Podcast | Marketing Darwinism

Every firm I speak to wants to better position themselves as thought leaders in their specific area of Technology. And for good reason – better margins, better awareness, better leads, more qualified leads. Moreover, it changes the dynamic of the conversation from one of WHO are you to HOW can you help me with my problem. But creating Thought Leadership is not so easy. Sure you can get someone in your organization to write a white paper for you that you can send to trade pubs, email out to existing clients, post to your website and buy keywords to point at it that drive you leads. But Quality writing and Quality writers are hard to find – You don’t see very many schools offering – Thought Leadership for Tech Firms 101. Nor do you hear kids saying they want to grow up to be a Thought Leadership writer someday. That’s why this book Thoughts on Thought Leadership is one of the best compilations of ideas on how to create better thought leadership if have read EVER! With that in mind I had to get Bob Buday from The Bloom Group on another podcast to keep drilling for more ideas on how to make my process and hopefully your process for creating thought leadership better. Give a listen. More Thoughts on Thought Leadership About Bob Bob Buday is a co-founder of The Bloom Group and has been a researcher, marketing strategist, and writer for consulting and IT companies for 15 years. Prior to launching The Bloom Group, Bob for 10 years was director of marketing communications at CSC Index. He played a leading role in making the consulting concept of “business reengineering” a household word, directing Index’s extensive publications, PR, and survey research activities. From the development and marketing of reengineering, Index’s revenues grew from $30 million to $250 million in less than a decade. Bob was instrumental in the development and placement of two Harvard Business Review articles. He launched and directed the firm’s popular Insights Quarterly management publication, its annual study of information systems management issues, and its 1994 study of reengineering initiatives, which The Economist said was the most extensive study of reengineering to date. He also played a key role in promoting three best-selling books. Transferring the lessons learned from marketing consulting concepts to the marketing of other complex products (particularly IT), Bob co-authored “Marketing Breakthrough Products,” published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999. His most recent Harvard Business Review piece, “A Consultant’s Comeuppance,” was published in the February 2003 issue. Bob’s passion for research and writing about the business implications and applications of IT began in 1985, when he joined InformationWeek magazine as a senior editor. At InformationWeek, the No. 1 magazine on information technology for senior IT and business executives, he led coverage of the strategic use of IT and the software industry. Before joining InformationWeek, he was a business writer at The Orange County (Calif.) Register, where he wrote news and feature stories on companies in the real estate, consumer products, health care, IT, retailing and other industries. He has a B.A. in communications studies from Penn State University and did graduate work in an MBA program at California State University, Fullerton. The post More Thoughts on Thought Leadership first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

Discovering and connecting with the people who will help your business thrive in today’s social economy is vital especially when attention has become a precious commodity! As a PR and Marketing specialist it is becoming mandatory for businesses today to identify the communities that are actively defining and shaping the future of your business in places like blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, as well as traditional media. Much more than a Social Media monitoring solution, BuzzGain can help you reveal the influential voices and corresponding conversations that are happening about your product or service so that companies can listen, learn, and effectively engage in mutually beneficial relationships. BuzzGain is an ideal DIY solution for PR check out their white paper the 5 Steps to DIY PR Pricing for BuzzGain starts at $99 per month for companies under $100m in revenue, $100m – $1 billion is $500 per month, those with over $1b is sales is $1,000 per month. And don’t miss out on the BuzzGain’s 15 day free trial offer – you can be accelerating your companies PR in matter of minutes! Accelerate your PR with BuzzGain – a podcast with Mukund Mohan About Mukund Mukund Mohan founded BuzzGain, the leader in Do It Yourself PR. He has founded and successfully sold 3 startups before BuzzGain. Prior to founding BuzzGain, he served as the Vice President of Marketing for Inovis, a leading B2B Community Management software company. Before Inovis he was head of product marketing for Mercury (Hewlett Packard) responsible for the strategy and customer success of the company’s Application Management solutions. Mukund studied at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County pursuing a master’s degree in computer science and holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering and computer science from the University of Mysore in India. Full Disclosure: BearingPoint is a Beta Client of BuzzGain The post Accelerate your PR with BuzzGain – a podcast with Mukund Mohan first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

