtual gifts, and earned media -- the exposure and interactions received by working for it through tactics like blog outreach and video syndication (plus some will happen organically).

Why It Doesn't

Search engine queries tend to fall under one of three buckets: navigational, informational, or commercial. Microsoft's adCenter Labs has a tool that predicts whether a query or Web site is informational or commercial. For instance, the query "new car" is listed as "commercial intention" with 92% probability, while "Detroit Lions" is listed as "non-commercial intention" with 94% probability. With search, there is a high probability of commercial intent for a vast number of queries.

Now try imagining how that works with social media. What do you think the commercial intent is of someone logging into Facebook, watching a YouTube video, or checking Twitter updates? There are still opportunities to reach these consumers and build relationships, but getting a direct sale is a relative layup in search compared to social media's three-point shot with Shaq and LeBron double-teaming you.

So social media isn't the new search, but the most engaging, fastest-growing online activities all have major social components, and the growth rates are so stratospheric that marketers and consumers alike are still trying to make sense of it all. Let's enjoy the process.

And on that note, I'm enjoying joining the original Social Media Insider Cathy Taylor and contributing to this community. I do hope to keep it social, so feel free to share your thoughts via email, in the comments on Twitter, on my blog, and elsewhere. Perhaps we can meet in person too, such as at the OMMA Social New York event June 23. The first way you can participate is by voting on the agenda -- but do it now, since voting ends tomorrow.

Roundup of Coverage of Forrester Marketing Forum 2009

Last week I was in Orlando covering Forrester’s Marketing Forum. Below are links to some coverage on this blog and others. If you posted any coverage or saw some elsewhere, please share it in the comments and I’ll add it to the master list.

 

Why is this web strategist smiling?
Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Marketing Forum 2009

On this blog:

Day 1: April 23

• Introductory remarks from Christine Overby
• Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk on Managing Risk and Innovating (my favorite session)
• 7-Eleven VP Marketing Rita Bargerhuff
• Forrester Marketing Forecast: 2008 to 2014
• Harte-Hanks and PetSmart (some fun pet stats)
• JetBlue’s Marty St. George (and the CEO’s Guide to Jetting)
• AT&T Chief Marketing Officer David Christopher
• David Card breakout on Social Media Innovation in Tough Times
• Coca-Cola, MTV Networks, Canoe Ventures panel covering the Future of Media (favorite panel)

Day 2: April 24

• Forrester’s Peter Burris on B2B Innovation
• Microsoft’s Craig Dewar on Engagement through Community
• Wharton Professor David J. Reibstein on Ubiquitous Marketing
• Starbucks and Blast Radius on Building Brands for the Social Age
• comScore’s Gian Fulgoni on Online Advertising Effectiveness

Forrester Blogs:

• Forum Insights: Take Risks, Solve Customer Problems
• Marketing Forum Theme Day 2: Engaging the Innovative Customer

Around the web:

• Jeremiah Owyang covers The Future of Media
• 360i’s Blog on How to Take Manageable Risks
• 360i’s Blog on Owned Media

Multimedia:

• Forrester Marketing Forum on Flickr from Forrester’s official account
• My Flickr roundup (see my slideshow below)

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Technorati Tags: fmf09,forrester marketing forum,forrester research

Blast Radius and Starbucks on Building Brands for the Social Age at Forrester Marketing Forum

Sarah Dickinson, Strategy Director, Blast Radius
Alexandra Wheeler, Director, Digital Strategy, Starbucks

From Ideals to Ideas

Navigating New Channels: Building Your Brand for the Social Age

Context: Starbucks (RED): For every beverage purchased, $0.05 went to global fund

Things used to be simpler (yes, hearing that a lot here).

“If Twitter carries on at the same pace it will reach 100 million users by the end of the year.”

1. Objectives for Starbucks RED:

• Drive trial and purchase of Starbucks RED beverages over holidays
• Build awareness, traffic, participation online
• Get positive sentiment

Media landscape

• Bought – paid media online and offline
• Owned – websites, SEO, retail
• Earned – social media, commentary, SEO
•  

 

2. Customer Needs/Values

Studied by

• Observation
• Social media monitoring
• VOC surveys
• In-home interiews
• Media planning tools
• Technographic tools

3. Where is their customer? Why do they do what they do?

4. Where is their brand?

Start with what worked in traditional sense. Then incorporate what they’ve learned.

- Personality, Values, Promise, Benefits, Attributes

Brand ideal: Doing something good every day – in Starbucks DNA, but must be easy.

Spectrum: CADENCE: frequent/infrequent, FORMALITY: informal/formal

 

Results

Technorati Tags: Forrester Marketing Forum 09,FMF09,forrester

Led to most viral event on Facebook.

1.4 million days of medicine in first two weeks.

3.7 million days of medicine by March.

50% increase in Facebook fans.

Over 2 million branded searches.

