It's no secret Microsoft launched it's latest version of the Windows operating system this week to the consumer market. There has been much debate about how long it took to get the product out and how many times the engineers had to start over. But I'm not going to talk about the product, I use it now and love it and I'll let the public determine what they think about it in the weeks and months to come. What I do want to mention is the amazing marketing campaign the Vista team created for launch. This is no small feat and I think probably most of us have no idea what goes into launching a product of this size. In fact there isn't another product on the planet that has the reach and influence Windows does on people's lives. That to me is fascinating. What's more interesting is that Microsoft doesn't spend nearly the amount of money people think we do on marketing a product like this. I don't know the actual dollar amount the Vista team spent but it's no where near what a car manufacturer or soft drink company would spend.  Another challenge unique to Vista is the product appeal must span B to B and B to C customers. The value proposition to a CEO is going to be much different from the value prop you would lead with to a working mom or grandma but all of them are a core audience. And the CEO is not only an enterprise customer but also a consumer customer. How do you not confuse him in the marketing messages being sent?

Seth Godin posted a dig on his blog yesterday about the on stage presense at the NY launch and I get where he is coming from. But in good conscious that portion the NY Times chose to show was just one tiny piece of the launch experience. Here are a few things that I think the Vista team did very well;

1. They involved the customer during product planning.  While Vista was in beta testing Microsoft worked with over 80 families from around the world to get feedback and recommendations on the product. Those recommendations made it into the final release and several of those families were featured at the launch event yesterday.

2. A little something for everyone. Vistas worked with Demetri Martin to build credibility with the influencial online community and they developed a website (clearification.com) that builds on that connection. There is no sell for Vista on the website or in Demetri Martin ad's. The strategy is to keep the message very low key for this particular audience that is ultra sensitive to marketing messages but at the same time draw an affiliation between Martin and Microsoft.

3. Something for the traditional Microsoft devs and bloggers. This is a core audience for Microsoft and while the launch has added elements that appeal to lots of different customer segments the techie is still where Microsoft gets it's love.  John Mullinax does a great job of explaining the Vanishing Point game.

4. Messenging driven from a local level. While a products positioning statement is global the messenging should be done on a regional level. An example of something cool the Microsoft Austria sub did was get the most popular Austrian newspaper to run their home page demonstrating Vista. Pretty imaginative!  

There are many more examples of the Vista launch in local markets. If you've seen any cool Vista marketing be sure and post a comment. I'd love to see it.

I did an interesting interview with Jon Udell yeserday. He has started a new podcast series called Microsoft Conversations (podcast feed here). The interview may appear as part of that series, but if it doesn't I'll be sure and post it on this blog. I'm working on a blogger strategy and to date I haven't seen a company really nail this. I originally contacted him because he brings an interesting perspective about blogging. He is new to Microsoft and comes from the influencial blogger community, the exact audience I want to target.  My main question for him was what does he think is the most effective way for marketers to use the blogosphere? How do bloggers want to be contacted and what is an appropriate way to get your message out to the blogosphere while still being respectful of that community. His advice was simple. Rather than sending press release type announcements and asking bloggers to post the news Jon suggested to first make sure someone is blogging the news on a company or personal blog. Once the news is posted on a blog it is acceptable to send an email to an influencial blogger that you may think is interested in your announcement. Send them ONE email with a link to the blog and a short description of why the blog would be interesting to them. Then leave it at that. You'll know through your blog tracking whether or not they click through the link and more importantly if they sign up for the RSS feed. The tricky part is to have the influencer network set up BEFORE you want to announce a new offering. That's what I'm working on right now, setting up an influencer network that would spread word of mouth to my targeted audience. By developing the relationships before you want something from them the influencers are able to see your offering and how it benefits them without hanging a bunch of marketing flare on the message.

