I didn’t intend to experiment to find out how my “market” likes to engage. But what I did was, on a small scale, the kind of experiment in which marketers engage every day: Put something out into a market or segment and see how people respond. Do the same thing (at the same time) to comparable but different versions of the same “thing” (offer, message, whatever) in different but comparable markets or segments and you’ll end up with a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

Marketers do this all the time. And, I hope, as a result they improve how they talk to their market.

Marketers (and, I’ve noticed, many companies) are not as good at the kind of experimentation that creates change. It’s really not that different. Experiment with things you have not yet tried. Try a new medium for communication - outbound, inbound or (preferably) two-way. Try a few all at once. See if any work. Maybe try a structure to a program, or create something in your market that’s never been created before. It might not work, but it might, and even if it doesn’t, you’ve learned something about having the conversation with your market that your current structure would never have allowed you to learn.

Using simple methods, like piloting, controlled experiments, and allowing the emergence of what works and what doesn’t, this type of experimentation can be successful in almost every organization. And when you learn what works, and then work to improve it, you create the kind of marketing innovation that puts you ahead of your competition.

Why does this matter? I will refrain from beating the now-tired drum of “the market is changing” (which really means your buyer is changing) - we all know it’s true, and will continue to be. If you’re trying the same things over and over again (even if you are improving them every time), you will become irrelevant.

Why does it matter now? In the past year, I’ve seen several companies start to see their marketing effectiveness eroding, only because they won’t (or don’t know how to) try something new. And I don’t know if I believe the doom-and-gloom economic forecasts, but I do believe that the market will become more challenging in 2008 than it was in 2007.

So the question is: are you going to keep doing what made you successful last year, and let someone else find a new way to beat you? or are you going to experiment with new ideas and find the new way to beat them?

But over the past year, I’ve begun to see something of a disconnect between the resolutions we’ve made in our work as marketers and the challenges we face as marketers.

In my conversations with marketing leaders, mostly in the business-to-business world, I’ve heard lists of resolutions that include: getting better at measuring campaign results, using the latest technology to run campaigns or to reach prospects, doing a better job of generating quality leads for the sales team, building award-winning branding and advertising, quantifying the results of our new-media efforts, and creating a “green” effort for our brand. There are many more, but the ones that fell into these categories were the most popular.

But then I look at the same conversations and I read the marketing press (and lots of other well-respected blogs that are too numerous to link here) and I conclude that marketing leaders, executives in particular are facing some key challenges: short marketing executive tenure (particularly CMOs), marketing needs more of a seat at the leadership/strategy table, the value of marketing is not well-recognized or accepted (with some even calling for the elimination of the marketing executive role completely).

Does better measurement mean that the value of marketing can be demonstrated better. Well, yes and no. I’d argue that it can demonstrate the value of marketing programs and campaigns. But does measuring lead quantity, lead quality, relationship value, conversational metrics, and all the other traditional and new media metrics we put in place show how the CMO contributes to the overall strategy of the organization?

I’ve seen only one measurement in an organization that demonstrates that anyone (or everyone) is making a valuable contribution: revenue. But I am left asking this question: does measuring the revenue result of marketing programs place a value on the CMO’s contribution?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Yet. But I look at another key executive, the CFO as a point of comparison. Why? Like the CMO, the CFO has measurement responsibility, fiduciary responsibility (for financial position as opposed to brand and market position), and no direct responsibility for revenue creation. What can we learn from the fact that the CFO has such a strong strategic role in nearly every company?

And here’s where we get back to that new year’s resolution thing. My one resolution for this year, as it relates to improving my effectiveness as a marketing leader, is to be able to make new year’s resolutions next year that are consistent with the challenges I face and help me move my effectiveness and my contribution to my company forward.

This means I have to understand the key question I’ve raised here: What underlies the apparent disconnect between marketing leadership and the expectations of corporate leadership? It seems that whatever this disconnect is, is the underlying cause of short CMO tenure, perceived lack of a strategic role “at the table” for marketing, and so many of the other issues I’ve seen raised in the past year (or two, or three, or ten).

And as with so much of what we learn, this will be a conversation. I know I’ll be having this conversation with many people in this field, and I’ll issue my usual and truly sincere invitation to you to participate. I still believe the larger the crowd the better the wisdom.

And as with any resolution, if I want to accomplish it this year, I have to be well on my way by the time we’re three-quarters of the way through the year. So I’ve picked a date that’s meaningful to me (no, it’s not my birthday) by which I hope to have moved much closer to some conclusions and answers.

Care to engage in the conversation?

Why? I have circles - more than one. People who find me to be a worthwhile business contact gather around me in that context and form my community of business associates. People who find me interesting as a friend gather around me and form my social community (as is social life). Some people are in both. There are more circles than that, some very closely related, some not, some entirely within others (my friends from school is a subset of all my friends). If I tried to draw it, it might look something like an unbalanced spirograph.

