Distribution & Conversion: The Fusion of Marketing and Product

Chief Marketing Officer: What’s in a Job Title?

The Product Management function for Internet companies is a Marketing function. If it’s not under Marketing in your company, it’s simply time to move it.

Marketing people can't do viral marketing.

Today’s "marketing" - viral marketing and word-of-mouth marketing - is built into the core of the product, and without the ability to design it in, marketing will continue to be expensive and sub-optimally effective, holding back the value of your business.

Today’s Chief Marketing Officer must not only straddle the fence between product specification and traditional marketing, but to be successful, remove the fence.

This isn't the Mad Men type marketer your mother warned you about - it's completely different sort:

"Marketing people can’t do viral marketing. You don’t just build a product and then choose viral marketing. There is no viral marketing add-on. Anyone who advocates viral marketing in this way is wrong and lazy. People romanticize it because, if you do it right, you don’t have to spend money on ads or salespeople. But viral marketing requires that the product’s core use case must be inherently viral." - Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 9 Notes

Marketing -- that job of creating awareness and finding new customers / users across a variety of media and channels -- is now less about paid media and more about earned media. The thing that’s changing the shape of the position is that the online product or service itself is now the biggest driver of earned marketing impact.  (Note: ecommerce remains very different - you're selling products online, not selling online products)

When people ask what I do, it’s almost impossible to communicate succinctly. As chief marketing officer, or senior vice president of marketing AND products, it’s complicated but critical to tell both stories and how they’re intertwined. And the value that I personally bring to the table is that I understand how and why they’re so intimately connected and know how to manage both sides synchronously.

If I explain that I’m in marketing, they get it the advertising part - but that’s only half my job (less these days). When I say I run product management, too, I get blank stares. I have to explain product management and that it’s not a coding position, but a general management position. (It’s somehow unique that software product managers, unlike the product managers at Proctor and Gamble, Mattel and Nestlé (who are the general managers of their products) don’t run into the same quandary.)

But, that’s changing - and it’s about time! Product Management needs more recognition as a critical function, even for startups. It’s usually the CEO or the CTO who’s the head product manager - it’s just not part of their title.

Take Instagram. Their focus on creating a passionate user network, rather than new features or platform expansion, turned that company into a tidy little acquisition. CEO Kevin Systrom understood the value of users, and [relentlessly] focused the technical team on that over all else. There were no Google Adwords campaigns, no SEO links, no paid Facebook campaigns, and hardly even a website – every bit of "marketing" was embedded the app.

As an accomplished Chief Marketing Officer for multiple Internet and software companies, building market awareness is largely reliant on a great product / service experience - and happy customers who can and want to tell their friends about it.

The customer drives marketing now. Marketing isn’t something you do. it’s what your customers and users do for you. If they like you (your product or service), it will grow (with well-executed coaxing and encouragement, and viral product design). If they think it’s OK or don’t like it, growth is slow, painful and expensive. It’s why so many companies fail – customers just aren’t delighted.

Not sure about your company? Give yourself a litmus test – run a customer survey to captive email addresses and your website to get your NPS (Net Promoter Score).  Ask just one question:

 How likely are you to recommend this product / service to a friend or colleague? 

The results will tell you how much work you have to do on your product experience with the goal of getting users completely enthused about it. (Make sure your scale is 0 to 10, not 1 to 10, otherwise you’ll be getting good information but it won’t be a comparable NPS score.)  An aggregate score of 70 or more is great - you're on your way.

Today’s successful Internet head of marketing isn’t a corporate marketing wonk, creative advertiser, or a brand builder – the traditional emphasis of a CMO. Marketing is not about paid media, brand advertising or even direct advertising. This new breed of CMO must orchestrate a blend of integrated online, social and email marketing programs that drive word of mouth and online recommendations and referrals. That means finding and leveraging happy customers as brand ambassadors and harnessing their inherent goodness. These programs are part of the product and service experience, intrinsically sharable and leverage the power of the network (and yes, the social graph). But how do you differentiate this CMO from the 'old version'?