It looks like marketers are getting smarter about leveraging the ridiculous amount of money they spend on super bowl ads. The New York Times reports a 30 second spot is going for a record $2.6 million this year. Advertisers are getting smarter this year and drawing consumers into the ads by providing contests to create the best ad, text messaging options to vote for your favorite ad, and rating the ads on corporate websites. Sound familiar? These are all techniques that drove Time magazine to name the User person of the year for 2006. Corporations are now putting the ads on their website and getting all the exposure they can out of them. TV is only one channel for media anymore and marketers are getting smarter about increasing their exposure through a more diverse marketing mix. Where a super bowl ad a few years ago played once for 30 seconds companies are now using that ad to generate momentum and a call to action to continue the campaign online. By expanding the reach of the ad a company is able to increase the ROI by factoring in press mentions, traffic to their site and word of mouth beyond Sunday afternoon. Smart. So whether you are spending $2.6 million on 30 seconds (and most of us aren't!) or running a campaign at a much lower price point the challenge is to find out all the ways you can leverage your investment. And thankful the online world is making that much easier.

There is a new report out by Forrester called Calculating the ROI of Blogging. Get your hands on it if you can. They did a really interesting study on the GM blog Fast Lane which started in January, 2005 and is authored by Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. The final analysis says that blogging had a ROI for GM of 99% in 2005, 61% in 2006 and they forecast for 2007 a most likely case of 65%. The decrease in ROI after year one was attributed to a decrease is buzz and press attention. In other words, it was cool in the beginning, but by year two it suffered from a bit of the 'been there done that' feel. The great news about this report is the conclusion that blogging can have a really strong ROI for business. I would be really happy with the 65% number on any given marketing effort, let alone achieve the 99%. They did a good job of factoring in the costs as well. They break costs into start up costs the first year and ongoing annual costs. Start up costs included employees set up time and executive salaries. Ongoing costs were identified as executive and employees time which they budgeted at one hour per blog post. The largest part of this cost was Bob Lutz's time, which accounted for 61%. Additional costs were fees for the blogging platform and service fees from a blog monitoring service, like Nielsen BuzzMetrics. On the benefits side they identified customer insight, blog visibility, press, and word of mouth, declining the press and word of mouth value over time.

Would love to hear if anyone else has done this kind of financial analysis on your companies blog.

Wow, maybe I'm a bit hipper than I thought I was. Just this morning I blogged about joining this new blogger community called MyBlogLog. Wouldn't you know Stephan Spencer just did a post on MyBlogLog too! He gives some great background on the site and how it works with communities. The guy that runs it sent a nice intro email when I registered which shows he's aware of good word of mouth marketing strategies – I did a post on Jan 19^th on Word of Mouth marketing.

I just signed up for an account on MyBlogLog under the name MartyTaylorCollins. I know, not so original. I always feel a strange pressure when I have to create a new user name. Should it be hip and cool, will people have a clue what I'm talking about? Sometimes people use their real name, other times it appears someone has simply strung a strange line of consonants together. And then there's the unknown of has someone already taken my name? Lots of places Marty is taken. Even Marty Collins is taken. So today I decided to use my full name. I typed it in then hit save and waited to see if the name was available. It was. So I went back to the users home page and all of the sudden noticed that most of the people on the site had funky names, not their real name. OOHH crud, this is one of the funky name sites! So I think, okay maybe I can go back and change my name to something hip and funky too so I don't look like such a dweeb. I go back to my profile page (which is very easy to find and use) and wouldn't you know the only box that is grayed out and can't be edited is the user name. I could cancel the whole profile and start over but that seems a bit extreme. So here I am, a member of the MyBlogLog community and I've got a boring user name. Will anyone even bother to click on my name? My pictures okay so I think maybe that will draw some folks in, if they haven't already passed judgment on the fact that I didn't pick a cool user name. Oh my goodness the pressure of living in an online community world.

One more observation I made while I was signing up for my account. On the profile page after the name, address, email, and phone number questions there is literally 25 other fields to fill out web community info. Now see this is what has kept me from joining lots of the web communities, how is the blazing am I ever going to remember all those account names and passwords! Are you kidding me? Here is the list. See how many you are a member of or have even heard of:

• Skype name
• AIM
• Yahoo IM
• MSN
• Google Talk
• ICQ
• Flickr user name
• LiveJournal user name
• MySpace Friend ID
• Upcoming.org profile URL
• Second Life name
• Digg ID
• Friendster email
• LinkedIn user name
• Plaxo email
• 30 Boxes public buddy page
• Google calendar ID
• Watchr ID
• Textamerica
• The DJ list
• Zorpia user name
• TypeKey ID
• Blogger profile ID
• Bebo user name
• Del.icio.us

   

I am a member of 5, and I've heard of 14. What does that say about my cool ratio? Probably moderate at best.