Marketing perspective 1: Your market looks just like this. Your customers, your prospective customers, people who might one day be customers all create the community which gathers around you (because they find what you are saying and the experience you offer interesting - but that’s a whole conversation in itself - look for more posts soon). But they have different reasons. Some like the lifestyle implications of being your customer, some like the way you care for them (I hope), and there are so many more. Knowing what these are, and what they can become means you can understand the kinds of experiences you must offer to engage the various communities.

Marketing perspective 2: In each of these circles - the communities in which you survive as a producer of experiences (note: not “business,” not “goods and services”) some of the community members are very close to you (maybe your most loyal customers) and some are on the edge, maybe moving in and out of your community as it suits them. Knowing who is where and why is critical to knowing your market, and being able to engage them in conversation and deliver a relevant engaging experience.

Reading the unbalanced spirograph that is your community, knowing its shape, knowing its distribution means being able to serve it well.

Knowing how it might change means being able to change with it.

Being able to create new circles (where neither you nor your competitors are delivering relevant experiences today) means being able to create disruption.

What does your spirograph look like?

Bloggers! Here Comes Navel Gaze Sunday
A trend: sometime every Saturday afternoon Eastern Time (now), tech bloggers run low on real news, and a story about bloggers themselves gets an unnecessary amount of airtime. On Sunday, it rises to a rabble before dying down as the Monday news starts coming in - call it Navel Gaze Sunday if you like

No, there’s nothing really disruptive about this at all. But it does lead me to ask whether bloggers (in general) are creating communities around themselves, or are the collective “they” just one community?

If you choose to start or use a blog to promote yourself, your company, your book or whatever ideas you want to put out into the market, while you are working to make it less promotional and more a part of the so-called blogosphere, you also have to remember that it needs to appeal to YOUR community, and not the community of bloggers.

You tell me: By talking about bloggers talking about bloggers on my blog on Sunday, have I participated in the tradition I just tried to warn against? Would it have been possible not to?

I found this on FaceBook, it’s an application called FriendWheel. You are at the center of the circle (this is a sample by the author of the application) with all of your friends around you. The lines represent the connections among your friends. If you were in high-school, it might show the potential for people gossiping about you.

But, a market? YES!

Your market - the collection of people (businesses - or actually the people in them) who buy from you, who want to buy from you, who have bought from you and might again (or might not) - is not a straight-line list (though that’s how we often think of our customers and prospects - as just a list). Your market is the group of people who have gathered around your company and your products because they find you interesting and engaging (the same reason your friends hang around you). And you (your company and all the people in it) are at the center of that crowd.

But the conversation is not just bi-directional (you’re doing pretty well if you are truly having a bi-directional conversation). There are conversations happening in all directions around you. Most don’t include you, but if they are happening around you, they are, more than likely, about you.

Your brand (the total experience and impression of you in the collective minds of the market) is being defined in these conversations. So look carefully at those lines that connect the members of your market community to one another. They show you how closely your market participants are connected, and how they are connected. They’ll help you understand where the conversation is taking place and how you can get closer to it.

Why? Because the conversation that defines your brand - and your success - is happening. And when your market is about to be disrupted, it is in these conversations that you’ll learn about it. Are you listening?

And lest we be reminded of this one too many times (and I hope I’m not sounding jingoistic here), it was 231 years ago that a small group of very smart people had a very different and disruptive idea. They gathered a community around them and created something never seen before - a democratic (system of government, not party) nation.

For much of what we call the “western” world, this is now commonplace. But it’s always possible, for better or worse, that somewhere in the world disruptive political change might be happening again today (it’s happened a few times since 1776).

But I’ll offer my admiration to those who dared to think differently and stake their lives on it (among them one of my most admired people). And I’ll remember that the ability and imperative to create change never ends, and applies to all of our institutions and every part of our lives.

Yesterday, AC Transit (a bus company that serves Contra Costa and Alameda Counties east of San Francisco) announced some significant changes to their schedule. Among these were such unusual routes as a “senior citizen route” which (according to the news report I heard) stops at shopping malls, hospitals and nursing homes.

But the most interesting idea is the “Flex Bus.” This bus picks up riders at one of three locations in the city of Newark, and takes them to any (yes, any) bus stop they want anywhere in the city. According to an AC Transit spokesperson:

If you’re the only one on the bus when you board, the bus will drive off and take you straight to whereever you want to go with no stops.

I’m reasonably sure that this whole idea violates all of the traditional notions of efficiency in public transit. I’m also reasonable sure there was lots of opposition to the plan.

All of that because it’s innovative. It’s an attempt to bring a level of service and convenience to the community (riders, customers) that has never even been conceived in public transit. It gives everyone a whole new experience on the bus.

I don’t know nearly enough about public transit to tell if this might work. But I give AC Transit lots of credit for trying.

We in the tech industry love to experiment with new products, services and technologies to deliver better experiences to our customers. This reminds us that anyone, anywhere and in any business (agency, organization) can be just as innovative and can deliver just as unique a customer experience.

How innovative is your customer experience?

Last week, I had two experiences which stood in stark contrast, and reinforced this.