We live in an age of skepticism about all forms of consumption. The diffusion of our skepticism is accelerated by the Internet and makes the sincerity even more pressing. So it’s no surprise that the world of business — specifically in the realms of advertising, branding, and marketing — has to once again ennoble the concept of sincerity, which is to say, they have to simply be sincere and do work that is bounded by and radiates honesty. Marketing too often over promises in the hope of attracting prospects but the product or service under delivers in the execution. Warren Buffet once said – “Trust is like the air we breathe. When it’s present, nobody really notices. But when it’s absent everybody notices.” To explore this topic further I interviewed Romi Mahajan who recently wrote a piece in Internet Evolution on this topic. Listen to our podcast and advice on how to be more sincere in your marketing efforts … Sincere Marketing – a podcast with Romi Mahajan About Romi Romi Mahajan, Chief Marketing Officer. Romi Mahajan is Chief Marketing Officer of Ascentium Corporation, a leading interactive marketing and technology consultancy. Prior to joining Ascentium, Mahajan spent over seven years at Microsoft Corporation where he held the title of Director of Technical Audience & Platform Marketing. Earlier in his career, Mahajan started two boutique consulting companies specializing in technology and finance joint ventures between U.S. and Asian companies. A well-known speaker on the technology and media circuit, Mahajan currently serves on the Executive Customer Advisory Board of Ziff-Davis Enterprise and has been a panelist at the Windows Connections, United Business Media Leadership, Microsoft Tech-Ed, Web 2.0, Interop and other conferences. His articles on technology have been published in Siliconeer, Silicon India, TechNet Magazine and in a number of proceedings and journals worldwide. Mahajan graduated from the University of California Berkley at the age of 19 with a Bachelor’s degree in South Asian Studies. He also received a Masters degree in South Asian Studies from the University of Texas in Austin. The post Sincere Marketing – a podcast with Romi Mahajan first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

A year and a half ago when I was researching how to start a wiki and looking for best practices in wikis – there was little information out there about it. So I decided to reach out to our internal consultant and found out there were already 6 wikis within the BearingPoint organization all built to do collaboration for various teams! I once read that 90% of collaboration happens in email – which is a shame since that really isn’t collaboration – it’s almost the opposite of collaboration! The goal of collaboration is to include as many people to get the best thinking on any given issue. If you are thinking of starting a wiki or working on launching on you need to hear what Eugene Lee the CEO of SocialText has to say about wikis, collaboration and enterprise 2.0. Secrets of Starting a Wiki – a podcast with Eugene Lee About Eugene Eugene Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors at Socialtext. Lee assumes day-to-day management and operational control over all aspects of Socialtext’s business, including driving product direction and development, strategic alliances, and scaling the sales, marketing and support organizations globally. Lee comes to Socialtext from Adobe Systems, where he led Adobe’s enterprise marketing and vertical market segments. Previously, he held several executive leadership roles at Cisco Systems, ranging from Vice President (VP) Worldwide Small/Medium Business Marketing to VP Worldwide Enterprise Marketing. Lee also held key management positions at Banyan Systems, including General Manager for the messaging business unit. He was co-founder of Beyond Inc., developers of the award-winning BeyondMail product, and holds four patents in messaging, workflow and privacy technologies. Lee has a B.A. in Physics and B.S. in Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard College and an MBA from M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. The post Secrets of Starting a Wiki – a podcast with Eugene Lee first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

As the economy twists and turns with more layoffs mounting – having a strong personal brand is becoming ever more important from a career perspective. But what does that mean? Do you launch a blog? Do you start a Twitter account? Do you launch your own Vlog? Or maybe some combination of all of the above. To get some more clarity on this I interviewed Dan Schawbel the author of the Personal Branding blog. He will also be releasing a new book called Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (due out with Kaplan in April 09). In my opinion, Dan is also the hardest working guy in Social Media posting 10 times a week on his blog, publishing his own magazine and book as well as having a full time job as the social media expert for EMC! How to create your own Personal Brand? About Dan Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He is the author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 2009).” Presently, Dan is a Social Media Specialist at EMC Corporation, which is one of the leading technology companies in the world. He has helped revolutionize the way EMC communicates and collaborates with all stakeholders. He has spearheaded the company’s Twitter, Facebook, social media press release/newsroom, social bookmarking and blogging strategy in the past year. Dan has introduced a whole new generation to personal branding, as he opens up new opportunities and strives to elevate the practice. His Personal Branding Blog is consistently ranked in the top 70 marketing blogs in the world by AdAge, and has achieved syndication from Forbes, Reuters and Hoovers. Dan publishes Personal Branding Magazine, is the head judge for the Personal Brand Awards and directs Personal Branding TV. He has written articles in major magazines and online resources such as BrandWeek Magazine, PRWeek, About.com, Web Worker Daily, T & D Magazine, Small Business Opportunities Magazine, MarketingProfs, Advertising Age, TheLadders.com and The American Marketing Association. He is a frequent media commentator, cited in such outlets as Fast Company, ABC News, Boston Globe, Monster.com, Young Money Magazine, BNET, ReadWriteWeb, Providence Business News, Marketing News, Brand Strategy Magazine (UK) and Yahoo! Finance. The post How to create your own Personal Brand? first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