In 2007 online advertisers are beginning to recognize that users have distinct personalities that can be leveraged to the advertiser's advantage. Bebo has announced they will offer advertisement widgets for their users to post on their sites but the difference in these banner ads is the user gets to pick which companies they want to advertise. I love this. Users recognize that advertising needs to appear in order for the service to remain free (in many cases, including Microsoft Spaces you can upgrade your service for a fee and have no ads on your space) and by letting the user pick the ad they want to appear on their space it increases relevancy for the user and their reader. Plus it increases the relevance for the advertisers. Think about it, take my blog for example. The people that read my blog and see the advertising on my space are most likely going to have similar interests to me, and if I get to pick my advertising I am defacto picking an ad more relevant for the advertiser. Maybe I love my car and am happy to spread the word so I chose an ad from my car makers company, on the other hand maybe I have had nothing but problems with my car and it's a real lemon. It would annoy me to no end to see ads for that car popping up on my blog for everyone to see. This keeps advertisers honest by ensuring there are customers who will want to advertise for them; and that's a win win.

We (Microsoft) continue to learn our lesson in transparency. Here is an article that reports Microsoft paid a writer to enter a submission in Wikipedia. If you read the article all the way through it does reveal that there was no malicious intent on Microsoft's part and it's common practice for Microsoft to hire technical writers to write whitepapers. But the lesson here is in community site etiquette. There are no bi-lines like in traditional articles; in every case error on the side of too much disclosure. Go to as much trouble as you can to be completely transparent with your actions. It's like eating your vegetables, eat as many as you can as often as you can and if you consume more than you need well, then it's just extra gravy! It can't hurt you.

The article outlines what Microsoft should have done and I think it's a great lesson for any company

Here's an interesting story. There's a music sharing site in Canada called Zunior.com. They have been in business since 2004. It seems some folks think Zunior.com may have some trademark issues with Zune, Microsoft's MP3 player. This is one of those situations where a company has a decision to make. Do they take the opportunity to embrace a community and build great buzz alongside that community OR do they stay true to traditional business legal wrangling and try and protect the brand by suing or something corporate like that? To be clear, no one is insinuating that Microsoft has any plans to get Zunior.com to change their name. But this is a great example of an opportunity to let the community enhance the brand. Much has been written about how marketing has moved from a push (tell them who you are, what your brand means) to a pull (consumers decided what they want to see and how they will use it). Zunior.com has presented Zune with a great opportunity to network and build word of mouth through an established community. What if Zune featured an artist from Zunior.com once a month on their music sharing site. Or maybe they offer to distribute all Zunior.com music through Zune.net. Or there is featured content on Zune.net from the best music sharing sites on the web and they start by featuring Zunior.com. The possibilities are endless, but this is the golden opportunity that marketers should be looking for to build word of mouth and brand awareness with their audience. What better fit for Zune that Zunior.com!

Christopher Carfi published a very interesting Social Consumer Manifesto that I think would apply to this scenario – particularly the last bullet. It reads;

• I want to have a say.
• I don't want to do business with idiots.
• I want to know when something is wrong, and what you're going to do to fix it.
• I want to help shape things that I'll find useful.
• I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.
• I don't want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)
• I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don't care if it's the end of your quarter.
• I want to know your selling process.
• I want to tell you when you're screwing up. Conversely, I'm happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.
• I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
• I want to know what's next. We're in partnership…where should we go?

Don't ask your customers to choose between traditional 'hit you over the head' marketing and community driven, peer recommended viral marketing. I'll guarantee you what will win.

I had someone on Friday ask me what was the difference was between Evangelism and Marketing. To give you some context, I work in the Evangelism group at Microsoft. I'm a marketer within that group. The group is mostly made up of technologists whose mission it is to evangelize Microsoft's platform to the world. We don't directly drive sales or share or margin, product teams do that. But we are given the ultra important goal of making our customers happy. Our bottom line is customer satisfaction, that's what our group is measured against. So while we are still in the business of selling software and at the end of the day that's what keeps the lights on and our paychecks coming, it's a wonderful thing to know I succeed when my customers are happy (and happy enough to tell someone about it) NOT when they have bought something.