First the good news:

I was invited to join a (relatively) new business-focused social networking service called Visible Path. In order to vet members to some degree, the service requires that your e-mail be a valid, non-spammer, domain (maybe more than that, I don’t fully know their criteria). So when I went to sign up, the site challenged me. The way it was stated caused me to interpret the requirement as the site admin’s desire to make an arbitrary judgment about my worthiness to join. This did not go over well, and I chose to, rather than join, fire off a rather scalding e-mail to the first contact person I could find on their web site. Within 2-3 minutes, I had a response back from Kathleen Bruno, who asked me to call her directly.

I did. She asked me what had cause me to think this, and how they could improve the process. We talked about this for nearly 30 minutes, discussing everything from word usage to my ideas for how to make the sequence friendlier and more transparent (there’s that word again!). She even told me who else in the company would also hear about my feedback.

This conversation turned my experience of Visible Path from one of a company who is clueless about networking (as an exclusive club?) to one that wants to engage users and make a valuable place to connect with others.

The initial experience was not good (I don’t think it’s completely my privacy fanatacism, either). But the response was outstanding. Here’s a company that “gets it.” They seem to care about the experience. They seem to care about making my experience useful, friendly and productive.

I’ve since completed the sign-up process and will be testing this very interesting new social-networking-for-business service to see if all of the cool stuff they offer really helps me (I’ll keep you posted!) (and, I’m not yet a raving fan of the service, but I am a raving fan of Kathleen!)

And now the bad news:

I spent this past weekend in Deerfield, IL. I stayed at the Embassy Suites (it was the designated hotel for the function). For those of you who know the Embassy Suites, you know they offer a reasonable breakfast buffet. Fortunately, this buffet included some hot food, like eggs and pancakes. Unfortunately, it also included cooked-to-order omeletes. Why is that unfortunate? In order to get any hot food at all, you have to wait in the omelet line. And on the weekend, the hotel is not populated with speed-focused businesspeople, but rather throngs of tourists, all clamoring for as much free food as possible (and ordering 4, 5 or more items). The line when I arrived was 45 minutes long. I didn’t wait.

I did, however, run into the manager as I left the line. I suggested that maybe the scrambled eggs could be placed in a chafing dish outside the line - not as fresh, but far more efficient. I made one or two other suggestions as well in my desire to be helpful and point out the error of their ways.

His response? He told me why my suggestions were bad ideas. He told me that my ideas were not what other guests wanted. All of this is probably true (I’m no hotelier, after all). But it left me thinking: This hotel doesn’t care what I think. They offer a generic service, and don’t care if I take it or leave it. (For the record, I’ll be leaving it next time I’m in Deerfield).

My experience of this hotel was one which does not care about its guests, one that does not listen, and one that does not care to improve my experience.

Contrast that to my new friend Ms. Bruno at Visible Path, who cared enough to want my personal experience to be a good one. I’ll be spending time using that service.

As is my habit, I pose the question: How are your customers experiencing your company? Are you sure? And what are you doing to make sure?

After all, Experience isn’t everything. When it comes to customers, it’s the only thing.

An “SMB” is not a trend. A business - any business of any size - is a (prospective) customer. (did I really have to point that out?)

I’ve heard this play out in several companies with which I’ve been associated: Someone contacts the company asking for information. The response is “you’re an SMB - you need to talk to our new SMB department (group, team, whatever).” This is a bit like telling the prospect calling from Buenos Aires to call the Brussels office because “you’re international” (hint: no, they are not - they are domestic; just not in the same country as you).

So let me offer this challenge: Can we please stop calling SMB a trend. Segmenting your market by size is fine - if you can identify unique needs and buying patterns based on size. But the so-called SMB market has always been there. The fact that enterprise-focused companies have been unable to address it is not the problem of the (prospective) customers in that market - it’s the problem of the vendor!

So, please, remember: a small or mid-sized business is not a trend - it is your customer. Act like it.

I’ve seen quite a few IP phones on people’s desks, and I’m sure that some people are doing innovative things with them. However, I usually see them being used as, well, phones. The phones may have an IP address and lots of great possibilities, but I have yet to encounter anyone who uses even 20% of those possibilities. Most people just pick them up to dial, much as they have been doing for decades.

Am I missing something? I respect Mr. Mann greatly, but I think there’s a point missing from this argument.

Whenever a new - and disruptive - technology arrives, even when it’s widely deployed and the benefits are obvious, the adoption of the most advanced features takes some time (remember your technology adoption life cycle?).

I don’t mean to be cynical here, but let’s face it: If I had an IP phone on my desk, I’d use it to make calls (sorry, I’m with Steve Jobs on this one: the killer app for (cell) phones is still making calls). Given my penchant for playing with tech toys, I’d probably play with all of the advanced features, too. And I’d learn which ones are actually useful for me (not necessarily the same ones for everyone, either). But I’m an “early adopter” and not everyone is - in fact, very few people are.

But the fact that the technology is there, and it’s being marketed and made available means that - if it’s useful - it will eventually be used.

Bringing a disruptive technology to market happens in stages. In order for a majority of customers to understand the technology, it has to fit into the context of something they do today. It can be better and different, but in this case, a phone is still a phone and makes calls and does some other cools stuff.

