mercredi 31 octobre 2007

Salaire du Président : augmentation indecente ?

Il est difficile de ne pas céder à des tentations "populistes" lorsqu'on entend que l'assamblée vote une augmentation de 140 % du salaire du président de la République, sans parler du budget élyséen. Difficile... C'est idiot, mais ça reste difficile.
Personnellement, j'ai du mal à éviter...

Sur le fond, je ne suis pas forcément choqué que le Président de la République ait un salaire conséquent. Il ne me semblait pas que Mitterand ou Chirac, par le passé, se soient trouvé dans le besoin et se plaignaient de leurs pouvoirs d'achat, mais soit...
Je milite depuis longtemps pour un vrai statut de l'élu. Pour que le Maire d'une commune modeste ait un vrai salaire. Ce qui permettrait de ne pas voir uniquement des professions libérales, des fonctionnaires, ou des salariés, occuper le poste de Maire. Donc que le poste de président de la République soit "correctement" rémunéré, cela ne me choque pas.
Ce qui me choque, ce n'est pas le salaire. C'est l'augmentation de salaire. Et la forme...

Cela tombe mal. Actuellement, la tendance est à l'alignement 'vers le bas'. La tendance est à la rigueur. Cela ne me choque pas : le pays est exangue, les finances publique à sec. Tout le monde fait des efforts. Pour sauver la planète, pour sauver la sécurité sociale, on demande des efforts, légitimes et que je veux bien comprendre, à tout le monde.
Or, que voit on ? On demande aux fonctionnaires de voir leurs régimes de retraite alignées sur le plus défavorable, et le Président de la République devrait voir son salaire aligné sur celui du premier ministre, ce qui est un des arguments pour justifier cette hausse ? Le message de la majorité, pour laquelle j'ai voté, lorsqu'il va falloir demander au plus grand nombre des efforts, sera brouillée... Difficile d'aligner une majorité de gens vers le bas, et quelques uns qui n'étaient pas les plus à plaindre et qui en plus sont rémunérés via l'argent public (on parlait de dette publique), vers le haut.

Cela tombe mal quand le prix du gasoil dépasse les 1,15 euros, alors qu'il était au dessous de 80 centimes il y a à peine 3 ans. Cela tombe mal quand arrivent des avis d'impots locaux qui ont conséquement augmenté depuis l'an passé. Cela tombe mal quand on demande au citoyen de sauver la planète via des écotaxes et autres taxes carbones, quand on demande à ce même citoyen de sauver la sécu via les franchises médicales.

En bref, cela tombe mal quand on a fait campagne sur le pouvoir d'achat, et que l'hiver arrivant ce dernier se trouve mal en point, parce que taxes supplémentaites, parce que hausse des produits de base, parce que pas de hausse de salaire générale...

Enfin, sur la forme toujours, grand bravo à l'Assemblée Nationale. Une majorité qui se couche, tel le chien que je rève d'avoir, et dont je me demande s'il serait aussi obéissant qu'un député UMP de base.
Je ne parle pas de l'opposition. On entend la gauche hurler et faire du bruit comme les élèves à la cantine quand un verre tombe par terre. Et puis lors du moment du vote solennel, ils sont absents... Lire les dépeches apprend cette nouvelle qui me rend la gauche de mon pays aussi crédible qu'une sélection de Raymond Domenech. Cela me semble assez grave...

Au final, cette nouvelle plus la minipolémique la semaine passé sur le finance du Nouveau Centre me fait craindre une chose. La gauche n'a aucune crédibilité : à part crier, elle ne propose rien. Et lorsqu'il faut voter contre, elle est aux abonnés absents. L'UMP quant à elle me semble toujours plus crédible que ce triste PS dont je souhaite, en tant que citoyen, une renaissance rapide qui se fait attendre depuis 2002. Mais la politique actuelle du pouvoir en place me parait contestable et discutable.

J'avais dit sur ce blog et ailleurs, au soir du 7 Mai, que je n'étais pas triste de l'élection de Sarkozy. J'ai voté pour lui au deuxième tour. Pas un chèque en blanc, juste le vote d'un citoyen qui le pensait plus crédible et moins dangereux que son adversaire du soir (qui est où au fait ?). Mais qui demeurait libre de son vote, de ses opinions, de ses coups de coeur, et comme ce soir de ces craintes, voire colères.
La campagne de Sarkoy s'est faite, en majeure partie, sur la défense du pouvoir d'achat. Cela lui a valu beaucoup de suffrages venant d'un électorat de gauche qui n'avait aucune confiance en un tandem Hollande - Royal qui jouait une coupable comédie. J'avais dit ici que si Sarkozy trahissait cet électorat, et les 53% qui avaient voté pour lui, la déception serait à la hauteur de la colère qui s'abattrait dans les urnes.
Je pense aujourd'hui que les extrèmes prennent un plaisir à lire les journaux le matin. Et je pense que les LePen et les Besancenot, peut être pas aux municipales (trop tot), feront trés mal dans les urnes.
Parce que Nicolas Sarkozy est en train, peu de temps aprés son élection, d'oublier à qui il la devait. Parce que la gauche reste dans une posture purement négative et caricaturale d'opposition stérile et frontale.

