As marketers we need to remember that we are not the only suitors engaging our target prospects.  We are competing against endless channels of information feeding into their inboxes, handhelds, news feeds, social networks, so on and so forth.

What can you do to spruce up your content?

Content will always be king but it also important to compete on a visual level. Every customer-facing asset, be it your website, whitepapers, datasheets, email blasts, newsletters, business cards, blogs, etc., should be formatted to invite, entice and motivate. Think of it as visual ergonomics for your brand and collateral.

You can start by taking a hard look at your existing marketing arsenal of campaigns and assets and try to pinpoint areas (and we all have them) that could benefit from a little simplification and refinement. Pay extra special attention to  text-heavy sections and try to find ways to translate some of the content into visual media, such as a  2-3 minute video, a well-designed diagram, or a nice stock image. As the old adage goes, “a pictures says a thousand words”.

Other ways to sharpen your content include bulleting whenever possible, and incorporating attention-grabbing headlines.

Don’t forget the Golden Rule!

As marketers we work hard to understand and anticipate the needs of our existing and future customers. But when it comes to getting their attention, we mustn’t forget to “treat other’s as you would like to be treated”. You can do this by incorporating YOUR own tastes and tendencies into the design process. Consider your answers to the following questions:

• When you visit a website, what navigational elements typically catch your eye?
• What navigational elements typically annoy you?
• What color schemes and graphics catch your attention?
• What elements of a datasheet make it interesting and scannable for you?
• At what point do you lose interest in a vendor’s video?
• What makes you choose to trash certain emails over others?
• Do you have a personal aversion to pop-up ads?

We’re more alike than we think

At the end of the day, we are all consumers of information. And what we choose to consume goes beyond just an interest in a topic—a lot of the time something beckons our attention and makes it easy for us to grasp the gist within a few precious moments. Once you take a step back and evaluate your own behavior as an information consumer, you’ll find that you have more in common with the audience you’re trying to reach. Treat them to the same design elements that pique your interests.

For additional tips, check out  How to Train Your Content to Get Your Audience’s Attention on Search Engine Guide.

Pivot Conference surveyed a group of brand marketers targeting the 18-34 demographic and revealed that more than 87% of them will increase social media marketing spending in next 12 months. While the overall results indicate that these marketers are enjoying positive results with social campaigns, the general sentiment is that more time, energy, and money is required to expand reach and measure results.

On the other side of the fence, Jacob Morgan of CMSWire referenced a recent study from the Brand Science Institute in his post on why so many social media strategies fail. The BSI report polled 563 marketers across 12 European countries and exposed alarming statistics that include 81% of companies do not have a clear social media strategy while only 7% understand the value of customer interactions.

What can we gather from these polls?

These studies are interesting because they reveal how little we marketers really know about how social media works and how to measure it. For example, you have those who are largely invested in social engagement but are still wary about where to go and how to achieve measurable ROI. Then there are those who simply get lost in the social circuits and fail to effectively engage with their target audience.

Overall, as marketers we are faced with the dilemma of how to build a ‘strategy’ around something that is constantly evolving and requires frequent evaluation.

So, You’ve got the drive. You’ve got the budget. Now what do you do?

Social media strategies are unique to each organization. What may work for some might not work for others. However, the key to devising a successful strategy is to first establish a mission for your program. This involves identifying the pain points of your target customers and generating discussions in social forums.

Staying focused and committed is also very critical. As Morgan points out, your social media strategy should be built-in to your overall business plan. Make your approach and expectations official by establishing a company-wide policy around social engagement.

And finally, don’t forget to keep an eye on the Jones’. By staying up to date on social trends and practices, you can find new and creative ways to spruce up your social effort.  The beauty of social media is it has infinite possibilities especially as more tools and platforms are added to the pot. Just remember to stay consistent, focused, and informative.

A recent blog post by Caroline Ruggiero, the Customer Enablement Manager at Marketo, has challenged me to ‘re-think’ my approach to email marketing. In her post, Ruggiero brings up a good point regarding the ideal time to send an email blast – if there is such a thing. Marketers past and present have devised their own theories regarding the best time to blast – with consideration to the best day of the week and the optimal timeframe to accommodate the many times zones.

My Preconceived Notions

I have (and currently continue) to faithfully ascribe to the gospel of never blasting out on Monday mornings for fear of getting lost in the email onslaught that greets a new week, or on Fridays for fear of getting overlooked in the end of week wrap-up before the weekend.