The important lessons for disruptive marketers: Only when it’s accepted that the disruptive technology can fit into common activities does it get the chance to realize its disruptive potential and begin to change those activities, or obviate them and create new ones.

While not an uncommon tactic for technology companies (where nearly every vendor produces comparison charts that, while biased of course, compare their product to chosen competitor(s) ), this is new for car dealerships, whose sales tactics have often relied on getting you to make a deal before you ever had a chance to see a competitor’s model (also called pulling the wool over our collective eyes).

Saturn has finally admitted that its customers are going to check out the competition no matter what they do, so why not let them do it right in our shop where we can also engage them in the conversation about why our product is the best. It’s still a tactic to get us to buy before we go to the competitor’s shop, but all they are doing here is avoiding the conversation we might have with the competitor’s salesperson - who most assuredly won’t offer the same level of open comparison.

I might be biased by the fact that I love my Saturn, but I’d say after a few years of taking heavy criticism for some poor tactics and decisions, this one is a step in the right direction - and more importantly one from which all marketers can learn.

How confident are you that, when seen side-by-side with the competition, your customer will choose your product? (if you’re not, then you should think hard about changing your product!)

This is what you get when your new business isn’t just about inventing and controlling technologies and standards, but about taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up by fresh new technologies and standards. For example, making money because of blogging, or RSS, or desktop Linux, or whatever — rather than just with those things

In the technology business, we tend to be very obsessed with the technology itself. So many companies claim that what differentiates them is the technology (often only certain features of the technology) and sometimes it’s true, but not often.

But many of the real opportunities exist in taking advantage of all of the technology we’ve invented to do things (anything from business processes to making new friends) differently - and better than ever. Or what can be done because of the technology.

Think about the people making money by running businesses in Second Life. They are not in the technology business, but they are in the design or fun or entertainment (or whatever) business. And their business is able to have the reach is does because of Second Life. You can even say the same for the large corporations who have established a presence in this virtual world. They are able to better interact with partners, customers, etc., because of the technology.

There are two things I ask myself everyday:

1) How am I making use of all of the technology and capabilities available to me to engage my market? to attract new prospective customers? to start an interesting conversation? You might say, what am I doing different/better because of the technology I have at my disposal?

2) I market technology. What are my customers doing different/better because of the technology I market? We marketers like to think in terms of benefits (many of which are not really benefits at all). But if you pose the question this way, the benefit becomes very clear.

What are you making possible for your customers that was not possible before?

This story from Business Week is the story of just such a company. It started with

The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year

1,428 years. That’s a very very long time to be in business. In the technology industry where I live, many businesses are lucky to be around for more than five years.

Ultimately, according to this article, the business wasn’t displaced or made irrelevant (through a market disruption), but faded away in a series of mis-directed financial decisions.

But what struck me as interesting was the way that this company made decisions over its incredible millenium-and-a-half run. They refused to comply with established protocols and societal norms. They focused (until near the end) relentlessly on doing the one thing they knew better than anyone else, and they found ways that worked for them to overcome change on a scope that most businesses can barely conceive.

The result was a business that sustained financial, economic, political and military storms of nearly every conceivable variety. It is what they chose to do differently - making business and management decisions that defied the norms - that kept them stable over a very very long run.

It also points out that sometimes the best way to capitalize on disruption is not to respond at all - just let it wash over you and keep going.

One of the most common debates I see in businesses today is about the meaning of, and response to, competitors (and others) actions. There tends to be a common pattern to these discussions: panic, some analysis, then an increasing sense of urgency to act.

I can’t say what the decisions of Kongo Gumi’s management were a millenium ago, but from the history it seems to me that there must have been lots of decisions not to act in these situation.

An idea that might help many companies today is to include in the set of possible decisions “do nothing differently” and rely on the plans in place to succeed. Then play out that scenario next to ones that include the panic-driven actions. I have seen this work effectively far more often than you might expect.

My question is: Do you have the courage to trust your direction and not respond with panic?

The topic of competitive differentiation has been coming up in quite a few conversations lately. The context is usually a discussion on how to create “sustainable competitive advantage.” A variety of different frameworks are used to describe it, from Michael Porter’s classic to the currently in-vogue.

When I’m asked how to do this, I have only one answer: you can’t. You can (and must!) create both a process and a culture that continuously creates competitive advantage.

There are lots of ways to create competitive differentiation. A better product. More service. Something free. Customer service. Appealing to needs as yet unmet (even with the same product/service). Hire better people. Spend more on R&D. Create a “faster” organization. Lower your transaction costs. I can go on and on…and some of these things will work for a short period of time, and some for longer.

But can you create sustainable competitive advantage? Every single thing you can do can be copied by your competition. Most things can be done better (they can leapfrog you - and will).

There is really only one way to create “sustainable competitive advantage” and that is to sustain the effort of creating competitive advantage. Sound recursive? It is.

I’ll offer a recursive description of this process.

How to create competitive advantage:

1. Do something disruptive. Create something that will not just frustrate your competition, but that will do the market equivalent of rendering them speechless.
2. Assume that your competition (known or unknown) has matched you and outdone you.
3. Based on the position you are in after that assumption, create competitive advantage.

