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Friday, March 27, 2009

Experimenting with the "New Rules of Marketing"

During the last few years I have been learning and experimenting with the concepts of "The new rules of marketing", David Meerman Scott (see his blog). I must say that it has been a great learning experience. The latest exploit is helping my Wife to promote the rental of her mother’s house. We found a semi free website that allow listing of rentals. We made sure that it ranked high in a relevant Google search. Then we created a Facebook group and thus we started to promote it through our online social network, which apart from FaceBook also included Twitter, LinkedIn, and this blog of course. It is really kind of an experiment but I really love to see how it unfolds. My Wife is ecstatic about how quickly you can reach out to people for help in promoting it.  She is constantly on Facebook looking at how many people joined the group. Yes I know that is not directly equal to somebody actually renting it but it still has a certain buzz to it. 

I have been doing similarly in building my personal brand and also marketing the sub division that I live in. We have created a blog that is used to exchange and share information with our members, a Twitter profile to send updates and information around, a Facebook group, and a Google profile. I must say that it has taken much longer than I expected to gain momentum. However I have been receiving very positive feedback about how well this works and more, and more of our members are starting to use all these different resources. Of course there is the added value of promoting our neighborhood allowing people that may be interested in a home purchase to get a peek at our community and the people who live there – hopefully this will also help our real estate value.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Inbound and Outbound Marketing according to Pragmatic Marketing

This may be redundant information but I wanted to make sure that it is persisted somewhere for reference. It is really a summarized version of some of the teachings from Pragmatic Marketing.

Inbound Marketing

Understanding of the markets that are targeted by the company's/products' "distinctive competencies". The idea is to gain unequivocal understanding of the market, the people working in this market, and specifically the problems that they have. The goal is to provide product features that directly solve the problems in the market. In order to do that the product management activities are focused on defining and prioritizing these problems and conveying them to the product development as market requirements. The driving concept is that a product (and its features) need to do a job for the customer. For example: Online bill pay. the job is to pay bills, if you did not have this capabilities you would have to do it manually which is time consuming and tedious. Therefore it is a Market Oriented feature it solves a distinct problem for the customer.

Outbound Marketing

These activities involve the positioning and messaging of the product. It involves traditional marketing as well as what is now widely adopted "the new rules of marketing" using the internet as the main conduit. Using "viral marketing", new media, blogs and eBooks are some of the methods. The goal of all of these activities is to generate demand and leads that can be turned into license revenue by the sales team. One of the methods to expose the products to the market is using a concept called  "Marketecture". The idea is to describe the product (and its features) to the market not by its technical functionality, but by the problems that it solves for the users. In other words it is a market oriented description of the product that is developed as a result of the "Inbound" activities.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Management by objectives. Why?

I just published a post on the Linked2Leadership about Management by Objectives.

Excerpt:
Management by objectives, why? What is the perceived goal? What is the origin of this approach and why did anybody in his right mind think that it would work?

Maybe it stems from the thinking that we can impose tasks on people and that, by itself, will motivate them to do what they need to do. Old school thinking, if you ask me. Unfortunately, this is how many companies are managed and this practice usually only works when a high degree of self discipline and self motivation exists in the followers. But what happens when motivation and discipline erodes? How does a leader regain the lost ground when self motivation dies?