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Posted on by Louis Gudema

I recently attended a conference and heard Tom Libretto, CMO of Pegasystems, be interviewed on how to do customer research.

At the beginning of the session he gave a short professional history, which included working in customer research at Nokia.

Saying that you worked in customer research at Nokia is kind of like saying that you were a navigator on the Titanic. Nokia famously missed the shift to smartphones. This is how that impacted its market share.

Nokia market share declining

However, Libretto said that the customer research group knew that Nokia had to develop new products with flat, interactive displays before the first iPhone was introduced. Their research was extensive, including having anthropologists embedded with customers.

The problem, he said, was that the company was not willing to move away from its highly successful existing phones. This has been called The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. And so, as the industry leader tries to hold back the tide with wishful thinking, a company without that legacy baggage comes in and steals the market from it. The same thing happened with Kodak which invented, but wouldn’t take to market, digital photography; the film business was just too profitable for it to walk away from. Similarly, a young Netflix approached Blockbuster about being its digital distribution channel, but it found no interest.

So the navigators told the captain of the Titanic to change course, but they got the response, “Don’t worry. There are never icebergs in this part of the North Atlantic…”

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

The massacre in the New Zealand mosques raises again the question of how the social media platforms can control content. The terrorist who killed fifty people planned his attack for social media. His manifesto included social media in-jokes and memes intended to spark conversation, outrage, and sharing. He was wearing a video camera on his head and streamed the shootings live on Facebook. Within a few hours over 1.5 million copies of it were on Facebook, and more on YouTube, Twitter, and other sites.

Obviously social media produces great benefits — that’s why over two billion people worldwide participate in it every month. However, social media also causes obsession and anxiety. Some sites, like 8Chan used by the New Zealand terrorist, are meeting places for white nationalists. Facebook was the primary tool for Russian disruption of the 2016 election. And when the bad from social media can be as horrific as it was in New Zealand, it makes some question if it is starting to outweigh the good.

Management guru Tom Peters, who engages frequently with many people on Twitter, expressed that kind of despair recently:

Tom Peters tweet

I know a number of people who quit Facebook before New Zealand, or took welcome, lengthy breaks from it. Are you using social media less than before, or considering eliminating it entirely?

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Unless you already have a huge following (and I do mean huge), it’s unlikely that many people will see the next piece of content that you put out. After all, several million new blog posts are published every day, not to mention the countless videos, infographics, etc. Only one in 20 new pieces of content gets to page one of Google’s search results in the first year and that is usually on a site that already has high domain authority in its industry.

The rest of us need to amplify our content.

The first thing to do is to focus on amplifying your best content. What are people showing their interest in by commenting, liking, and sharing? That’s the content that is most likely to benefit from amplification, too.

Some of the ways that you can amplify it:

  • Post it to relevant online communities
  • Get industry influencers to share it
  • Target paid ads in social media to new people based on title, industry, size of company, location, etc., or to your current contacts by creating a custom list with your email addresses
  • Use remarketing ads to get the content in front of people who have visited your website
  • Advertise on relevant industry sites
  • Sponsor it as featured content for publishers to use in a leadgen campaign for your company
  • Email it to your list

Not everything will go viral. In fact, very little will. But putting a bit of push behind your best content can get it in front of many more people.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

I regularly see surveys and articles about the B2B marketing tactic/channel that works better than all others.

It’s events.

Well, no. Not really. It’s email.

Actually, it’s content. By far.

Get serious. It’s account based marketing.

Or all of the above?

Maybe, just maybe, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy (inbound? social media?) that is best for every B2B company in every industry. Maybe experienced marketers really do have to look at the unique situation of each company, run tests, and figure out what works best for them. And be constantly alert to their changing competitive landscape and that what works best today may not work best in six months, a year, or more.

Just maybe.