And you know that if you don’t do this, your competition will.

Typically this is a phrase used by software companies to indicate that their software can handle the intense demands of the largest multi-national companies combined with their very large communities of suppliers, partners, customers, etc.

In this context, I was hearing it from SaaS vendors trying to convince the audience that their applications were more than conveniences for small business, but rather ready for prime time and the so-called real business of large enterprises.

Add that to the fact that this conference (as so many are lately) is centered around Enterprise 2.0, and I began to wonder: Does “enterprise-class” matter?

Consider: Enterprise class usually means three things:

• Scalability: The ability to handle transaction volume, data storage needs, etc for a very large number of simultaneous users and still give good response time and performance.
• Security: The ability to protect data where it’s stored, in transit (over the network) and at all of the endpoints and nodes with sufficiently high levels of security so that it can’t be stolen. Also the ability to ensure that only people who are authorized to see certain data can get to it at all, plus the ability to provide business continuity in case of disaster. And to do all of this in ways that meet a tangled web of regulatory requirements.
• Flexibility: The ability to adapt to different contexts, tasks, etc. And the ability to configure both the application functions and the user interface to meet the needs and preferences of every individual user.

Let me compare those requirements to the requirements that might be placed on a successful Web2.0-style consumer application (think Google - search, calendar, reader, whatever) or small-to-mid-size-business applications (say, WebEx meetings or SalesForce.com CRM):

• Scalability: These applications must scale to enormous numbers of users (sometimes in the millions, rather than the thousands of an enterprise) and data transfer and storage requirements. Moreover, where enterprise applications can be rolled-out in a planned way (and therefore additional demands on the system predicted and defined), SaaS applications must respond to unpredictable demands which can grow very quickly if the application/service becomes popular.
• Security: SaaS applicaitions may or may not be subject to regulatory requirements, but they are subject to the requirements of the market. They must be able to keep user data and user content secure and be sure access controls are in place and highly effective. For small businesses they must still meet all of the business requirements. But imagine the exodus from the service if consumer data were compromised (see any number of recent examples). In addition, these applications/services do not reside behind firewalls, so they must be built to be hacker-proof in ways that an enterprise application is often immune (mostly) from.
• Flexibility: These application must not only allow so much flexibility that every user can personalize their experience, but it must be easy enough for users to do it themselves. Small businesses must be able to create the custom restrictions, processes, roles, etc. that meet their unique needs. Not everything needs to be customizable, but most of the experience should be. On top of that, there is an increasing demand for these applications/services to be published as web-services in some form, so that they can be used in more flexible ways.

“Enterprise-class” has become such a loaded and popular buzzword that no marketing department can seem to go without using it. But that’s just getting caught up in the buzzword.

I realized as I considered this comparison that this is another element of the “2.0″ shift that is turning the market inside-out in so many ways. And it led me to ask:

Does my enterprise really want an “enterprise-class” application? or a “consumer-class” application?

It’s good advice. All-too-often followed by not-so-useful action. It’s not as easy, nor as obvious, as it seems (especially for traditional marketers) to find the conversation, not to mention take part. And if you haven’t heard it enough, taking part not only means saying something, but also saying something useful and interesting, saying something authentically “you” and not saying something that is just a bunch of marketing-speak positioning words.

This posting is unconfirmed (as far as I know), but look at this response from the folks at Second Life. This gets at the heart of participation. The GetAFirstLife.com project owner is going to parody Second Life. And use some variations on the logo, etc. They accept reality and explicitly agree. They win points, buzz and goodwill all at once.

Most importantly, they further their reputation as cool people with something useful to say, and enhance their unique differentiation that makes Second Life the “place to be” in the virtual world.

Just like people will be talking about your company and your products/services. When you comment or respond, what will you be saying? Will it win you goodwill?

And most importantly, will it contribute to what makes you different and unique?

new product <> disruption

Or in words, having a new product is neither necessary nor sufficient to create market disruption.

I recently had an interesting exchange with Judi Sohn at Web Worker Daily (a new favorite of mine) about GrandCentral, which gives you a single number that can reach you anywhere you want. GrandCentral is getting quite a bit of attention and generating lots of buzz.

I had to ask: Why? Everything GrandCentral offers, I’ve had from VoicePulse (my VoIP provider) for years. Other than the obvious price (GrandCentral is free, VoicePulse is not), I can’t find anything that GrandCentral can do that VoicePulse can’t. So why is GrandCentral holding the position of “it’s YOUR number - it’s attached to you, not your phone/device/location” which in today’s highly mobile multi-device world is important?

Pretty simple, actually. When VoIP started (VoicePulse, Vonage, 8×8, etc.) the selling point (key message in marketing-speak) was “this works just like your phone”. You got a little box and connected it to your home network. It had a standard phone jack and you connected your phone to that just like plugging it into the wall. You picked up the phone a dialed just like a regular land-line POTS phone.

Sure, you could do all this other cool stuff that got me and my geeky friends all excited, but the mass-market sell was “it’s simple - it’s just like what you do today, only cheaper and cooler”

This is a classic way to sell new technology: First, make it fit the existing model; second, show how it changes the model. GrandCentral is making the move to the second stage of technology adoption.