#1 video of the day on YouTube

Over a million virtual drinks given

100s of thousands of visits to site

 

 

Technorati Tags: FMF09,Forrester Marketing Forum 09,Starbucks,Blast Radius,paid media,earned media

Wharton Professor David J. Reibstein on Ubiquitous Marketing at Forrester Marketing Forum

Professor David J. Reibstein, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

 

Ubiquitous Marketing in a Fragmented Age

The environment is changing around us… war, the economy, global warming, globalization… lots of turmoil.

Are we considering the implications of the global financial crisis and recession?

Moving toward a new marketing paradigm: Reverse Marketing. It’s not us telling them, it’s them telling us.

Foundations:

• The changing consumer dynamics: Customization, Communities, Channels, Competitive Value, Choice.

 

• The centrality of the consumer: Who are customers and what are their evolving needs? What product/service offerings will meet target segments’ needs and offer competitive advantage?
• The choices are immense, getting more and more complex. But because of better tracking we can demonstrate better value

.

 

• Changing content: Top 25 mobile apps on iPod Touch/iPhone: 12 games, 4 entertainment, 3 social networking, 2 music, 1 travel, 1 utility, 1 lifestyle, 1 news (comScore April 7, 2009)
• Proliferation of social media: Blogs, video, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, the portals (Google, Yahoo, Windows Live)

Innovative examples of Reverse Marketing

• General Ray Odierno – in charge of Iraq, changed face of how we manage a war. He has Facebook page. Went on CNN – got 10x increase in friends from that. How wild – being a friend of this general. He wanted to hear from people, get a real connection and find out what people needed to know.
• The YouTube Presidency – Obama has done “wonderful job” of listening, taking in questions of what people care about. “You tell me what it is you want to know.”
• Ford Fiesta: Fiesta Movement – 100 cars, gave to ‘agents’ – they get em for 6 months, drive em, take pictures, say whatever you want about them, put the pictures up on Flickr, communicate to people
• Nike+: started blogs, not taking control
• Dell Ideastorm
• P&G – welcoming next game-changing innovation online – Connect + Develop
• Doritos: Crash the Super Bowl

Question: What are YOU doing to engage your target stakeholders as co-creators, co-producers, and co-marketers of your products and services? Are you giving up control? Can you more?

Is your marketing plan consistent with the new model of reverse marketing?

Budgeting in a Down Economy

* Marketing budgets are challenged during these times

* Easy to cut

- Fungible

- Built stock

- Hard to spend without evidence it provides value

He cited a quote from another conference speaker: “Now is the time to be investing in your brand.” He followed up asking when’s NOT the time to invest in the brand?

Opposing forces:

• Best time to cut: Generates cash, stock, fungible
• Best time to invest: rates are low, more relative impact, less noise

Wired Magazine: in 2000 had 231 pages. 2002: had 113 pages. Readership almost the same between the two. Cost was fairly comparable. Which had greatest impact, an ad in which issue?

Impact of spending during a recession depends on competitive spending

 

Summary

• New environment calls for new practices
• Best time to invest or opportune time to withdraw from the woodpile
• Measurement is key to maximizing return on marketing investment

Find more from David at MarketingNPV

Technorati Tags: fmf09,forrester marketing forum,david reibstein,reverse marketing

Gian Fulgoni of comScore on Online Advertising Effectiveness – Forrester Marketing Forum

Gian Fulgoni, Chairman, comScore'

 

- The right metrics are critical

- It’s not just about direct response

- Need to measure offline as well as online behavior

- Post-buy measurement of delivery of media plan

“A lot of good changes occur in the toughest times because it causes you to question what you’re doing.”

Online advertising: $20+ billion in the US - $23.4B in 2008, 8%. 20% to direct mail, 12% newspapers, 23% TV (distribution, cable, broadcast combined), 6% radio, 5% Yellow Pages. Total: $296.8 billion.

“If anyone thinks the Internet is going to replace TV… In 08 the total amount of time spent watching television in the US grew by 4%. That growth alone was greater than the total amount of time spent watching online video.”

In Q4: search was 47% of online ad spending. Display ads totaled 33% including banner (21%), rich media (7%), video (3%), sponsorships (1%). Q1 08 display grew 27%, Q4 display SHRANK 4.3%. Banners, Video went up, rich media, sponsorships down in that 4.3% drop. “Advertisers are shifting from the more expensive display formats to the less expensive display formats.”