A Reversal of Thought

My rule of thumb has always been Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays, preferably at 7:00am Pacific Time so as to not interfere with lunchtime on the East Coast. And never, ever, ever on weekends because your hard work will definitely go unnoticed and it will all be a wasted effort.

Or will it? As Ruggiero points out – the information that crosses our desks daily has increased – so have the channels that bring it in. People actually bookmark (we’ve seen this ourselves) or store incoming mail for future reading because there isn’t enough time in during the workday to consider every email and newsletter that crosses the screen.

Why Reconsider Your Scheduling Strategy?

An organization’s mailing list is one of the most valuable marketing assets and should be treated with respect and concern. Email blasts can sometimes fall by the wayside as other social media platforms provide faster and immediate ways of staying connected. However, your database consists of people who have gone out of thee way to opt-in to your world. They deserve direct contact and consideration. Maybe we’ll be doing our valuable contacts a favor by lessening their email load in the middle of the workweek.

Challenge Your Current Approach

Perhaps it is time we rethink our preconceived notions about the best time to blast. A/B testing, as Ruggiero suggests, is a great way to gauge one day against the other. Also, before scheduling that next campaign, I encourage you to consider your own email consumption habits and when you prefer to be pinged with new content.

The projects were so successful, that we’ve decided to launch our ‘webinar repurposing’ as a service called MarketPlane Webinar Concentrate. Although it’s just been a few weeks since we launched, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response and interest from B2B technology companies.

In a nutshell, here’s how the service works: We mine the high quality content buried in your webinars to deliver more concise and focused multimedia marketing materials that highlight your product message and share your value proposition.

What Makes Webinar Concentrate So Interesting?

What seems to be so interesting to the companies we’ve spoken to so far is not only the cost savings (as compared to building new content), but making some of their really great content more accessible.

For example, you’ve got a webinar that includes a customer interview and they say some really great stuff about how your product solved their business problem. Now, the problem is, this great story starts at the 30 minute mark of the webinar, which means for someone to see it, they have to be willing to put in the time and they are most likely already convinced your product is a good fit for them.

But what about the first-time visitor to your web-site? The prospect, who has just started their fact and information gathering process? Well, watching the webinar is just too much time to invest but watching a 5-7 minute Webinar Concentrate snippet featuring your customer interview is a perfect fit.

What our Webinar Concentrate service lets you do is take some of your “heavier” content and repurpose it into social media content that suits any audience, from a first-time prospect to the existing customer who wants to find out more about your products. Webinar Concentrate is a cost effective way to turn your lengthy quality content into more accessible bite-sized pieces.

If this sounds interesting to you – give us a call or drop us a line. We’d be happy to talk about how Webinar Concentrate can help you leverage your existing webinar content to create your next set of social media product marketing materials.

If you like to find out more, take a look at the little video we put together.

Webinar Concentrate from MarketPlane on Vimeo.

Forrester Senior Analyst Tom Grant recently provided an interesting take on harnessing a community’s collective intelligence. In his recent blog post Thought Leadership: Bringing The Community Into Research In An Agile Way, Grant announced a new role-based research program designed to tap into the company’s newly formed community of product marketers and managers to build research around the topic of thought leadership in the technology industry.

Forrester’s approach to role-based research brings in expert opinions from the people in the field. An online development document serves as the collaboration tool where members comment on the research as it is being developed. The end result will amount to a valuable, informative resource made for the community and by the community it serves.

The spirit of this method aligns with the community building strategies we practice at MarketPlane. Integral to our approach is working closely with clients to build user communities and social media strategies around two-way interactions with prospects and the industry community. Our goal is to guide our clients toward meaningful communication that encourages community inspired content.

Encouraging community input and collaboration sends a message to members that their feedback is important. And harnessing their insights lets you fashion meaningful content around the real-world examples of your community members and industry.

A well organized product community is the most valuable marketing asset of any business. It can be your window to the outside world, and your path to establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

What better way to keep the lines of communication open than by seeking insights from the people you are trying to engage and keep engaged? Give your audience a say in what you say. Next time you draft a white paper, poll your community members for input. Or try building out your editorial calendar around suggestions for topics made by your customers.

Traditional Data Center Management

Traditional data center architectures favored single applications deployed on physical hardware operated at low rates of utilization. Server and application provisioning often took days, if not weeks. Hardware capacities were optimized for peak load with additional safety margins for risk factoring.

For the monitoring and management of traditional data center architectures, a high proportion of the cost was tied up in the initial configuration and deployment of the system. Depending on the size and complexity of the environment, management system deployments could take months – and in some cases even a few years. Once a system was configured for existing infrastructure, change management was complex. As new systems were added they also needed their own configuration, further lengthening the cycle.