J'espère sincérement me tromper... Ou alors j'espère que la majorité actuelle, qui possède en son rang des gens censés et intelligents, remettront vite le gouvernement sur des rails plus républicains. Et que les personnes responsables et adultes du PS feront de même dans leur opposition.
Sinon, l'accident de train risque de faire des victimes, en premier lieu notre République.

PS : Quelques blogs qui parlent du sujet, avec des arguments ou des positions parfois en adéquation avec les miennes, parfois différentes. Pierre Catalan, le Boulognais du Québec, ou le trés bon blog dont j'ai parlé ici de Lomig, Expression Libre. Duex positions opposés, mais complémentaires. Il y a pleins d'autres blogs qui doivent parler de ce sujet, mais bon...
PS bis : non, la photo n'a rien à voir avec le sujet. Mais la campagne Auvergnate est tellement belle : nous sommes là au dessus du Puy en Velay, et je trouve les paysages magnifiques...

mardi 30 octobre 2007

Football des campagnes

Valprivas - Chapelle d'Aurec. Le score final est de 7 à 2 pour les locaux.


Plus important que le score et le match lui même, c'est cet instant. Le vrai football des campagnes. Un stade avec les montagnes du Velay en fond de scène. Des gars qui reprendront le travail, leur travail, le lendemain.
Et autour du terrain, des enfants qui joue sur la touche avec un ballon et des blousons. Des femmes, des parents, des vieux, anciens footballeurs, collègues, qui viennent voir. Des chiens aussi. Un teckel, et un gros poilu. Et au fond, des vaches ruminent, impassibles, insensibles aux vivas de la foule, et au bruit du cuir et du sifflet.

Je ne peux pas ne pas parler de Sochaux - Marseille samedi soir... Mais j'en ai presque honte, tant je passe du foot rural à celui rutillant d'une Ligue 1 qui n'en finit pas de décevoir, de me décevoir. Je passe sur le match de mon équipe, qui rate un pénalty et encaisse deux "csc". Malchance, maladresse, nullité absolue, je ne sais pas. Triste, abattu, oui, ça je le suis.
Je ne parle pas non plus, quand les responsables de Valprivas s'occupent de la buvette, de cette minable guère des gangs au sein de l'OM. Qui sont ces ElGlaoui et De Labrosse qui veulent le firmament de la célébrité ? Qui sont ils, sinon ceux qui peuvent, si "on" les laisse faire, tuer l'OM pour leur seules gloires ?

Ce soir, Marseille Metz en Coupe de la Ligue. Dimanche prochain, où jouera Valprivas ? Je ne sais pas. Peut être je m'en moquerais, et pourtant, c'est là bas, le vrai football...

Seven More Essential SEO Tools


Optimizing your website for organic search is a matter of doing the right things, and doing those things right. Utilize SEO best practices, and use free online tools to track and improve your results. Here are a handful of tools that can help analyze and improve your efforts on both counts.

First, you need to know how well you site ranks today across your list of key search phrases on the most popular search engines. Two tools that automate this process are:

Search Engine Rankings from Mike's Marketing Tools

Search Engine Keyword Position from SEO Tools

To optimize your rankings, your most important keywords should have a density in the range of 3-5%. To check keyword density, use this tool:

Keyword Cloud from SEO Tools

Page content is the single most important determinant of your search engine rank, but crafting proper meta tags is also critical. Meta tags aren't difficult to write for anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML, but you use an automated tool to create them such as:

Meta Tag Generator from AnyBrowser.com

To check and optimize your meta tags for length and relevance, try this tool:

Meta Tag Analyzer from Widexl

All of the tools above assist with internal SEO, but external efforts—generating relevant external links to your site—is crucial as well. This tool tells you how many external links to your website have been detected by each of the major search engines:

Link Popularity Tool from SEO Tools

Finally, my favorite overarching, tie-it-all-together in one SEO analysis tool:

SEO Analysis Tool from SEO Workers

These seven tools will go a long way toward maximizing your SEO efforts. Looking for more? Knock yourself out trying the 51 SEM tools outlined in Essential Tools for the Search Engine Marketer from MediaPost. Though focused on tools to assist with online advertising campaigns, some of the tools on this list are also quite helpful with SEO efforts.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

samedi 27 octobre 2007

Automne, entre deux saisons

L'automne reste une saison étonnante... Aujourd'hui, la photo d'en haut à droite. Toujours mon coin préféré pour courrir. Les jardins de l'ile, à Roquemaure. Grand soleil. Soleil froid, sans nuage. Avec autour de moi les couleurs de l'automne avancée. Ces vignes qui ont été vendangés il y a peu, au début de la coupe du monde de rugby... ou fin de l'été, selon son référentiel temporel.

Aujourd'hui d'ailleurs, c'était agréable de courrir sous ce ciel sans vent. Trés agréable, même si j'aime aussi à me promener sous le ciel d'hier.
Et celle dessous à gauche, c'est hier soir. Le ciel, tel Yorito, le héros du trés beau dessin animé "Sola", j'ai pris en photo le ciel. C'est con, mais je trouvais l'image jolie. L'olivier provencal contraste un peu avec le ciel trés sombre.