But back to the difference between evangelism and marketing. According to Wikipedia Evangelism is "used in a non-religious sense to describe an individual who takes up a cause and convinces others to it." The American Marketing Association defines marketing as "an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders". A pretty good definition I think. So if in fact that truly is what marketing does "managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization" than I would argue that evangelism is indeed a form of marketing. We (my evangelism org) manage customer relationships that will benefit the organization (MSFT), the difference I think lies in the timetable and the metrics. Evangelism is a long term commitment to your customer; it won't move your bottom line this fiscal year. Evangelism is about setting up a network of people that will become influencers on your behalf and eventually bring benefit back to the organization. Offering great service to customers in hopes they will tell others. Does your organization do this? Are you thinking about building a network of influencers? My hair dresser has made an evangelist out of me. She serves complementary wine in the evenings, she guarantees her cuts and always lets me come back for free to get anything fixed that I don't like. She has great customer service and consequently I've referred her to at least three other people. Marketing will draw people in, evangelism will make believes out of them and drive them to spread the word. And trust me, you want that!

I've got a give a shout out to the latest book I'm reading which is really GOOD. It's called Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz. Let me tell you why I think it's great. I read quite a few books, and these days a lot of them are on marketing. What many marketing books fail to do is give clear, actionable plans for the reader. I finish books and say "yah, but what am I supposed to DO about it?" This book delivers. It's a quick read (you can finish it on a plane ride) which makes it all the better. He doesn't spend time filling pages with a lot of blah, blah. He cites case studies and provides next steps all along the way. If you read nothing else check out the Manifesto . After you read this you will never run another banner ad again!

Let me know what you think. I'd like to hear.

Welcome to my first blog post. I'm pretty excited to get some of the marketing speak that swims around in my head out in the open. I read lots of blogs and have a great deal of respect for people who share their experiences and knowledge with the masses. I thought it might be time for me to start giving back a bit.

I just finished the book World Wide Web Marketing by Jim Sterne. The book was okay, mostly targeted to people with little to no background in online marketing which wasn’t an ideal fit for me. But I did gleam a few tidbits from it so I consider it time well spent. One point the book makes that I think often falls short in marketing campaigns is follow through of your message across tactics. How many times have you seen a URL in a magazine or tv ad only to go to the website advertised and not be able to find the thing in the ad that drew you there in the first place? That makes the customer experience less than ideal to say the least. It can make the customer feel as if they have been baited in from the ad only to be dropped into never-never land without a clue how to get what they were originally drawn to. To my surprise I had this happen to me just today from a company that was marketing a marketing webinar of all things!

There was an ad on a newsletter I subscribe to called MarketingProfs that was advertising a free webinar. It sounded pretty interesting and let’s face it, it’s free! So I clicked on the link and signed up for the seminar. The thank you page told me I would be getting an email to confirm the details of the webinar. Makes sense. So I wait for the email and to my surprise two emails show up. Unfortunately I read them in order of most recent so the one I opened first was from a company called Perseus, which I had never heard of. It was from what I can only assume to be a sales rep. The introductory line says “Marty – here is some of the information you had requested. Please feel free to look over the website for more information.” Then it went on from there with more sales speak. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what this person was talking about or why this company is telling me I requested information. Then I read my next email that is in fact the confirmation email for the webinar I signed up for. I recognize the companies to be the same and realize that by signing up for the webinar my contact information had been given to the company running the webinar and they contacted me directly to sell their services. This definitely felt like the switcheroo on me. I was baited in by signing up for a free webinar and now I’m getting spam that says I requested info. Is this really the type of experience a marketing campaign wants a customer to have? Since the webinar is about marketing and I had just had a ‘not so good’ customer experience signing up for their webinar I had to ask myself, ‘do I want to take marketing advice from someone that thinks spam is an acceptable form of marketing??’

Why are people not thinking through the WHOLE customer experience? Not just the banner ad, or the thank you page, or even the confirmation email; the whole experience from beginning to end.  Here is one customer that is less than satisfied and telling people about it. Need I say more?