These days many professional services and technology firms looking to differentiate themselves lean on an age old technique of creating thought leadership. But truly differentiated and provocative thought leadership is actually hard to come by. Most of the time, it is just interesting theory without any proof. Moreover, does the thought leadership actually drive the business and create sales or is it just content for content sake. To get a better understanding of this space I decided to interview Bob Buday the co-founder of The Bloom Group whose firm specializes in the creation of cogent and well differentiated thought leadership. Bob is also the co-author of a new book Thoughts on Thought Leadership which is a great resource for anyone working to create thought leaders in their organizations. How to develop Thought Leaders About Bob Bob Buday is a co-founder of The Bloom Group and has been a researcher, marketing strategist, and writer for consulting and IT companies for 15 years. Prior to launching The Bloom Group, Bob for 10 years was director of marketing communications at CSC Index. He played a leading role in making the consulting concept of “business reengineering” a household word, directing Index’s extensive publications, PR, and survey research activities. From the development and marketing of reengineering, Index’s revenues grew from $30 million to $250 million in less than a decade. Bob was instrumental in the development and placement of two Harvard Business Review articles. He launched and directed the firm’s popular Insights Quarterly management publication, its annual study of information systems management issues, and its 1994 study of reengineering initiatives, which The Economist said was the most extensive study of reengineering to date. He also played a key role in promoting three best-selling books. Transferring the lessons learned from marketing consulting concepts to the marketing of other complex products (particularly IT), Bob co-authored “Marketing Breakthrough Products,” published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999. His most recent Harvard Business Review piece, “A Consultant’s Comeuppance,” was published in the February 2003 issue. Bob’s passion for research and writing about the business implications and applications of IT began in 1985, when he joined InformationWeek magazine as a senior editor. At InformationWeek, the No. 1 magazine on information technology for senior IT and business executives, he led coverage of the strategic use of IT and the software industry. Before joining InformationWeek, he was a business writer at The Orange County (Calif.) Register, where he wrote news and feature stories on companies in the real estate, consumer products, health care, IT, retailing and other industries. He has a B.A. in communications studies from Penn State University and did graduate work in an MBA program at California State University, Fullerton. The post How to develop Thought Leaders first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

Marketing is the interface a company builds to interact with the marketplace and the customer base. The marketing group, combined with the sales force, is the point in the company where the market understanding resides. This should be the group that drives the company, that sells the marketing vision and message internally, and if that is not happening or doesn’t seem appropriate, there is something seriously wrong. Big M Marketing focuses on the broader more strategic use of marketing have having solid processes in place to take advantage of this. I sought the advice of Dave Guzeman president of Mindpik and author of a recent book called – Driving Marketing Success with Big M Marketing. Proven Big M Marketing Techniques About Dave Dave Guzeman Mindpik’s Mastermind, has combined sophisticated technical savvy with keen marketing instincts for over 30 years. A veteran Silicon Valley marketer, Guzeman founded the Mindpik consultancy in 1988 to develop sales and marketing programs for new product launches, startups and turnarounds. Guzeman directs all of Mindpik’s efforts to build business plans for capital acquisition or sales of companies or products to targeted markets. Mindpik clients have included semiconductor powerhouses like Signetics (now Philips) to inventive start-ups like Music Semiconductor and u-Nav microprocessors. Prior to starting Mindpik, Guzeman held executive marketing positions including VP of Marketing at Zilog and VP of Marketing & Sales at ZyMOS. At the latter, he was responsible for introducing the industry’s first PC clone chipset, a release that triggered the PC clone avalanche. Guzeman started the Advertising and PR department at Intel in the mid-seventies where he worked with the company’s founding partners to launch the legendary 8080 microprocessor which set the architecture and instruction set Intel still uses today. Guzeman came to Intel from Teledyne Semiconductor, his first stop in Silicon Valley, where he served as the Digital Product marketing Manager after graduation with a BS in Physics from Aurora University in Illinois. The post Proven Big M Marketing Techniques first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