La suite ? Pour moi, c'est demain départ à Saint Hilaire Cusson la Valmitte, la maison d'enfance de Falconette. Le haut Forez, à la limite entre Loire, Haute Loire et Puy de Dome. La cheminé est une obligation, dans ce village de 300 ames (et autant de vache).
Cet été, nous avions fait du vélo. Les images de dessous sont des prises de vue dans les chemins. C'était déjà trés vert en Aout. Aujourd'hui, les couleurs doivent être magnifiques : je me languis d'essayer le Lumix TZ3 que j'ai entre les mains... Peut être pas à vélo : les chemins doivent être trés glissant...

(Intermède pour Lomig, auteur du magnifique blog "Expression libre" : le TZ3 est plus difficile d'accés que mon ancien Kodak Easyshare. Notamment pour l'acquisition automatique des images par Windows. Je suis un peu déçu de ne pouvoir tirer le plein parti de l'utilitaire Windows qui est performant : cet appareil photo est reconnu comme une cléf USB, dommage.
Sinon, bien qu'il soit plus lourd, et plus compliqué, j'adore l'utiliser... Je trouve qu'il prend des beaux clichés, et les photos de nuit sont vraiment pas mal du tout... Viens ici, tu verras ce que ça donnes ^__^)

Intermède passé, revenons à nos vaches du Forez, départ demain donc. Et ce soir ? Pas de Sochaux - Marseille, à mon grand désarroi. Triste de louper un match de mon équipe préférée. Non, un repas avec ma maman politique, qui m'a bien remonté le moral y 3 semaines... J'en avais besoin. Et des anciens compagnons, amis maintenant, mais plus vu depuis longtemps. Y aura de l'émotion dans l'évocation d'anciennes cantonales ou le référendum de 2000 sur le quinquennat (je me souviens de mes arguments du non, heureux d'avoir eu raison à l'époque...).
Oh, je sais qu'il y a aura des moments difficiles pour moi. Les élections locales de Mars 2008 seront inévitablement évoqués. Ainsi que mon role. Celui que j'aimerais avoir, et celui que différentes personnes aimeraient me donner... Encore faudrait il qu'elles s'accordent entre elles pour avoir la même vision de moi... Et puis me demander un petit peu mon avis aussi. Que je donnerai. Mais pas ce soir : j'ai envie de passer une bonne soirée...

Peut etre je blogguerai demain. J'avais envie d'écrire sur les franchises de santée... Oh, je maitrise mal le sujet. Mais pareillement à ma colère suite à cette blague du Grenelle de l'Environnement, il me semble, une fois de plus, que les deux items "raison" et "bon sens" (nom de la liste municipale avec laquelle je fus élu...) sont deux mamelles sur lesquelles ils seraient bon parfois de venir se ressourcer... Et j'ai l'impression que cette énième réforme du système de financement de la sécurité sociale en manque énormément, de raison et de bon sens...

Enfin, j'en parlerai demain. Ou au retour de mes vacances. Là, je vais manger.

PS : La musique est une chanson que j'ai eu au moment de la dernière montée cette aprésmidi... Une chanson tirée du dessin animé Blood+, qui reste un des meilleurs de ma fin 2006. Le genre de musique qui, quand tu as un coup de mou, te refait partir la machine trés vite, trés bien... C'est bien de courrir en musique.

vendredi 26 octobre 2007

What is the True State of Search Marketing?


On Wednesday this week, MarketingSherpa hosted a presentation on Search Marketing Trends and Tactics (that's the link to the PDF; the audio is here). The same day, Bill Gadless at the B2B Web Strategy Blog wrote a post on The True State of B2B Search Engine Marketing. Combining information from the two paints an interesting picture of the current search marketing landscape.

Bill notes the gap between high interest in search marketing and the low actual adoption. In his words, "everyone’s intrigued; but very few are yet investing much of their budget with the help of a professional SEO firm." He concludes by writing, "The lack of attention SEO and PPC are receiving from B2B marketers is troubling."

Research from MarketingSherpa, on the other hand, demonstrates that the businesses who are investing these areas are seeing substantial ROI and increasing their spending. Overall, roughly 40% of web marketers plan double-digit increases in search marketing with Google next year; about a quarter plan similar spending increases on other PPC programs; and 40% also plan to increase dollars devoted to organic search optimization.

In addition, MarketingSherpa reports that SEO and PPC campaigns are rated as providing the second- and third-highest ROI of marketing tactics, trailing only house list email marketing. These tactics beat PR, direct mail, offline advertising and online banners. Their study also reveals that repeated landing page testing and optimization drives the greatest improvement on ROI for SEM campaigns.

So why the gap between the heavy spenders and non- (or very light) spenders? My own experience indicates that one answer is "bad experience." Time and again I've seen well-intentioned but inexperienced marketers throw money at PPC campaigns only to:

- Bid a single default amount across all keywords;
- Write and run a single ad;
- Point all clicks to their home page;
- And then wonder why their ROI is terrible (or not even measurable).

I don't mean to be too harsh here as none of us knew how to optimize SEM campaigns when the web was young. But over time, those who have focused on web marketing have learned the importance of bid optimization, ad and landing page testing, and other SEM best practices that drive high ROI from search marketing programs.