Combining the “Chief Product Officer” and “Chief Marketing Officer” into a single role is the right call for early-stage Internet companies. My naming dilemma of the day is finding a new title for this role that encompasses both marketing and product management in a way that’s descriptive, intuitive and creative.

• Chief Experience Officer?
• Vice President of Distribution?
• Head of Customer Experience? 
• SVP of Advocacy? 
• VP of Customer Mobilization?
• VP of Customer Experience?
• Director of Social Sharing?
• Growth Hacker?

I could use your help – can you think of a job title that represents both product and marketing?

Read more

New Media, Social Publishing or just Social Media?

I get asked quite frequently what makes OleOle different from a 'social network'. The concept of tracking your online or offline network of friends, family and colleagues was never the driver for the OleOle site design, even though 'networking' features are available. It was the ability for amateur or professional writers to instantly find an instant audience of people interested in the topic they were writing about. Publishing and immediate delivery of relevant content, from multiple sources, personalized for each individual, delivered in the way they want it.

Publishing through social media, or Social Publishing, is really that ever elusive "New Media". Everything a newspaper does offline leveraging everything possible online in a true crowd-driven, automated fashion. New Media still in relative infancy and continues to undergo transformation as technology and understanding of crowd behaviour and the social network matures. The idea that blogging is dead - don't beleive the hype- is related. We're seeing a change, and blogging as we know it is evolving as rapidly as it's appeared. We're seeing far fewer independent blogs and more commercialized blogs and blog networks. Not only that, but the standard web-based blog post is changing shape - into iPhone app snippets, Twitter tweets and - get this - ListServes. There are still millions upon millions of blogs, but there are fewer independent blogs making it out of obscurity. Not because it's any harder to setup and write a blog - that's getting easier every day. Rather, it's much more difficult to get an individual blog (like this one) read. Bloggers are now finding that the laws of big numbers work, and blog networks are able to pass along Pagerank, a captive audience, and 'recommended reading' to visitors in a way that a stand-alone blog cannot. Not to mention the ex-old media writers, left to wither on the street in the past two years, are bringing their organizational maturity and editorial skillsets to the web.

So we're seeing a professionalization (not sure that's a word but we'll go with it) of blogging; networks are better able to monetize their readers in aggregate, and able to pay the blogger a bit of that. Blogs and 'collectives' are still working at generating any significant ad revenues, but lumped together with an audience around a single theme, it gets a lot better. Writers are banding together, and we're seeing publications that are challenging 'old media' sites as they grown in prominence, reliability and even scope - even without that offline "doorstep" delivery.

OleOle takes the social media concept to this new level of Social Publishing. Where it's possible to have enough content on a site about dogs or cats or maybe even cars created by a team of 5-20 bloggers, it is impossible to have enough content about a topic as big as soccer / football with a paid writing staff. Covering 6,000 professional soccer teams - around the world - would be far too cost prohibitive. Big media companies haven't done it, and will never do it - TV, radio, newspaper, magazines - nobody. But, find one (or more) passionate fans per team who are basically literate, and you've got a global publication that covers the entire sport. Fans are out there, otherwise the teams wouldn't exist - it's a matter of time before they stop relying on the AP for their news.

But how do you organize posts from 6,000++ independent blogs? Throw in millions of photos, videos and other user-generated content - how do you find it all? Its not reasonable to be 'friends' with all 16 mllion fans who follow Manchester United. Social networks aren't geared for this for sure.

