Here are the slides from the session.

“On closer inspection Actifio and CommVault are in fact pretty different. They’re saying all the right things when it comes to defining the next generation of enterprise storage technology. But Actifio is delivering on them – today – with the only system purpose-built to do exactly that.”

There are many good reasons to write such a post, but perhaps the best reason is to draw a clearer picture of the company’s own value proposition by explaining how it clearly differs from that of the competition. Sometimes contrasting to something else is the best way to provide clarity on what makes you special.

“Rather than work up from the complex landscape of storage, Actifio works down from the application-based requirements of an SLA…Unlike CommVault, Actifio can protect data over the IP network or within a storage network, in either case delivering application- and/or crash-consistent RPOs, and heterogeneous storage migration.”

In the end, defining what you are not (and identifying the comparative weaknesses of the competition), it makes it easier for people to understand what you are.

The simple answer is I’d like to get on a rocket ship and help it to fly far and fast.

The more detailed answer has more, well, details…

What is this high flying endeavor, you ask? Am I joining a company that is powering the social media revolution with a new service? Am I getting behind the rapid change in how we use robots in every day life? No. I am going to join Actifio in Waltham in their quest to disrupt the data management and storage markets in the enterprise, and I could not possibly be more excited.

Once I convinced my wife that I was not going to a yogurt company, I explained to her, as I explain to all who will listen, that there are three main reasons I am joining Actifio as their new VP of Digital Marketing.

1. Actifio is already incredibly impressive.

For a company that many in the area have still not heard of, Actifio is about to become very well known because their story is compelling. They solve a real problem that enterprise customers need to address - the run-away volume of data, and copies of that data, that are permeating all businesses - and they do it in an simple, elegant way that saves their customers up to 90% on their costs in this area. Good story.

They have one of the most impressive leadership teams I have ever seen, let alone worked with, and they have already had tremendous success in previous endeavors. They are also moving as fast as a rocket ship (hence the obligatory image above) and growing rapidly.

2. The opportunity and challenge is compelling.

The marketing challenge itself is compelling - how do you take all of what has become possible in the last few years via social media, marketing automation, content production and distribution, etc. and roll it into a 21st century marketing model for reaching enterprise technology buyers that puts a human touch on a technical brand and drives awareness, customer acquisition, and creates evangelists for a great product and company…wow. That is a set of questions and answers to keep one awake at night pondering and now I get to help answer them.

3. Miketrap

The last piece is about my journey to get better at what I do and continue to raise my Marketing game. Mike Troiano, Actifio’s CMO, has long been one of my Marketing heroes. He lives out loud, tells it like it is, and is compelling in how he approaches humanizing and simplifying a brand’s story and driving Marketing’s contribution to a company’s bottom line. I have been quoting his maxims in my own work for the last few years and I really could not find a better person to help me in my quest to be a better marketer. To say I am looking forward to working with him would be an understatement.

Given all of that, this is the right step for me.

I have learned a lot and worked with some great people at The Hanover. I will miss my co-workers and I am sure they will go on to do amazing things. But, for me, I am ready to change my game and to raise my game and Actifio gives me a chance to do that.

I can’t wait to get started. Game On.

Photo Credit - Stuck In Customs

It used to be that a brand stood for whatever its company defined. It was a tag line, a logo, a design treatment, or perhaps the functional essence of the product itself. In the “golden age” of mass outbound media, companies (and their ad agencies) defined a brand for us. We either embraced it or we didn’t, but make no mistake, the communication was one way.

This level of control of the communications mechanism also gave rise to the notion that the company controlled the brand itself. Just as the command and control organizational model still remains in place today in many companies, this notion that the company controls its brand persists in many organizations. But companies cannot control their brands. Just as communications have inherently shifted to be democratized and multi-directional, so has the power to control what is said about a brand and how many people that conversation may reach.

If brands are really the public’s collective perception of what a company or product stands for, or as Brian Solis has said, the “culmination of shared experiences” with it, then the power has shifted to the user or customer.