Virtualized Data Center Management

With virtualized or cloud systems, physical servers host multiple virtual machines with pooled risk management of resource capacity from multiple, distributed servers. These capacities can be located on-premise in private cloud architectures, or in remote datacenters operated by a 3^rd party provider, as a public cloud infrastructure. In both cases, virtual machines and applications running on them are provisioned, operated, augmented with additional resources, moved to different physical servers or locations rapidly – based on fluctuating demand and business service policies. The setup and tear down of additional capacity is done in a span of minutes.

Clearly, the velocity of change in cloud systems is an order of magnitude different from those of traditional datacenters. This demands a new class of management capability, as doing things the old way becomes even more expensive and ultimately infeasible. Consider just the speed of change management required to track new cloud resource provisioning alone. Not all management systems can keep up with the transient nature of cloud infrastructure – resulting in blind spots or gaps in monitoring visibility.

5 Strategies to Consider on Cloud Infrastructure Management

Ensuring successful operations management of cloud infrastructures requires selecting the right management tool attributes, and setting up the appropriate organizational structure, processes and goals.  The five strategies outlined in this article touch all of these aspects, including the adoption of an overarching operational management vision to drive continuous improvement.

1) The Cloud Management system must be flexible and adapt to changing environments

The speed of change in cloud infrastructures is truly unparalleled, particularly compared to traditional data center architectures. The first and foremost requirement of a management system is therefore the ability to manage that change. Regardless of how powerful or sophisticated, if a management system is too complicated to configure, or if it requires manual processes to perform change management – then it is fundamentally misaligned with the dynamic nature of the cloud environment.

What is needed is an automated and flexible monitoring system that stays in tune with the infrastructure. Examples of how this can be achieved include the use of business rules written for generic entity types and events, like say, the set up of a new virtual machine. A management system with business rules or management mechanisms that require static or individualized specification of, say, an IP address or MAC number in its logic – would fall out of sync with the cloud environment very quickly.

The management system should also be able to constantly update configuration information on a near real-time basis – to accurately assess health and availability of monitored infrastructure. Without these updates, relative health assessments of elastic capacities may only provide an incomplete picture.

2) Use Open management systems and a federated architecture

Cloud-based architectures decouple the physical hardware and capacities from application loads. In this type of environment application logic or databases can span multiple server or storage components glued together by a virtualization layer. Even the most comprehensive of management tool suites cannot provide a single interface to capture the configuration, performance and availability metrics across such distributed systems including network, systems, storage, and application silos. Therefore, the best approach is to select a set of management tools that support an open architecture and that share information on a federated basis.

For example, operations management tools need to continuously check for ‘context’ against external management systems and update their understanding of a managed entity over time. Lack of a complete information set should not impede the speed of monitoring and management provisioning. This is bound to occur in a dynamic environment where capacities move or grow / shrink based on application load and business service policies. A proprietary management system would have a very difficult time keeping in step with the changing environment without significant manual intervention.

An open management architecture, on the other hand, can help establish one or two-way communication between management systems relatively easily – using standard web services based interfaces and collection modes. These include SNMP, log acquisition and analysis and SOAP/Java/XML based web services integrations.

While achieving any level of integration can be complex, the increasing collaboration between cloud vendors across operating systems, provisioning, database and even open source components is moving things forward. As a result, more operations management vendors are offering native integrations with critical cloud components in a productized form.

3) Focus on service delivery, not component health or availability

Operations teams in traditional data center environments are tuned to track and maintain utilization and availability of physical components within their own silos. In a virtualized or cloud environment the silo-based divisions must dissolve.

For example, the configuration of virtual switch or storage layer requires ownership from across the network and systems organizations. Instead of focusing on an individual silo, operations organizations need to build teams focused on end user service delivery. It’s worthwhile to note, that the concept of “service” may have a different meaning and involve a separate cross section of the stack when considering say, IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), PAAS (Platform as a Service) or SAAS (Software as a Service) modes.  While IAAS would include hardware, operating system and virtualization middleware, both PAAS and SAAS would include participation from related application specialists (either software development or business end user focused).

4) Vary SLAs by type of service and by customer

In an elastic environment, absolute utilization levels have less significance as the concept of ‘capacity’ itself becomes relative. Similarly, with higher interdependencies and redundancy among virtual system components, focusing on individual virtual infrastructure whether it be server, network, storage or I/O entities, offers less return in terms of ensuring end user service availability.