A second reason may be another research finding from MarketingSherpa: more than half of respondents said that it was somewhat or very difficult to hire in-house SEO and SEM expertise.

But whether done internally or externally, companies need to either transition from the "interest" stage in SEO and SEM to the execution phase—or continue spending scare marketing dollars on lower-ROI tactics.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Grenelle environnement : une juste cause permet elle n'importe quoi ?

En Septembre 2003, le gouvernement de Jean-Pierre Raffarin augmente le gasoil de 3 centimes d’euros le litre. Après avoir mis un terme à la TIPP flottante, cette bouée d’oxygène pour le portefeuille du pékin moyen, Raffarin décida d’augmenter le gasoil « pour raisons écologiques ». Toutes les recettes supplémentaires devaient permettre de développer de ferroutage et les véhicules propres.
Octobre 2007, à quoi ont servi ces 3 centimes d’euros le litre supplémentaires ? Des véhicules propres ? A part la Prius de Toyota, au prix bien peu écologique pour le porte-monnaie, très peu. Ne parlons pas du ferroutage. Mais voilà, les taxes eurent augmenté à l’époque. Et comme c’était pour la bonne cause écologique, chut ne disons rien : protéger la planète demande privations et sacrifices…

Le Grenelle de l’Environnement accouche donc de cette idée révolutionnaire : faire payer, une fois de plus, l’automobiliste. L'enemi désigné de la planète. Notamment via une vignette écologique, et la taxe carbone chère aux Nicolas Hulot et Sarkozy (augmentant le carburant de 10 centimes le litre). Des éco-taxes dont personne ne devra se plaindre : politiquement incorrect malheureux ! Toi, automobiliste moyen, français moyen, tu paieras pour sauver la planète ! Les transporteurs et autres professionnels de la route continueront à payer l’essence moins chère, les entreprises continueront de se voir exonérer de taxes sur les carburants, mais nous, toi, moi, nous, non. C’est nous qui allons sauver la planète… (aux armes citoyens comme dit la chanson…)
Le pompom de la pomponette, c'est que, d’après les informations ce matin, ces éco-taxes financeront des "baisses de charges pour les entreprises"… Encore une fois, c’est toi et moi, couillons moyens, qui sommes les pollueurs à abattre et qui devont sauver le monde par notre porte-monnaie...

J’en ai marre que ces « bons sentiments » permettent d’aller, une nouvelle fois, ponctionner le français moyen. Le ferroutage, qui peut s’y opposer dans l’idée ? Ca coûte 3 centimes de plus par litre au gars qui va bosser… 5 ans après néanmoins, on peut se demander l’efficacité d’une telle mesure, mais ce serait presque politiquement incorrect. Là, on nous demande un nouvel effort, pour « sauver la planète »… Qui oserait être contre, sous peine d’être taxé d’égoïste ?

Allons plus loin dans mon raisonnement, dans ma colère du jour. La canicule fait un carnage sanitaire en 2003. Parce que les pouvoirs publics étaient absents et totalement dépassé. Résultat ? Pour « la solidarité entre les générations », vous, salariés, travaillerez un jour de plus gratuitement. Pour vos aînés. C’est beau comme du Brassens… Dans le même genre d’idée, le cancer et Alzheimer sont des fléaux. Mais peut on quand même contester cette idée de franchise sur les dépenses de santé qui, une nouvelle fois, frappera le français moyen ? Même si est mis en avant une cause oh combien légitime, et qui personnellement me tient à cœur ?

Une cause qui mettra tout le monde d’accord, et derrière des mesures franchement contestables, je n’aime pas cette politique. Trop de mort sur les routes ne valident pas, à mon sens, cette frénésie policière quand les gens rentrent du travail sur des "zones pièges". La défense des droits d’auteur et de la création n’autorise pas ces nouvelles taxes sur les supports numériques, mettant les prix en France largement au dessus des moyennes européennes. Et la sauvegarde de la planète n’implique pas forcément cette culpabilisation du quidam moyen par cette demande nouvelle de sacrifice.
Surtout que pendant que la vignette sera mise en place en France, les voitures étrangères continueront de polluer. La Prius ne verra pas son prix baisser. Et les entreprises américaines et chinoises continueront de fumer.
Mais le français moyen aura fait sa pénitence : le monde est sauvé. Pour combien de temps ?

PS : j’aime bien la photo de mon ancienne voiture… Ma ZX d’époque, acheté en 98’, pendant la coupe du Monde. J’en ai fait et connu, des choses avec elle… Dans l’ensemble, des belles choses. Dans le coffre, le chargeur CD qui ne jouait pas encore du Kajiura… Et à coté, l’ancienne voiture de mon papy, qui mourra un jour d’hiver 2003’ sur le parking de l’usine à mon papa… Quand le Rhône déborde, il ne fait pas dans le sentiment. J’ai eu un peu de peine quand même…

jeudi 25 octobre 2007

Première photo, devant la cheminée

Je parlerai demain du Grenelle de l'Environnement... (sérieux, des choses m'ont bien échauffé...). Mais ce soir, première photo prise avec mon nouvel appareil photo.
Pour l'instant, je trouve le Panasonic TZ3 moins ergonomique que le Kodak... Mais aprés 5 ans avec une marque, il faut un temps d'adaptation : normal.