Social publishing takes the concept that everyone in social network (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc) can publish things to their profile and pushes that to the public arena. Social network blogs are only available at the profile level - so you've got to know the person or have access to their profile to read the content. With organized blog publishing (TechCrunch, Huffington Post) everything is public but there's a high standard of editorial - someone manually arranges content, features it on the right page, and even commissions it in the first place. Again, impossible to do at reasonable cost for 6,000+ bloggers speaking 20 languages in 200 countries. Social publishing enables individual bloggers to self-organize their user-generated content for public consumption leveraging an underlying publishing framework. Social publishing relies on the concept of "Topic Centers" that visitors can easily find and access, and individual contributors can push their content to. Topic centers can be built around any topic the site anticipates - in the case of football it's players, competitions, teams, leagues, WAGS, etc. Finding a topic center must be easy for the user (accessible directly from their homepage) and it must be easy to navigate to, and find new ones. This requires something big - a reversion to what web 2.o brought to the world - the sidelining of those uber-cool things called 'tags'.

Tags, by their very nature, are personal. They are used on blogs to group and classify content around a specific keyword, and that keyword is completely variable based on the author's preferences. A topic center requires centralization and sharing of keywords, so that every author has equal access to publish to where their best audience is visiting. A Topic system is at the heart of the OleOle publishing platform - providing a way for authors to publish and visitors to find the right content - outside of profiles, outside of user idiosyncrasies. The topic system also drives site navigation, page generation, menus and SEO - it's the fabric of the platform matching publisher and visitor together invisibly. However, just because topics are site-wide doesn't mean they need to be static, although in the case of football they are hierarchical to some degree due to the complexity of the sport. So, you're not really giving up the personalization of tags (which can still be employed to filter submissions made by a single user) - but tags are now "personalized" for the collective editorial team, and evolve as needed.

Social publishing is the organization of social media. It's the next step in Web 3.0, social aggregation and smart filtering. Social publishing means leveraging the power of the crowd and the individual writers to publish. The organization is automated, not human, and visitors and volunteers stand in for a managing editor to both rate content and correct things published to the wrong topic centers. Where social networking is useful for keeping tabs on people you know, social publishing is the maturation of social media and user-generated content enbling groups rather than individuals.

Read more

New York Times - taking small steps in Social Media

My last post pointed at all trditional media and publishers. Apparently, The New York Times is becoming a leader in the industry and taking at least a few steps to increase traffic.

There's a lot of promise in this - the content is there, and if it can be structured for SEO it will kill other papers.

Search Engine Land

This goes for other media sites, too - optimization is key regardless of how the content gets to the site. OleOle's concentration on linking, sharing and optimization is a huge advantage for our content contributors and bloggers. More people will read their thoughts here than anywhere else on the web - because they care about football.

Read more

Newspapers Can't Find the Right Business Model

New Media means changing old media. Really.

Newspapers and traditional media seem to just "not get it". This article by David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times clearly identifies the problem - newspapers are treating online like it’s the same publishing medium as a hardcopy paper.

I visited the LA times site to view David’s article online and see what was going on. Having the print copy delivered to me every day and not reading the paper online, I'm very old school and like to touch the paper and wrestle it to the ground when it doesn't fold.

I know where he’s coming from – I’d be worried about my job and my future if I saw newspaper revenues continue their decline. And, of course nobody is going to pay for the same article online that's in the paper – its just not the model people are used to. I’m positive, however, that advertising can support a newspaper – even one as big as the LA times. Rupert Murdoch is betting on it by intending to what I think is the world's most successful (most profitable?) online subscription content – the Wall Street Journal – available for free. He surely gets it – why can’t everyone? I bet at $60M a year in subscriptions, and with 980k current subscribers, revenue at $10CPM is around $20M/year. That's not the same, of course, but open it up and make it interactive, the audience could grow to 2M+ and the # of pageviews would also increase, driving up ad rates. In 2.5 years, the WSJ could be making $100M+ online just through CPM ads.