GrandCentral has taken advantage of the general awareness of VoIP capabilities and the fact that people in the market (mostly early adopters) no longer need to make it work just like their old POTS phone, they want all the capabilities that a network-based service can offer. So GrandCentral has gone to market with the selling point that “you own your own number.” It’s a powerful message, and it appeals to the people who were eager to move to internet telephony and wanted the capabilities to move forward.

Their service isn’t really new or innovative (OK, their exact brand is, but I bought the same exact service 4 years ago), but GrandCentral has turned on the second stage ‘boosters’ and is now moving the market forward - I expect pretty far forward. While for now it’s only the early adopters who will sign up, someone will figure out how to move this to the broader market pretty quickly.

And it is changing that market. Completely.

My question is: will the traditional VoIP providers take advantage of the opportunity to re-take their lead? Or will they, as so many technology companies before them, stand there complaining “but we’ve had those features for years!” - and go nowhere fast while their market escapes them?

What would your company do?

Do you really want to change your market?

SuccessFactors (blog) has as part of their founding principles:

Increase worldwide productivity by 50%.

They want to change the market - and the world.

What’s your mission?

So my advice (FWIW): (re-)Read something by Tom Peters (post-McKinsey!!) or something Tom-Peters-like (apologies to both Tom and my mother) every 3-6 months. It will keep you from becoming complacent.

Then go create something disruptive.

[My position: I disrupt. I create extraordinary opportunity. (6 words)]

BTW: my BHAG: I want Tom Peters to be my mentor.

Are you thinking risk doesn’t really work well in politics? Making a bold statement can certainly alienate entire groups of people, but it can also make all the difference. Think back to Newt Gingrich and company and their “contract with America.” That led to a change in control in both houses of congress. Or think back to the 2004 presidential campaign and Howard Dean’s railing against the Iraq war. That changed the conversation in the Democratic party and eventually led to the change in opinion across the country and another change in control in congress.

Marketing 101: Your brand is your identity. It is your point of view.

Disruptive Marketing 101: The point of view you add to the conversation not only matters, but can change the whole conversation. In other words, you (as an individual or a company or whatever) can disrupt the conversation and the market.

Is your point of view interesting enough and different enough to be disruptive? Are you willing to overcome the fear of risk and add your point of view to the conversation?

If you answered yes to both questions, you might just be ready to start disrupting your market.

Have you ever had someone in your organization unexpectedly try to tell you that there’s a completely unanticipated and dire threat to your business? What did you say? Did you investigate? Or did you ask them to investigate? Or did you assume that it was the warning of a less experienced (and therefore less knowledgable) wolf-crier? (with the corrolary assumption that you’ve already planned for any relevant threats)

I’ve been in that position several times - both as the deliverer and the recipient. I’ve ignored serious threats (I don’t anymore) and I’ve even been fired for raising the topic repeatedly when I thought the situation was dire. You’ve probably guessed that since I’m writing about it, I was right. And I learned that it was surprisingly unsatisfying to watch from outside as the business dissolved.

It’s been my experience that nearly every day someone in your business is raising a red flag. Sometimes, it’s just an opinion. Sometimes a well-founded belief that doesn’t apply - or even better has already been anticipated (and, I hope, planned for). But sometimes, more often - no, far more often - than we’re willing to admit, the wolf-crier has actually seen something coming that poses a real threat to your business.

When these alarms come from unexpected sources, the first thought should be: “this could be disruptive.” But usually the first thought is more like “          .”

Warnings of truly disruptive threats - like the threats themselves - often come from the most unexpected places. If you don’t listen - and pay attention! - you risk ignoring a disruptive threat. Maybe it’s nothing.

But are you willing to bet your business?

I’m going to go slightly off-topic today with a little rant about what I think is an absolutely embarrassing ad campaign - one that makes me think the creators have simply forgotten some of the basic principles of marketing, and holds a reminder for me (and I think all of us) that whatever your are doing to be different and innovative - disruptive - you simply can’t forget the basics.

Creating edgy, unusual and attention grabbing TV ads is almost a requirement for many brands. So it came as no surprise to me that when I saw the Comcast ads (there are several series advertising different services) that they played on a slightly warped and unusual sense of humor to attract attention.

But one of these series stood out. The ads are for Comcast digital phone service. One shows a young man who has recently been told by his ex-girlfirend never to call her again. He calls her, trying to convince her that things are different now because he’s calling on his Comcast digital phone service. Of course, she’s not convinced. Another ad shows a man calling tattoo parlor insisting that the tattoo artist can now say “yes” to removing his tattoo because he’s now calling on his Comcast digital phone service. And there are a few others in the series.

Are these funny? Probably (I don’t really find them funny, but I can see how someone in their target demographic might). Are the edgy? Maybe.

But here’s what gets me: The main message of these ads is:

Your horrible, crappy, miserable life will not get any better if you buy our service.