This is neither a wholly bad or good thing. It just is reality and companies are not bystanders in this process. While they cannot CONTROL a brand image any longer, they can clearly INFLUENCE perceptions of the brand and can take actions designed to lead to positive impact on their brands.

Think about the brands for which you have the greatest affinities. Why are you loyal? Why do you evangelize on their behalf?

The first and most important piece of brand strategy is to design and implement the best possible user experience for the customer. The product or service needs to be great, remarkable even. But then everything else that impacts the customer’s experience with your company needs to be equally as good. Service and support should not only be helpful, but it too should be remarkable. In a sense, the best strategy - social, branding, or otherwise - is to generally “be awesome.” In short, you should try to imagine what you would want a customer to tell their friend about your company and then engineer experiences that would help lead to that outcome.

I tell my friends about Apple’s design and function because it has an impact on me. Even the packaging on my first iPod was so well designed I told people about it. I have had multiple experiences with Fedex’s service that was so good, I literally told people about it (my son dropped a regular mail envelope with a large check in it into a Fedex box once…long story).

Beyond the “what” (the product), and the “how” (what surrounds it), the “why” (the greater mission) is often the biggest factor in the affinity customers have for a brand and the reason that they evangelize on it’s behalf. Because of this, the second part of a brand strategy is to define that mission and invite users to join it, be part of it, and contribute to it.

And this brings us back to control vs. influence. Those companies that recognize their role is to define what they want to stand for and then to live that mission across all their interactions with the public - product, service or otherwise - will be successful in establishing the brand they would want to define if they had actually had that level of control. By living their brand, rather than just messaging it, they have a better chance to influence the outcome they desire. Maybe then their customers will get tattoos of their logos…

Photo Credit by TerryJohnston

It is easy for those of us who work on forward looking strategy to become enamored of what is possible, to see a cool vision of a future state that works better. But thinking about how to apply some of my takeaways from SXSW recently made this concept, that real tangible results are the key things that matter, really come together for me.

In an era when lots of things are possible, it is even more important than ever to focus scarce time and resources on those projects that help move the ball down the field to the goal line, whatever goal that is for your business, organization, or project. Because of this, it is imperative to tie efforts that use new approaches or technology to delivering a solution for current issues and not just for future possibilities.

This is equally true for startups with new products as it is for big companies using new technology or processes. The Lean Startup and Customer Development movements, which are revolutionizing the way startups come to market, hold valuable lessons for anyone who works on anything “new”, including those in large companies. The key concepts are that learning quickly what really works is of core importance and bringing a Minimum Viable Product to real potential customers yields a faster brush with reality about the real demand in store for your idea.

What’s possible is great but support and adoption come from those current needs. This is the difference between people liking your idea and needing your product/service today, or between thinking your project sounds great for the future and acting now to allocate funding and resources. Part of this is people’s focus but the other part is their capability to understand. Put something in the context that is real to them - “we can reduce time to market with product X” - and it resonates more than a possible abstract benefit - “people will feel more connected to their team.”

John Hagel talks about how change is more likely to be driven by threats than opportunities. Beyond the fear response being stronger than the interested response, I think this also likely comes from threats being concrete and related to today’s reality. What’s possible is in the future. What’s an urgent threat is in the present or at least near term.

So at the end of the day, how do we get to what is possible? I’d argue the most effective path is via solving for current needs and communicating the benefits of applying forward looking approaches or technology to meeting those current needs. Each time we take such a step, we lay the foundation for what is possible and one day people will wake up to find themselves there having traversed a set of steps that each solved a real concrete issue.

Image by Tomasz Stasiuk

No one thinks your baby is as cute as you do. You are not the market, even if you may be a member of it. Your mother may want to see 1000 pictures of the kids, but your neighbors do not. Why then do you think your market wants to read content about your product? If they are in a buying mode, they may want information about your product, but they don’t want an ongoing relationship with product content. They don’t want to share it with their friends and followers.

Content marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing today. It delivers benefits across many programs. It can cause people to come to your site and to return frequently. It can power your organic search traffic, by letting all those pages be indexed and found and by driving thousands of links to your site, thereby raising your authority. It is the lifeblood of sharing on social networks. And, it is a way to get the influencers in your industry involved with your brand.