Photo de votre cher serviteur devant sa cheminée, un verre de Lirac (Domaine Beaumont) à la main. Et France Football de la semaine dernière. Oui, c'est une pose que j'ai prise : mon salon n'est pas comme ça. Et oui, demain j'irai dehors jouer avec l'appareil photo, mais ce soir il pleuvait.
La pluie qui donnait plus de force au plaisir de boire du vin devant la cheminée...

(maintenant, comment avoir une connection PC optimale ? on verra demain...)

mercredi 24 octobre 2007

Book Review: Value Acceleration


The central contention of Value Acceleration: The Secrets to Building an Unbeatable Competitive Advantage by Mitchell Goozé and Ralph Mroz comes down to three points: 1) virtually every functional discipline in the modern organization (accounting, engineering, production etc.) is now run using established processes; 2) marketing and sales organizations are broken because they lack such processes; 3) companies can create an "unbeatable" competitive advantage by incorporating an overarching sales and marketing process, borrowing principles from the manufacturing realm.

Goozé and Mroz argue that marketing (defined as the entire process of determining customer needs, guiding product development based on customer and competitive intelligence, promotion and sales) is the central function of every company—it aligns marketplace needs with the organization's core competencies. Therefore, "An integrated-process model and objective management methods to manage that process lay the foundation for realizing the potential of marketing/sales."

The authors make a compelling case—up to a point. Particularly on the product management side of marketing, many organizations struggle to implement effective practices, or have reasonably solid product management processes but lack integration with the promotional end of marketing. In the words of the authors, "The "front-end" marketing skills—such as positioning and opportunity identification—and the "integrative" marketing skills—such as integration with product development, sales and corporate strategy—are not well understood." Getting the "front end" of marketing right us crucial because, to cite one example used in the book, "80% of HP's and Canon's revenue comes from products less than two years old."

Among the book's highlights:

- "Competitive advantage, therefore, goes only to the risk takers—to those who pioneer useful new management techniques." That may well be true, but small businesses constitute the bulk of the American economy (and many others) precisely because as companies grow, they tend to become more risk-averse.

- "Among all corporate functions, marketing alone has the distinction of not having a well-defined process by which it is practiced." The authors propose a promising answer: an overarching product-management-promotion-sales process based on a "customer manufacturing system" and borrowing principles from manufacturing, such as constraint analysis, continuous improvement and lean thinking.

- "Why is there no well-accepted marketing process today? The first and most obvious answer is that there isn't even a common answer to the question `What is marketing?' Ask 100 managers and marketing practitioners to define marketing and you'll get 150 different answers." There is no overall process because there is no common definition.

- "There is no consistency [in marketing processes] over time or across products." This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that the average tenure for a CMO is less than two years (optimistically; I've seen figures closer to 18 months). While that's enough time to install a process, it's not enough to really establish it as part of the organizational fabric. This presents a chicken-and-egg question: are CMO tenures so short because they don't implement effective, overarching marketing processes, or are such processes rare because corporations chew through CMOs too quickly?

- "[A common problem is that] too much attention is paid to gaining new customers, to the detriment of existing customers...There [is] a strong likelihood that [companies lose] existing customers to the competition while...working hard to attract replacements."

- As familiar as that last point likely sounds, this one will probably resonate even more with most marketers: "If you ask sales people where the constraint or bottleneck is in your marketing/sales process, we find the answer is invariably in only one of three areas: 1) Your prices are too high; 2) They need more leads; 3) They need more new products or services. In our experience working with companies to identify the actual constraint, this is rarely where the constraint actually lies." Ouch!

- "A set of sales activities not organized into a process is nothing more than a chaotic, random group of events. The inevitable outcome—surprise!—is a chaotic, random group of results...The only way to 'manage' or 'improve' a sales function that is not process-driven is to swap out sales people and hope for better results. Sound familiar? That's the way many sales organizations are run."

Although the central message of the book is compelling, I do have several issues both small and large with the book. Among the small issues:

- The overall tone of the writing is dryly academic, and could have benefited from a lighter treatment in places (though in fairness, the authors do quote Yoda at one point). Here's a sample: "Using a causal modeling technique known as structural equation modeling (SEM) or pathway building combined with constraint theory, it is possible to obtain correct results from this approach using a widely applied set of questions." Whew, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

- PR is NOT a lead generation activity; it's about awareness and credibility building.

- The proofreading is sloppy in spots. Example: "Clearly spelled out in these of processes is a detailed list marketing responsibilities at each phase from a product development perspective." Huh?

And among the large issues:

- "A useful process model...defines the information flows between the elements and sub-elements of the process; thus ensuring that marketing/sales is an integrated function, and that the information it operates on is complete and accurate." Because the authors use manufacturing practices as a model for marketing, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the fact that marketing deals with people, not parts. Yes, anyone can theoretically make the right decision given complete and accurate information, but getting such information is more challenging than the authors concede. Unlike production parts, people bring biases, assumptions, and other mental baggage to the process, so the trick is to be able to make good decisions based on information that is fundamentally BAD (my acronym from my competitive intelligence days for "best available data"), with recognition that the information at hand will always be less than "complete and accurate."