There’s no positive association with the service. There’s no message in that ad about how the service helps or what it does for you. After the vignette, there is a low-price promotion, which makes me think that what Comcast is selling is price, which is fine, but they’ve just told us that we can get to keep our miserable lives by paying less for a service (not really true if you compare phone services).

Is that really the message thy want me to remember? That nothing in my life gets better if I buy from them? Will I really buy a service based solely on the fact that it’s cheap and the ad entertained me for 15-20 seconds? Maybe someone will, but I’m guessing (given the competition in that market) not many. I suppose Comcast thinks enough people will.

My conclusion, the ad is certainly Comcastic! (full disclosure: as a result of a series of horrible experiences with Comcast, what Comcastic! means in my house is rather different from what their marketing department would like it to mean - and here’s some fun reading on Comcast nightmares other than my own).

To my point, stupid marketing tricks like this remind us that as we try to be different, to distinguish ourselves in the marketplace, to use new an innovative techniques to gain attention we simply cannot ignore the basics of marketing. You still have to give your audience a good, positive reason to pay attention, and a good, positive reason to buy from you.

Executive anxieties about losing touch with their customers is driving higher and higher usage of customer tools such as CRM and segmentation. These tools have moved from below average use to second and third place, respectively, in the 10 years since Bain has included them in the survey:

• 84% of executives are now using CRM
• 82% are using segmentation to tailor their marketing programs and offerings to groups of customers who exhibit common patterns of behavior
• New tools are emerging. Use of loyalty management is at 51%, and the use of ethnographic methods to observe customers in the real world is becoming more mainstream, at 35%. But in 2006, each of those tools rank below average in terms of executive satisfaction.

There’s more on his post.

Don’t mis-read my commentary: I’m not discounting or dismissing the value of CRM or loyalty programs. In fact, I use those and simliar tools to get to know my customers better also. They are valuable, and they are also very consistent with the approach that businesses have long taken to marketing.

But the concern that these executives expressed is that their companies - meaning the people in their companies - are out of touch with their customers.

Which made me think: Are they talking to their customers? or, more importantly, are they listening? and are they listening where their customers are talking? (you can listen to your market research, but does the blog-commentary of your customers tell a different story?)

People who’ve worked with me will know that I am the first to jump into the data. Mine the CRM system. Find new segments and new demographics. Make the data tell stories it never has before.

But there’s a very large element of this data focus that makes me feel like I’m staring at my own navel and drawing conclusions about the world around me. Data can say alot. But data can’t speak for a person. Or a market. Or a community.

I’ve had the privelege to work with some companies where everyone in marketing talks to customers regularly. And so do all of the executives. We still mined the data, but every conclusion we drew, we validated. We asked actual people. We read what actual customers and prospective customers were saying about us in unsolicited ways. We had that very elusive sense of the market.

I’ve also worked with companies where talking to customers is, at best, discouraged and generally never happened. The inevitable result was that there was a lot of talk about how out-of-touch we were, and a lot of hand-wringing about how to get closer to the customer. System were put in place. Data analyzed. But still no one talked to an actual person. In one recent case, the conversation in the blogosphere was discounted as irrelevant.

You can guess which companies were more successful.

Being in touch with your audience matters. Data matters. Research matters. But unless you have something interesting to say, and can engage your market community in conversation, all the data in the world will just leave you staring at your collective navel.

Marketers are finding themselves in an increasingly frantic race to get people talking about their brands. The desire to produce something “viral” is nearly ubiquitous in the marketing world. But it’s unclear who exactly “consumers” are these days. We don’t even know what that word means any more. Can consumers be producers? Yes. Can they be users? Yes. Can they be active participants, members of niche communities, or even critics capable of effectively mobilizing others? Yes, yes, and yes.

The article goes on to talk about the “2.0″ technologies that are changing the nature of the conversation (and yes, includes Twitter - their marketing folks must be proud!).

Really? I thought the “2.0″ tools are making the conversation possible. Looking at this from the perspective of a marketer, the “2.0″ tools are making it possible for consumers to become producers (of content at the least) and participants. They allow us to “hear” from our market not only in new ways, but to hear things that just 10 years ago we could not hear at all. Reading blogs about your product (and hoping it’s not on the yourproductsucks.com blog) gives you a perspective you could not have had just 10 years ago.

Yes, markets are conversations. It’s the buzz phrase of the week, but it’s been true before this week, and will be true after next week.

The fact remains, when I meet a new friend, I hope the conversation is engaging. As when I meet a new member of my market community, I hope that what I have to say is interesting enough to be engaging.

The point being that the conversation is important, but the conversation has to be engaging. You still must engage your community, your market, your potential customer.

The difference is that now we have to do it by actually being interesting. Being bright and shiny just isn’t enough. Are you saying something interesting?

Capturing this institutional knowledge and leveraging it across the organization is the power of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 tools are designed for individual contribution and grass roots, bottom-up type development. They must be simple to use in order to draw users to swarm around key pieces of knowledge, tagging and posting blogs and wikis.

This is in fact what many Enterprise 2.0 initiatives are based on, or are at least counting on. Knowledge management as a function or capability has had its ups and downs, but the reality is that all of us so-called knowledge workers count on access to incredibly large amounts of information and knowledge to do our jobs. If the tools work, and the knowledge not only gets captured through participation, but also grows through the synergy of collaboration, our jobs get easier, and we work better, individually and together.