To be effective, though, content needs to be about topics that are not product focused. To be authoritative, they do, however, need some relationship to your industry. The key then is to develop what I refer to as “adjacent content”. What does your market and community care about? What interests them? What will enhance their professional knowledge? Once you shift your thinking to those topics that aren’t about your product, or even about the problem your product solves, potential topics will explode in volume.

In RealEstate? Don’t write about your listings or your sales success; write about pricing trends in the market. Run a grocery store? Don’t write about your specials; write about the growth of local farms in the area and the demand for their produce. Make fine furniture? Write about the new woods available from Latin America that are changing the industry.

Not the thing, the thing next to it…the adjacent content. That’s your sweet spot. Build the value of your brand by giving people value in content that interests them AND that relates to what you do. Do that and they’ll come back and read your product copy when they are in buying mode…it’s right next door to where they hang out anyway.

Image credit: Mr. T in DC

I learned long ago that the key to developing good messaging is listening to the market. Listen to customers and prospects closely. They will not only outline the problem that needs solving - thereby helping to define a feature set - they will also unconsciously “write copy” for you. Listen to enough people and you will hear the patterns of speech for how THEY would describe your product, which coincidentally is the same set of words that will resonate best with them when you sell your solution.

So back to those sales people. The same principles apply to spoken sales language as do to written marketing copy. If you listen first and pick up on the way a prospect or customer describes her business and then use her vocabulary when you speak, your words will resonate better with her. Does she call her distributors “agents”? Don’t call them brokers. Does she “sell direct” to consumers? Don’t call that part of her business “retail”.

Even more important than the words is to make sure you demonstrate a knowledge of the customer’s business. Don’t talk about selling direct if the business is purely based on a distribution network. This is basic homework. Read the company’s website before the meeting. Take note of the things that show how the organization does business and the words they use to describe it and their products. Though they may not even know it, they will appreciate that you speak their language and that they don’t have to correct your incorrect assumptions. Start the meeting by asking them to talk about their problem before you pitch your solution. Pay close attention to the words they use while speaking and use the same vocabulary when you finally do present your solution. It will resonate better with them.

It’s not rocket surgery… Why do so few salespeople get this right?

Image credit: Dullhunk

1. how often people click on a link to your site in the search results
2. having a Google Plus profile associated with your site.

I have had this site now for a number of years, both as a platform to share my professional expertise and to try to “own your own brand” and have a greater share of the top google search results for my own name (you can’t come across as knowing much about SEO if you don’t appear prominently in results when someone Googles your name…). But paying some level of attention to how I rank for my own name has also given me some insights into Google’s ranking algorithm.

The first thing I noticed a few months ago was that I was getting a good chunk of visits to my site coming in through my resume page. Many of those visits were being driven by search queries for people with resumes like mine. Clearly I was showing up high enough in those searches to get some clicks. I also noticed that when googling my name, that my resume page was the second page from my site to show up in the SERPs. Given this level of “success” (I still get very low site visitation in the grand scheme of things so it’s all relative…), I figured I must have gotten some links to the page from somewhere that was helping the authority of the page and helping it to rank. So, I checked my inbound links to that page and found…nothing! So why then was the resume page ranking higher than other pages that actually had an inbound link or two? the only answer I could come up with was that this page was appearing more in search results and getting more click-throughs from those results than any other on my site.

The second thing I noticed happened when Google+ launched this summer. I haven’t been updating this blog in quite some time (I have pledged to remedy this, hence this and forthcoming posts) but I noticed a distinct change in my ranking once I joined G+ with my Google profile. Just prior to this, my site had actually slipped to #2 in the SERPs for my name - due I assume to the aforementioned inactivity. Literally the day after I joined G+, with no other changes or activity on the site, I reclaimed the top spot in the SERPs…It’s important to note that my google profile already linked to my site, but it was my activity in G+ under that profile which drove the impact to the SERPs.