A further complication here is that human behavior is much more complex than the physics of manufactured parts. If I perform operation A on part B in the prescribed fashion, over and over, I should get pretty much the same results (within tolerances). But the same ad campaign can produce radically different results from week to week based on seasonality or just random factors.

- The authors' description of the dysfunction of most marketing departments (they devote an entire chapter to this!), while containing many valid criticisms, is a bit overdone. While their central contention—the marketing discipline in general lacks an all-encompassing process framework, and could benefit greatly from having one—is valid, few marketing departments in quite as bad shape as the authors describe. The lack of an overarching process certainly doesn't mean that there are no processes in place, or that management techniques from the manufacturing world, such as continuous process improvement, can't be or aren't already being applied (having started my career as an industrial engineer before moving over to marketing, I was applying this approach an ERP company a decade ago).

- In their discussion of misalignment between selling and buying processes, the authors write, "End-of-the-period purchase incentives are another common misalignment...you are training your customers to expect an incentive. As we write this, the U.S. automobile industry has been running "incentives" for so long, that most customers won't buy a car without one any more."

While the observation that car makers could optimize their profitability by ceasing to offer incentives may be true in theory, in practice they have created for themselves a "prisoner's dilemma"—they could all make money by dropping the incentives, but any single manufacturer that tried this would quickly lose business to those who continued the practice. The authors provide no answer to this quandary.

- The chapter on "Breakthrough Thinking in Sales" is the weakest in the book. The authors advise sales people to "Map your customer's buying process. There is no step 2. Now you can stop selling and start making customers." There are (at least) three problems with this approach:

1) Customers are most likely to have established buying processes in place for frequently purchased items, where the roll of sales is primarily to act as an order-taker, not true "hunting."

2) Different customers have different buying processes: small companies buy different than large ones, public companies may have different processes than private firms, and government agencies purchase differently from private sector organizations. Practices may also vary by industry. If there are a dozen (or more) different buying processes to model depending on any variety of factors, is there really a "process" to mirror at all?

3) For infrequently purchases products and services, or entirely new offerings, there is no established buying process in place to reflect. Sales people require the skills to guide the customer through the purchase.

- The authors emphasize continuously throughout the book the importance of solid product management in designing the right products for your market. Yet, despite the one example cited to the contrary (an odd one at that—IBM, the company that famously missed the PC revolution, which was launched by two guys in a garage), large and even midsized companies rarely introduce truly new products. They are very good at developing incremental improvements, but the aforementioned risk-aversenss of larger organizations make them ill-suited to designing entirely new products. These are most commonly created by visionary entrepreneurs in small companies willing to risk everything to bring an idea to life. As noted above, the personal computer wasn't invented in large company; neither was online music distribution (which the record companies were too short-sighted to capitalize on; that took the work of a 19-year-old), online video sharing (YouTube) or a host of other innovations.

- Finally, there is this: "This book has been about both the necessity of process management and about the need for a process model of the corporation's single most critical, non-out-sourceable function: marketing/sales." [Emphasis mine.] Whoa, while product management may be very difficult to outsource, the notion that marketing can't be outsourced would certainly be news to the 3,000+ marketing agencies in the U.S. (and many more around the world). And if sales can't be outsourced, how does one explain the existence of brick-and-mortal retailers, ecommerce companies, wholesalers, distributors, VARs and other external sales channels?

Still, despite its flaws, Value Acceleration: The Secrets to Building an Unbeatable Competitive Advantage presents a compelling case for, and a useful description of, a unified marketing/sales process model that could benefit many companies. It deserves to be read, if sometimes with a dash of skepticism, by every CMO, aspiring CMO, and marketing executive, as well as non-marketing executives who want to understand why marketing and sales sometimes seem like dysfunctional, disorganized parts of the organization—and what can be done to fix the problem.

Other blog reviews of this book:

Six Sigma Blog
Meaningful Marketing

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

lundi 22 octobre 2007

New on WebMarketCentral: Marketing Careers and Events


Two new sections have recently been added to the fastest-growing web marketing portal—a Marketing and Sales Career Opportunities section, powered by CareerBuilder, and an extensive calendar of Marketing Events.

The Career Opportunities area enables you to search for jobs by category, including Advertising, Public Relations, Graphic Design and B2B Sales. You can refine searches by location and keyword, and access a variety of job-seeker tools. For those who are hiring rather than looking, this section also provides an array of tools for employers.

The Marketing Events calendar features marketing-related event dates and descriptions from around the world, displayed by week and frequently updated. Use this page to make sure you don't miss any important events (such as the upcoming Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas) or to promote your events.

These two new sections continue to expand the B2C and B2B marketing resources available on WebMarketCentral, including the top marketing books, web marketing news, marketing-related blogs and the web's most extensive listing of marketing and advertising-related trade publications with editorial contacts and RSS feeds.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

jeudi 18 octobre 2007

Blog Marketing for Non-Bloggers


Rarely do I drop what I'm doing to read a newsletter article, but that's what happened when I came across Elge Premeau's Using Blogs to Attract Attention (Without Having Your Own) in the RainToday newsletter. Premeau accurately points out that while writing your own blog is hard work, promoting your company, product or service through blogs doesn't have to be: "60% of bloggers have not updated their blogs in the last 60 days...So, why not tap into the audiences other blogs attract (presumably the blogs that are updated more frequently) and participate in the blogosphere without doing the hard work of creating and marketing a blog?"