 

 

 

Cookie Deletion

Measured Yahoo and DoubleClick cookies

- 30% of Internet users delete their cookies in a month – corroborated by Belden, Jupiter, Nielsen

- These deleters do so an average of 4 times a month – user can be counted as 5 unique visitors

- Rate of people deleting hasn’t grown, but people who do delete do so more often

Massive decline in display ad click-through rates

• July 07 study: 32% of people clicked a display ad, 68% didn’t click
• Concentration of clickers – Top 6% of clickers account for 50% of all clicks
• Recommendation: only use clicks to evaluate direct response ad campaigns, or search
• Clicks don’t reflect campaign’s sales impact, or brand building

Search Study

• 25% buyer conversion from search
• 92% of buying that occurred was offline – that’s what needs to be measured
• If you’re just measuring direct impact of a click, you’re likely understating the ROI by factor of 6X

Post-Buy Analysis Summary

• 8% hit target with >5 frequency
• 61% in US but not target
• 19: Frequency <4
• 12% Outside US

Big value proposition not yet taken advantage of: big global brands have yet to run global campaigns through one buy. Internet’s the only medium to reach the world.

Holistic Impact of Online Ad Campaigns

- 200+ studies by comScore assessing impact of paid search and online ads on online, offline sales

- Display ads don’t just increase site visiting: trademark searches continue to see lift over four weeks after exposure to an ad

- For making a purchase (retail only): search and display exposure combined: 173% lift

- Incremental impact on retailers’ offline sales per 000 exposed: search + display = 119%, search only = 82%, display only = 16%

- Higher reach of display ads often helps lift sales more than search – reach of display 10x what you get with search

- 82% of online campaigns comScore has measured have generated average lift of 18% in CPG sales in retail stores

- Short term retail CPG brand sales lift from online advertising matches long-term TV impact

Check List

- Cookie deleting is reality

- Display ad click-through rates are minimal

- What must be measured:

• post-buy of media plan
• immediate/latent effects
• search display ad campaigns
• online/offline behavioral impact

Discovery

• Even with no clicks or minimal clicks, online display can generate substantial lift in site visitation, trademark search queries, lift in online/offline sales
• Higher online sales lift found for search ads vs. display, but when combined synergy provides even more lift
• ONline ad offers lower cost, better targeting, interactivity, sales impact

 

Technorati Tags: comscore,gian fulgoni,research,stats,statistics,fmf09,forrester marketing forum 09,forrester research

Microsoft’s Craig Dewar on Engagement through Community at Forrester Marketing Forum

Craig Dewar is passionate, but he didn’t come off as the angry Kiwi that he looks like here

Presenter: Craig Dewar, who heads up community marketing for Microsoft Business Solutions

One to one engagement is key.

Microsoft community examples:

Xbox Live; Entered gaming market in 2000. Sony had shipped 20 million PlayStations. Xbox Live was built in from day one, and it drove the success of the product. 60 million units of all Xbox consoles, 17 million users on Live, 1.5 million users online. Community was key business strategy.

Channel 9: Developers are lifeblood of Microsoft. Developers were getting irked around 2000. Created a community and dialogue. Transparency, dialogue matter.

Microsoft Dynamics Community: community.dynamics.com – ERP, CRM software. 10000 people attended event. MSFT sells through partners so no direct relationship with end user of product. Wanted direct engagement. Knew end users cared about: Learning, Networking, Support, Feedback.

Lessons learned:

• Even if you build it, they may not come. You have to have the right value proposition. Awareness is issue. Discoverability is key.
• Critical mass is hard and will take longer than you think. 6 months after launching, less than 2,000 registered users. Not enough people to sustain dialogue. 1-10% of people will create/contribute to content. 10-15% will comment. The rest won’t do more than read it. 2,000 users wasn’t critical mass. Dewar spent an hour every day answering users’ questions. Motto: “no question will be unanswered”.

:Lessons applied:

• Reach: Built Community Connection directly into the product.
• Relevance: Making sure businesspeople think of them as a place to ask questions
• Referral: build something in to make it easy for others to participate

 

 

Technorati Tags: fmf09,forrester marketing forum,b2b marketing,craig dewar

Peter Burris on B2B Innovation at Forrester Marketing Forum

 

Peter Burris, Principal Analyst, Research Director, Forrester Research

“Innovation is a social act… It’s something that we do together. It’s the process, ultimately, of inspiring people to change.”

“Tweetamus ergo sumus”

 

B@B tech buyers double # of content creators compared to US consumers.

 

 

 

IBM: adding social media across spectrum got 10% registration uplift, saved $100K, big bump in lead capture and conversion rates

 

PLOT:

Persona: Develop customer needs through social interactions

Location

Option

Test

 

Recommendation:

• Position marketing as a resource that B2B customers can use to drive better business outcomes

Question: Who’s best to lead building communities?

Peter: Marketing has to accept a new role. Cites example where marketer at Serena took over customer service, and then engineering. That made a product possible.

Q: How do you ensure authenticity?

Peter: Don’t get caught up in paying bloggers. What info do your customers need to be successful? All of your customers encounter problems. If you want to remain authentic, provide value to your customers that truly helps them solve their problems.

Technorati Tags: forrester marketing forum,fmf09,peter burris,forrester,b2b marketing