Now none of this is a remarkable discovery or something that top seo people haven’t already written about. But it was really interesting to see the evidence of these factors impacting my own site’s rankings. As I pick up my blogging again and have new fresh content (that will be shared via social channels) it will be interesting to watch how my site’s appearance in my personal branded SERPs changes… I will write a follow up post when that happens.

- When dealing with enterprise level social interactions, you can’t scale with just experts, you need to let your broader front line employees scale your social capabilities. (Charlene Li and Jaime Punishill)

- People want to join something bigger than themselves and giving them something to join helps them support your efforts. (Jackie Huba)

- Stories put a human face on statistics. Don’t forget that service is a set of experiences and not just metrics. (Frank Eliason)

- Businesses thrive on the network when they adapt to it and not the other way around. (Lane Becker)

- Businesses will more readily change in the face of a threat than an opportunity. (John Hagel)

- Measure the return on the attention of social collaboration participants not on the cost of the collaboration system. (Lee Bryant)

- Marketing going social is all about having people spreading your stories because they want to. (David Meerman Scott)

…and countless more.

I also learned that pictures of cute animals in your powerpoint deck is the new black…but that’s for another post.

But even more than these business imperatives and strategies, I had a real world set of experiences that highlighted one of the keys of Social Business for me.

Since I have returned, I have been telling people that I even more than the great sessions I attended, the conversations I had in “social” situations gave me incredible value. Sure, the parties were fun. But they served a real business purpose as well. I made some great contacts at 3AM, hanging out with great people. As I reflected on my time in Austin, I realized that this real world experience was an analog to how social media can work for business and also a guide for the best way to approach social business.

Business has always relied on personal relationships. When you have a relationship with someone, you have enough trust in them that you are willing to listen to them and willing to help them when you can. This is why business is done every day with people you meet at the rotary club, or coach youth soccer with, or see at monthly tweetups…etc. Genuinely seeing people as people and building trust with them is done for its own value and creates new friendships, but it also sets up future business. I know that if and when any of my new friends from the last week need help with something, I will be genuinely happy to be able to help them…FAR more so than if someone just cold calls me and asks for my attention.

And there is the analog between real life and social media. Companies and business people who see social media as just another message or selling channel miss the point and opportunity. Social business is an opportunity to develop relationships without needing to be in the same physical space and to do so with a lot more people - with what Mike Troiano has called Scalable Intimacy. People who pay attention to what I have to say and engage with me in social media build trust with me. People who DM me to check out their latest thing even before we have exchanged any pleasantries do not.

So my number one takeaway from Austin was a reminder that you get a lot of value from personal interactions - well beyond the fun. If we remember that aspect of human nature in social business, we’re already half way to our goals.

temporary technorati stuff: 2ENDS7A7HAFN
Photo Credit: The Plan8

Among the many memorable quotes from Mad Men that marketers can take away as sage advice, this is one of my favorites. the reason is that it gets to the heart of marketing (and selling too, if truth be told). In order to both identify the need of a market and to understand how they think about it and talk about it, you need to listen to them explain it in their own words.

Too often, companies are in love with their product and the cool features they have built to solve a problem. they love their elegant use of standards or cutting edge technology. they describe their products in terms that use the language of their industry. It makes them feel smart and they think it makes their products seem, therefore, to be the best.

They will also fall prey to the classic marketing trap of thinking of themselves as the market. They say, “if I describe this in terms of how I think about this, everyone will understand.” [In Mad Men, some of the less talented copywriters don't even do that. they just assume others are the market and assume they know how they think.]

But the best marketers are great listeners. they don’t assume they know the market. they listen to what the market wants. They don’t describe a product in their own words. They use the words used by their targets or early customers to describe their problem and that solution. Even effective market research heeds this. In one of my earliest jobs, in market research, we would always run an open ended survey (endlessly coding the free form responses) to get the best way to describe things before writing the closed ended version in the language of the targets. This lesson stuck with me through my career.

The message development came from listening, not from talking/writing.

Apparently Don Draper knew that too…one of the many reasons we marketers love the show.

Photo Credit AMC