Monthly Archives: December 2006

It is one of the hardest thing to do for a marketing guy. 

How do you talk about all of your customers and market momentum in a way that is intuitive, innovative, and plain and simply — not just a boring list of names and stats? (i.e. “30 of the fortune 50 use our product”, or a web page with 1000 logo’s on it … yawn)

We all know the age old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” — but again how do you do it with customers, and in many cases those that for a variety of reasons don’t or can’t be mentioned?  One great way to show this is through a demographic map.  Political campaigns have been doing it for years by coloring towns, counties, and States with their respective parties color as they get poll data to suggest voter preference.  But again, without costly polling and surveys how does a company use data it has to project real-time maps of its customers.

 Well I came across a really interesting idea when researching this problem.  Sun wanted to show momentum for its free Solaris O/S program and created a visual map to show all of the SYSTEMS that were using the product. It hit me over the head — wow 80,000 plus users and it was interactive so I could see which neighbors and regions were in fact using the product.  In other words … they sucked me in.

To do this they used a mapping tool that superimposed a red dot every place an installation occurs … right down to the street data (for privacy the really only show it to a zip code level).  You can then scroll out for a world view or zoom in for a specific regional view.  It even does the math to tell you how many systems are represented in a given view.   What is truly innovative is how they automatically track the users by correlating subscribers to their software update service to the mapping system — providing real time/automatic charts.

This is a great example of using data your customers are willing to provide (when they register for a download or auto update feature), applying web technologies to graph the data, and then use cyberspace (in this case Suns CEO blog) to tell the world about it.

For more details on how this map was created they cover it here. 

Again, another great example of using technology to tell a marketing story that is simple, powerful, and best of all something that people will remember.

Like the web there has been a constant migration in terms of best practice and even the tools for companies marketing departments to buy and use to get out the message and track success. But UNLIKE the web application space — I’m not convinced that most marketing groups have really spent the research time to uncover how to really USE these new tools. I think the majority of the teams just kind of muddle along and try bits and pieces of the new ideas but never master it. It kind of reminds me of people with TiVo that never figure out how to use the “Season Pass” feature and record their favorite shows weekly …MANUALLY (if you can imagine that )

Or for a more realistic example — spend tons of time putting in SalesForce.com — but never use the campaign features or report writers to really SEE the customer pipeline. They simply use it as an expensive contact management and to-do list tool!

For example — to show the evolution of marketing teams using the web in a very basic fashion — In 1995 it was simply cool to create a web page. In 2000 it was all about driving traffic to your site and getting a mention here and there in a few of the top print publications and then linking to those articles as a virtual on-line library. Hey it was pretty cool back then that you didn’t care when the story ran (it could even show up in the 4th of July edition … ) because it was now searchable by that new fangeled search engine “Google” and you could prominently display the story on your website forever!

Well a lot has obviously changed in the last few years. In fact I think more in the last two years (2005 & 2006) than in the previous three as it relates to new marketing tools and best practices for getting the PROPER message out to your TARGET customers. It is no longer acceptable to post a few pages on the web, do a press tour, create an advisory board, do some trade show events, and call your company “Successfully Launched”. Same with products. Same with success stories.

The game has changed with Startup Marketing 2.0. Now the question is where to start and how to use the new fancy car you’ve just been given so that nobody gets hurt!

SO WHERE DO WE START?

Sure there are tons of ideas floating with concepts surrounding blogs, Podcasts, YouTube product demo’s, Webinar’s, event wiki’s, and my new personal favorite the “un-conference” where event participants decide on the format for the event as evidenced by the BarCamp event and even one sponsored by Sun recently called Startup Camp.

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