Stop everything you are doing and listen to this podcast! Seriously, if you have never met or had the opportunity to listen to Avinash Kaushik you must hear this podcast – I guarantee you will learn something from this podcast. Sometimes you meet someone so passionate about something that it’s contagious and if you listen closely you can hear me firing off emails to my team in the background about what I am hearing and learning on this podcast. I had the opportunity to do a podcast with Avinash to discuss some areas where marketers are doing things right and wrong but all of them are simple but extremely powerful uses of web analytics to make their websites and businesses better on the web. We also took some live Twitter questions as we were doing the podcast. But stop reading this and start listening to Avinash – its 25 minutes long but positively electric! Secrets of Web Analytics – a podcast with Avinash Kaushik About Avinash Avinash Kaushik is the author of the recently published book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. 100% of Avinash’s proceeds from his book are donated to two charities: Doctors Without Borders, The Smile Train. Avinash is also the Analytics Evangelist for Google and a co-founder of Market Motive. As a thought leader Avinash puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of web research and analytics, and combines that with this philosophy that investing in talented Analysts is the key to long term success. He is also a staunch advocate of listening to the consumer, and is committed to helping organizations unlock the value of web data. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences in the US and Europe, such as eMetrics, Ad-Tech, iCitizen, and SES. You’ll find Avinash’s web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor. Here are two links to posts about the dashboard (the first one was the one I had promised): The “Action Dashboard” (An Alternative To Crappy Dashboards) Five Rules for High Impact Web Analytics Dashboards The post Secrets of Web Analytics – a podcast with Avinash Kaushik first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

There is no doubt the speed of change in the media space is blinding. New tools become available to marketers and individuals alike nearly every week. If you have ever felt like it is hard to keep up (and I know I have) then this book is for you. Admittedly, Paul Gillin wrote this book for the 90% of marketers still trying to figure out social media, I can tell you it makes and excellent resource for even the most polished social media expert. Paul covers topics like how to sell your social media program to by making a strong case, how to be a good listener using DIY tools across many types of media, how to find and court influencers, how to make social media worthy content and measuring results. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of his book and really enjoyed reading because it gave me ideas I can put into play immediately. Check out my podcast with Paul as we discuss some of the Secrets of Social Media Marketing. Secrets of Social Media Marketing – a podcast with Paul Gillin About Paul Paul is a veteran journalist who’s always been fascinated by the leading edge of technology innovation. Paul is a veteran technology journalist with more than 24 years of editorial leadership. Paul was founding editor-in-chief of TechTarget, one of the most successful new media entities to emerge on the Internet. Previously, he was editor-in-chief and executive editor of Computerworld . Currently, he writes the social media column for BtoB magazine. His critically acclaimed new book,The New Influencers, is about the changes in markets being driven by the new breed of online publishers. Published by Quill Driver Books in spring, 2007, it is in its third printing. His second book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, will be published in the fall of 2008. Paul specializes in advising business-to-business marketers on strategies to optimize their use of online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively. He is particularly interested in social media and the application of personal publishing to brand awareness and business marketing. Paul is an accomplished speaker and media spokesman. He has keynoted more than a dozen technology conferences, including annual user group meetings for IBM, Oracle, Cognos, Business Objects and J.D. Edwards. He has also spoken at scores of other events about technology trends and social media. His ability to translate complex technology topics into plain English has made him a favorite source for journalists. He has been widely quoted in newspapers and on the airwaves, including appearances on CNN, PBS, Fox News and MSNBC. Paul is a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research and he chairs the social media cluster of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. He blogs at www.paulgillin.com. The post Secrets of Social Media Marketing – a podcast with Paul Gillin first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.

Normally email and profit don’t go in the same sentence at least in the minds of most B2B marketers – but actually they should. Everything has a cost associated with it and email is no exception – so this podcast focuses on how much lift in revenues and profits you can get out of your email program if you are in B2C or B2B marketing. To accomplish this I decided to speak to Steve Webster, Chief Strategy Officer from iPost who has published several case studies on the topic of improving profits via email. Don’t miss he views on this topic. Using Email to Improve Profit About Steve Stephen Webster leads iPost’s Sales team and co-founded iPost in 1996 to address the need for well-designed, professional email services and software. Prior to founding iPost, he worked on email systems for an IBM-funded consortium called ITC, and served as engineering director for the award-winning Z-Code, co-founded by iPost’s CTO, Bart Schaefer, PhD. Webster is a frequent keynote speaker on behavioral targeting, profitable and effective email marketing, and cross-channel marketing programs. He holds a BSEE from Carnegie Mellon University. The post Using Email to Improve Profit first appeared on Marketing Darwinism.