The success of a cloud service should be measured by the nature of the offering. For example, for application layer cloud-based services, end user experience focused SLAs offer the most objective performance metric. This type of SLA abstracts away the complexities and componentization of physical and virtual hardware and software.

For an infrastructure focused cloud-based service however, the end user experience metrics would be impacted by a poorly architected application. In this case, tracking total “out-of-SLA” duration of contracted resource capacities may be more useful. Of course this demands a sophisticated management tool to capture the service profile as a capacity aggregation between multiple virtual entities. When new entities come online their impact on the pool needs to be correlated with federated information to enable their correct assignment in the service chain.

Finally, since cloud service providers serve multiple customers, whether internal or external, the “multi-tenant” operation of the management platform is a necessary attribute. At a basic level this means that different customers and business units can be supported with integrations and access that does not compromise privacy and information security. On the SLA front, this would imply that the management system allows the set up of tuned SLAs based on individual customer discussions and negotiation.

5) Make closed-loop cloud infrastructure provisioning in alignment with service monitoring – the operations management vision

For most organizations, each of the strategies outlined above will take considerable process change, tools realignment and instrumentation, as well as technical implementation.  However, this last strategy is still the hardest. That is why we mention it as a vision for the operations organization to progress towards over time.

The long term goal of operations management should be to create a closed loop process orchestration between virtual infrastructure provisioning and service monitoring metrics. Simpler rule based versions that link provisioning to infrastructure capacity levels are already possible through, say, a VMware vMotion or XenMotion. However, the complexity of meshing together multiple types of virtualized entities across the infrastructure stack, their relative capacities and normalized by their impact to, say, an end user focused service level makes the actual realization of this goal unattainable even in the mid-term.

However, striving towards this vision, in realization of end-to-end adaptive computing, can benefit all other strategies for cloud systems operations management.

- Ronnie

(First published in the Virtual Strategy Magazine on July 9, 2010).

1. Don’t be a crowd pleaser. Just as YOU can’t be all things to all people – neither can your SEO content. The Internet is a boundless arena chock full of players vying for the attention of countless spectators. Make your voice heard over the bellowing crowds by choosing long tail keywords that cater to your target audience. Bear in mind, the broader the key term the more competitive and expensive it is. Who wants to pay more when you can gain quality with less?

2. Don’t forget about conversions! Site traffic is all well and good but what good are site visits if they render no actionable results? Wouldn’t you rather have 5 qualified conversions than 5,000 visits? Though site traffic is important, it’s not always the best method for evaluating your SEO strategy. It’s one thing to get people to your site, but the real value comes from keeping them there and encouraging engagement and action!

3. Don’t give bad directions. A click is a wonderful thing and if you’re lucky enough to get some, make sure it’s worth your “clickers” while. Direct visitors to a targeted, easy-to-understand landing page that immediately lets them know who you are, why they are there and what they are supposed to do. Remember – a click is like a first date; it may be your only chance to make a good first impression–don’t screw it up!

4. Don’t be so chatty. Follow the “less is more” adage by keeping your copy simple, catchy and focused. We are living in the age of information overload and  busy schedules – these two factors work against each other so that people have little time and attention to plow through wordy and complicated jargon.

5. Don’t use keywords without a cause. Of course it’s important to infuse your content with keywords but make sure they fit the context of what you’re saying. Keywords help to improve your search engine results, but interesting copy is what entices people to click to learn more.

See, it’s not so bad.

Tell us what you think. What SEO tips have worked for you?

- Julie

• "More than half of the survey respondents who’ve embraced virtualization rely on the built-in tool provided by their hypervisor vendor, whether it’s VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, or someone else. This leaves them with two sets of tools to manage–one for the physical servers and one for the virtual environment. Only 10% of organizations have invested the time and money to implement a server management system that provides a single framework. The rest either use legacy tools that don’t adequately handle a virtual environment, or they’re doing nothing at all."

• "The decision for most companies naturally comes back to how much they can rely on the tools of the virtualization vendors themselves. VMware and Citrix have solid tools for managing their environments, and they’re perfect for the initial deployment and setup. But eventually the rest of the operations must be integrated, especially as virtualization moves beyond the server to infrastructure and desktops. In addition, mixed platforms are the reality. VMware still dominates, but a whopping 64% of organizations use or plan to use more than one vendor’s hypervisor."

If these data points represent the broader market (since we don’t know the sample composition) – it indicates that there is a lot of room for growth for multi-vendor virtualization management capabilities. Eventually, as organizations move towards managing not only the infrastructure but also the “Service” – specialist tools would need to interact (via federation) or completely give way to consolidated platforms that can bring together an end-to-end view.