The opportunity here is to extend this outside the enterprise. I don’t mean suppliers and partners - though that’s useful too. I mean to customers, prospects and everyone else who is part of the community to which you are trying to speak. I can ask the age-old marketing question “what can you learn from your customers?” but what if you can not only learn, but engage your audience in mass collaboration to make your offering better…and maybe your marketing too.

Followers are the rest of us. Generally, everyone who listens to what the high-profile leader says and gives it some credibility.

I’m starting to question that assumption. Does the advent of a community-based (aka more collaborative, contributory) world around us change how we lead and follow? And does it change how perceptions are set?

Let me go back to the Scoble talk last week. He said that he gets bombarded with lots and lots of new and allegedly cool ideas every day. Not surprising. But he pays no attention to any of them…here’s the key…unless his friends (those people whose opinions he trusts) tell him it’s worth a look.

My first thought was that’s completely the opposite of me. Taking the difference in fame out of the equation (can I do that?), even when people look to me to opine on the new, cool thing, I still prefer to do the work to discover that cool thing and form my own opinion (which you can listen to or not…) than to rely on others to come to the collective opinion that it’s worth my time.

Both approaches are perfectly good, and both work for different kinds of people.

But doesn’t the first one (Scoble’s approach) sound like a follower? Someone who is listening to those who are more famous, higher profile, or to whom we attribute some “inside” knowledge? But isn’t Scoble just such a high-profile insider?

So this raises the question: Who is the thought-leader? is it the person with the new idea? or is it the person who relies on the wisdom of the crowd to raise the good idea? Is it the inventor or the reporter?

I can’t offer a more definitive answer right now other than the oft-quoted “I know it when I see it,” but when you are looking for the trend-setters in your market, don’t count out the followers.

Earlier this week I watched Robert Scoble on his book tour talk about his ideas on how blogging from within a company changes the nature of the conversation with the customer. He should know - and I agree with most of his premise (I’d disagree that ‘buzz’ is unique to the blogosphere, but it’s certainly different).

The core of the message was that the blogosphere is both diverse and current, and therefore it’s possible to discover new and interesting things very quickly. That can apply to everything from news to products to gossip. Buzz travels faster in the blogosphere, and there are more (and presumably better) opinions and perspectives.

Then, he brought up Twitter. It’s pretty unlikely you’ve never heard of Twitter - the ‘buzz’ on Twitter as spread quickly, and interestingly often by using Twitter itself. But if you haven’t, it’s essentially a communication vehicle that allows you to be in a virtual conversation with all of your “friends” all of the time by web, IM or mobile phone. It’s fast, slightly addictive, and at least at first a bit overwhelming. (Add me to your Twitter friends if you want to try).

Here’s where it got interesting. We used to learn about new things in time units of days. Newspapers and daily news shows and the like brought us interesting and up-to-date information. Just two months ago, we were learning about new things in hours (sometimes minutes if you happened to be paying attention). Blogs, podcasts, even IM, chat and text messages took a short time to travel around, and we found out about (or our friends told us about) the cool new thing.

Now it’s seconds. I can watch the Twitter streams of people I know will have the latest information. I can spread information to my friends (or anyone who will listen) in a matter of seconds. They can do the same for me.

The marketing perspective? This changes the game. Remember those weeks (or for some of you, months) you spent planning your launch? beta-testing your site/service/product? Well, now, as soon as someone thinks it’s worth talking about (and that can be because it’s cool or because they hate it!), they can tell everyone they know in a matter of seconds. Are you prepared for the rush of attention?

And are you prepared to admit that you’ve now not only lost control over the message, but that old-hat “we’re not ready to make this widely known yet” - sorry, I’d have to say that if Scoble (or anyone who becomes widely followed) twitters about it, it’s widely known.

If you don’t believe it, look at the exposure Twitter got on blogs and in the news within just the first month or two after opening their site (search Technorati if you don’t believe me). And the most talked about topic on Twitter? Twitter! (maybe McLuhan was right…)

The point: The speed of buzz just got a lot faster. Maybe the speed of information did also.

This means you have to be prepared to be very public and, to use the current jargon, transparent, much faster and much more readily. Your audience will form opinions much sooner than you expect, and you won’t have much opportunity to influence them.

If what you’re offering is great - good for you - you have a good chance at a rapid success. If what you’re offering meets with disapproval, your audience will know it and move on just as quickly.

I don’t know if Twitter will be the ultimate way that the speed of buzz takes yet another leap, but it’s proof that the leap will happen. Get ready.

This blog will become, I hope, a contribution to the conversation about how marketing is changing to meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing business world.

Please participate - comment, agree, disagree, whatever makes sense to you (I only ask that you contribute to the conversation, and not just criticize it!).

If you’ve been following my other blog, Nuggets (thank you for reading it!), you’ve noticed that I haven’t posted in a while, and from now on I’ll probably will focus most of my efforts here. I’ll cross-post for a while also.

Thanks for reading!