For the LA Times specifically, it’s a great paper (top 5 in the US) but there's no just value in the online edition. Reading David’s this article online contains nothing Web 2.0 at all - it’s merely a paper reprint. This is death-by-smothering from a traditional media company, and I certainly see the cause for concern.T

Traditional Media Death 2.0: On the LA times article in question, there's no ability for readers to comment on the article or have a discussion, submit viewpoints or even link to the article. There’s no social bookmarking or sharing the article (except via email), no hyperlinks in the article to sources or related stories, and no simple way to get RSS feeds for that column / author. No submitting to Digg or any other site that would lead more readers back to the article. For interaction, there's just a link to the author's email address, which will result in the poor guy to get included in every spam list in the Ukraine and Romania. The article was clearly written for print – not for the web, and that’s just not what the web generation expects from anything online – there’s no personalization or interaction. And that's exactly how to stop online readership from expanding.

The old model of write & publish is over. If the LA Times was serious about online, they'd stop treating it as a bastard stepchild of print. Yes, there would be a difficult transition period as it would be impossible to support 900+ staffers with online revenues at this stage. But assuming a transition could be worked out and an upfront investment in the future was made, the end result would be an interactive site that fuels itself - an accredited reporter posts an article (doesn't have to wait for press time - it can go up at the right time) and that article, if deemed valuable, will be passed to others by the international community. It’s not just about servicing Los Angeles, it’s getting the news of Los Angeles and the world out to everyone who's interested – faster than any other pub.

But, it takes discipline to see an article get trashed, mocked, or relegated to the heap of articles if not valuable. Comments, ratings, and user feedback will do that – it’s a consumer-driven economy now and the good (greater distribution) comes with the bad.

However, exclusivity is really key here - articles that come from the AP are now a commodity – there’s zero value in reposting something that everyone else posts as well. News that everyone else is covering – without having a specific angle or a unique feature, source or contributor – are a dime a dozen, and only weigh down the cost structure of a paper. Cut the ‘me too’ stuff – use a feed to pull in AP articles with minimum cost and overhead – and focus only on the stuff nobody else has (or can have).

Leverage those news desks around the world - break some news - see it spread and see the credit get linked back directly to the reporter. This will drive pageviews and unique users from outside the normal geographic market, which will in turn drive advertising appeal and ad rates.

And, alongside of that, change the ad model - the advertising team must be stand-alone and not have every deal linked to the print side. The current ads on the site seem like freebies thrown in by the print ad department. Create sponsorships for sections, use non-standard ad sizes, and adios the low-revenue text Google ads and replace them with higher rev direct ads - the Google stuff is crap and it makes the site look cheap, too.

One thing David's article mentions is the Little Guy – small newspapers won’t be able to support online because they’re entirely the wrong structure. Small papers would need a new low cost back office structure to survive. Most just can’t or won’t make this transition – it would require laying off too many people – or they just wouldn’t recognize the skills sets that they need to find or keep. Good reporters, however, can and will survive – even as bloggers. The world will continue to need journalists with integrity and the ability to find news – those are not skills any technology can replace. As long as there is exclusive news, people will pay for it in one way or another.

Today’s publishers are right to say that the internet side of their business can’t support the business. But, that doesn't mean it can't forever. Publishers must make the commitment, investment and effort to build the right online experience for readers – not dangle it as a loose thread from their flagship. Until then, I expect we’ll hear thousands more stories, tragedies and complaints from traditional media who, as many entrenched industries have done in the past, can’t make the transition to the future because they're too entrenched in the past. It won’t be easy, but there is a clear path forward, and it is possible.

Read more

New in Social Media

So, here's my first blog entry, a narrative of all things social media (and football).

The trend in social media isn't going to stop - people are starting to understand that they can be involved and will start to demand it in the next few years. Users, fans and supporters are going to continue to push the traditional media to be included, to be a part of the story. Supporters want a deeper connection to teams and players - something meaningful and as 1to1 as possible, and old media just can't do that. OleOle is leading the charge here. In the next few months we're going to be blowing the doors off old media and soccer supporters worldwide will be able to connect with their favorite teams, players and other like-minded fans.

Social media will become pervasive - a part of everything, not a special thing. Just a matter of time.

Read more