Premeau recommends commenting on popular (and relevant to your business, obviously) blogs as a way of getting exposure and demonstrating your own thought leadership in your field without making the commitment to your own blog. She helpfully provides advice on how to find relevant blogs to comment on, track them, and write appropriate, productive comments.

Commenting is a great way to start a relationship with influential bloggers. Once you have that, it's much easier to reach out to ask them to write about your product or service, or even offer to write an expert guest post for their blogs.

At the least, you should probably be monitoring the most influential blogs in your industry to follow their commentary on your industry, markets, and possibly your company—just as you would monitor relevant trade publications and industry analysts. But whether your blog strategy starts with tracking, commenting, or outreach, Premeau's article provides an excellent guide to finding and monitoring key blogs in your area of interest.

She also writes the eMarketing Strategist blog, which I'll be adding to my favorites.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

mardi 16 octobre 2007

WMC Interviews: Dale Underwood


This week I caught up with Dale Underwood, CEO of EchoQuote, an automated lead capture web service provider. EchoQuote enables B2B companies to automatically create customized price quotes based on the requester's email address and distribute lead information to an internal sales team or channel. The philosophy behind the product is simple: between your website, analysts, publications and social media, prospects can now learn pretty much everything they want to know about your product or service before ever contacting you—except the price. EchoQuote fills that gap, on a pay-as-you-go pricing model that minimizes risk.

WebMarketCentral (WMC): What did you do before EchoQuote? What’s your background?

Dale Underwood (DAU): I’ve been directly involved with information technology my entire career. I started out as a datacenter operator (I worked in the computer center at Virginia Tech while in high school), turned programmer, sales engineer, salesman and finally business owner. In 1998 I co-founded Marzik, a Value Added Reseller (VAR) focused on selling enterprise storage solutions to the Federal Government.


WMC: How and why did you get started in this business?

DAU: By 2004 I noticed a change in the business climate; the self-service nature of the Internet was empowering our customers to research and learn about the products we were selling. As a VAR it was becoming tougher to remain the “subject matter experts” when customers were not only using the latest gear everyday but they also had the Internet to supplement their research. I felt it was time to try something new and so, in January of 2005, my partner bought my share of the business. Marzik was a very positive experience and I owe a lot to my former partner.

I took some time off but it didn’t take long to begin thinking about building a new business. I liked the VAR business but it was missing one thing—innovation. The VAR business has not really changed much over the years so I came up with a plan to improve it. The plan focused on building a Self-Service platform that would benefit everyone involved in the enterprise sales process; the end-user, purchaser, large system integrator (prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, EDS, etc.) as well as the manufacturer’s sales and marketing teams. The end result was a VAR with this incredible internal infrastructure; my analogy was a bicycle with a jet engine. I quickly saw the value of the engine and decided to separate it from the VAR business and market it as a service to product manufacturers. I obtained a patent on the process in early 2007 and EchoQuote was born.


WMC: Who do you target, that is, who is your ideal or typical client?

DAU: Although our Self-Service Pricing model could be used across a wide variety of industries, we tend to stay within the IT product manufacturer segment simply because they are the quickest to adopt new technical processes; their entrepreneurial spirit is also a good match for our own. Our ideal client is a small to medium size IT product manufacturer (under $100 million) that has a good product but is just not getting the traction it deserves. Small tech companies are more aggressive and tend to judge value on results which aligns perfectly with the “pay for results” model of EchoQuote; it’s literally risk free.


WMC: Who do you view as your competitors, and what separates your offering from theirs?

DAU: Our primary competition is newness of the concept more so than choosing another service. There are many outstanding SEO and PPC products and services that drive web traffic but we have found very few that truly address the issue of filtering out good, qualified opportunities. EchoQuote was designed and written from the ground up because there was nothing in the market that addressed the B2B pricing dilemma—“How do we empower the prospect to select and receive a custom price quote while maintaining control at the sales edge?” Many B2B marketers assume they have “seen something just like it” but they are usually talking about product configurators or shopping carts. Our B2B solution is about connecting people; in our case connecting qualified prospects with the sales and marketing teams.


WMC: What’s your "elevator pitch"—how do you describe the value your service brings to your customers?

DAU: EchoQuote is a web based service that captures more qualified opportunities earlier in the sales cycle. We empower a potential customer to select and request custom pricing that will be delivered within minutes while alerting the appropriate sales team of the opportunity.


WMC: How do you market and promote your business?

DAU: Right now we are simply focused on making a huge impact on our existing customers and it is working. One client has uncovered over $20 Million in qualified opportunities in the first half of 2007. B2B Marketing is about visible, measurable results and with examples like that we expect the word to spread.

As for external marketing, I personally feel expert B2B marketing bloggers are a good first step for us. I am also learning a lot through my membership with MarketingSherpa and am excited about the upcoming Demand Creation Summit.