What strikes us most with some players that are active in this space – is the level of innovation in tools that is occurring in the sub $ 5,000 category targeted at small and mid size organizations.

For larger enterprises the innovation spectrum has already moved on to automation and policy management via virtual machine and resource orchestration. The adaptive/ dynamic world is finally here – and IT management needs to get smarter, simpler and more embedded into the active intervention process.
 

- Ronnie

Now to the topic that the next quest on the IT Management front is really about making things simpler. Enterprise IT tools have gotten big, complex and bloated. In a way, CIO’s and IT executives are looking to drive down that complexity through automation, correlation and even new business models – like open source software. When enterprise IT Management tools configuration cost millions of dollars of professional services for each effort, it’s the vendor and system integrators that laugh their way to the bank – not the customer.

On the SMB side, they have traditionally done things simpler, but the inherent complexity and dynamic nature of the new applications and infrastructure cannot be dealt with in the same way. Their challenge is to move to a higher order management without compromising on their ability to manage their environment with a few people – wearing multiple hats of network, server, app or even security expert based on the need. Remarkably, the tool box in the  SMB arsenal is starting to look like that of a larger business. SMB’s have graduated well beyond basic network, server and application monitoring to include integrated traffic monitoring, configuration management, virtualization management, network security, event log monitoring and in some cases helpdesk management as part of one suite from one vendor. And this without the complexity and labor intensive configuration required for larger tools.

Sounds surprising? We were too at the beginning, but the innovation at the bottom of the IT management pyramid is real and accelerating.  Larger organizations may have a thing or two to learn from here – that can give them some templates as to how they can simplify their complicated, siloed and specialist-driven management model to a lower cost, generalist model. In fact, in our experience MSP’s were already leveraging this kind of multi-skilled architecture – and it’s the turn of enterprises to take a closer look. We had a good discussion on this subject with Jim Metzler last week and there were other  interesting observations that will be part of a future webinar.

For the above to happen, legacy enterprise IT Management tools need to get way simpler compared to where they are today. If they don’t customers will find other alternatives  - from among the many SMB tools that are becoming capable to address mid-tier enterprise scale problems, as also from newer startups that are starting with a clean slate to address some of the perennial enterprise IT Management issues.

- Ronnie

Overall this is a strategic acquisition and the right move for CA. Enterprise customers today demand an application-centric network management approach – that ties infrastructure investments and decision making back to application performance. It’s no longer enough to know that the network is saturated or that a device is overloaded, without the context of understanding which individual applications, between which sites, between which users is responsible for that. Moreover, end user experience management based on response times for an application is a key metric to assure the delivery of enterprise class services. NetQoS’s technology provides that critical view into in-depth application usage and response times between sites complementing CA’s other capabilities and service management story.

In fact, CA has powerful capabilities based on its previous Wily and Concord / Aprisma acquisitions to monitor, report and diagnose application and infrastructure issues and speed time to resolution. Its NetQoS acquistion will provide operations staff with even more insight helping them quickly troubleshoot or eliminate the network as a root cause of application slowness. NetQoS’s relationship and technology integration with Cisco especially in the Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) area will also be beneficial to CA. Of course, Cisco has its own designs in the space and that could be a separate discussion in itself.

The one area that will be interesting to watch will be how CA uses the NetQoS acquisition to beef up its offering to Service Providers. Certainly NetQoS data would be useful in cloud management and automation as CA notes in its  Press Release. But NetQoS has primarily been an enterprise customer focused company and the scalability of its technology to handle service provider data volumes and applications (like IPTV) may not be optimal.  That said,  there is precedence in Service Provider focused management vendor InfoVista acquiring probe technology (via its Accellent acquisition) and shaping that to sell primarily into its established  CSP client base.

With all the strategic sense it makes for NetQoS however, it is surprising that the company agreed to a deal at $200M in cash. With phenomenal growth over the last 5 years and we believe much of that profitable, NetQoS definitely seemed to have more potential – including IPO aspirations in the future. Is this a case of the economy souring up the prospects for NetQoS that they agreed to a sale at close to 4X valuation based on revenue? Although the fact that they will operate as a separate entity reporting to Ajei Gopal, CA’s EVP for Products, for the time being, may mean that the executives and employees will have access to earnout based bonuses outside of CA’s corporate structure. And with $21 M in funding over three rounds their investors have something to toast about in an otherwise dreary exit environment.

More about the repercussions of this acquistion on the other large management vendors in a later post.

 - Ronnie