WMC: What’s the biggest or most important marketing lesson you’ve learned since you got started in all this?

DAU: Your product or service must translate to successful customers; everything else is just noise.


WMC: Anything else you’d like to add?

DAU: I’d like to thank all of the B2B marketing bloggers out there for their continued insights and lively discussions.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

vendredi 12 octobre 2007

The TruthLaidBear Comes Out of Hiding


If you're not familiar with The Truth Laid Bear, it's a kind of cool blog tracking site that's been for the past three years by the eponymous N.Z. Bear (no one knows what "N.Z." stands for except that it's not "New Zealand"). Today, the Bear came out publicly. Here's the bulk of his message:
    Folks:

    I hope you’ll forgive a brief commercial interruption. After five+ years as a pseudonymous ursine fellow online, the time has come for me to step out from behind the curtain.

    Hi ! My name is Rob Neppell. You may know me from such websites as The Truth Laid Bear and Porkbusters. I’m not actually a bear, but I play one on the Internet.

    The occasion? I am now ready to publicly announce the real "big thing" I've been hinting at for some time: TTLB is now part of my new company: Kithbridge, Inc.
    I’ve described Kithbridge as follows:

      Kithbridge, Inc. was launched as an evolution of one of the blogosphere's original and most successful blog-tracking sites, The Truth Laid Bear. While The Truth Laid Bear provides a portal and blog search engine for individual bloggers and blog-readers, Kithbridge provides customized technology, services, and strategies for businesses, political campaigns, nonprofits, and other organizations which seek to fully engage with the growing and dynamic world of the blogosphere and new media.

    I’m pleased to be working with a small group of great clients who have come on board already, and am now ready to open the doors and invite more on in.
So I checked out Kithbridge. "Innovative and effective strategies bring the power of blogs and new media to your organization"? The company sounds like a bit of an indirect competitor to me (or perhaps a future employer? One never knows.), though Kithbridge appears to be targeting the political market. The company has assembled an interesting package of offerings:

  • Blog tracking: while there are other ways to do this (Google Alerts for example), The Truth Laid Bear has some nice graphical tools that Kithbridge will be capitalizing on, which probably makes this feature worthwhile for organizations or individuals who garner a lot of blog coverage.

  • Custom Blog Feeds: "allow(s) clients to incorporate relevant blog posts seamlessly into their own web pages"—interesting, but it isn't clear what technology they are using for this. There are two ways to incorporate blog feeds into a website (that I'm aware of; there may be others): Javascript or PHP. Javascript is much easier from an administrative standpoint, but the feed content is invisible to search engines, so this method provides no SEO benefit. PHP is trickier but more search engine friendly, so it's what I use to post blog feeds and news feeds on WebMarketCentral.

  • Strategic Consulting: here are their questions, with my commentary.
    * Should my website include a blog?

    Probably not, but there are many other ways to use blogs for promotion. I'll address this topic in a near-future post.

    * How do I find out when bloggers are writing about my organization?

    Again, Google Alerts, Technorati...or Kithbridge.

    * How can I use new media to increase visibility of my company?

    Blogger relations, social media outreach and interactive PR for starters.

    * Who are the bloggers I should be reaching out to—and who are the ones I need to worry about?

    This is tricky and tedious. If Kithbridge can automate this process, they've definitely got something.

    * How can I get bloggers “on my side” to promote my products, services, or cause?

    Again, blogger outreach through interactive PR.

I'm a fan of the TruthLaidBear site and wish the now-public Mr. Neppell and his colleagues the best of success with Kithbridge.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

jeudi 11 octobre 2007

The New "Relations" in Interactive PR

The umbrella term of "public relations" (PR) has always covered a number of specialties: media relations (primarily), investor relations, analyst relations, community relations, even employee relations. The social networking of Web 2.0 and interactive PR has added two new "relations" to the mix—let's call them market relations and blogger relations.

Market relations is the practice of writing news releases (not press releases) that are targeted directly at your prospects rather than journalists (though media folks may pick up on these as well). This is a central concept of David Meerman Scott's recent book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR (reviewed here). While press releases are about you—you've released a new product, or hit a milestone, or signed a new partner alliance for example—news releases are about the interests of your market. They aren't designed to promote your product or service directly, but rather to position your company as a thought leader.

News release topics include new white papers you've produced (the findings, not the white paper itself), relevant commentary on recent news, results of studies you've done in the course of business, new ideas, how-to content posted to your site or blog—in short, any content that is relevant to your industry, of interest to your prospects, and that positions your company as experts in your field.

Distribution is also different: while press releases are dispersed via major newswires and directly to journalists, market-focused news releases are sent to targeted bloggers and through online distribution services such as PRWeb.

Blogger relations is similar to media relations, but requires a different approach as it must appeal to non-professional journalists who are often writing more out of passion than for money.
I've written previously here about blogger outreach, following up on two excellent guest posts by PR guru-ess Cece Lee (who also incidentally recently posted my comments on the topic of "sincerity"). Appeals to bloggers need to be direct, personal, relevant and transparent.

Used properly, the social media tools of Web 2.0 give forward-thinking PR professionals new ways to build awareness and corporate credibility through market relations and blogger relations.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom