AbleBrains

Oracle's Influencer Relations: Mom Are We There Yet?

A fellow Enterprise Irregular posed this question to the EI's relative to the maturity of the industry and the acceptance of bloggers @ Oracle Open World:

Especially after the Workday session where 20 of us from small and large firms all sat in same room and had a hugely productive session I thought the industry had reached a certain level of maturity when it came to recognizing enterprise bloggers. Last year Benioff even gave bloggers first row seats at Dreamforce.

Till yesterday.

Dennis Howlett, Frank Scavo and I were initially allowed to enter a session at Oracle Openworld then asked to leave because our badges did not say "analyst'. How Mike Krigsman and Josh Greenbaum qualify for that title and others don't was something I posed to Karen Tillman, the VP of corp communications - nicely. Her answer was even more bothersome - 'several different factors go into that decision" Now I like Karen and we had a nice drink afterwards, but chickenshit like this continues to happen 5 years after Nolan et al tried to break those barriers at SAP.

Another EI said:

The larger issue in the industry, that every corp comm team struggles
with, is what these lines are -- analyst/consultant/blogger/journalist. I'm in all four camps, and depending on the company and the situation I'm in a meeting under the guise of one or more of these titles.

With a response from yet another being:

It's only a challenge for corp comm teams that have not acknowledged that the lines don't mean anything. Even if you carry all four titles, so what... the objective is the same, to influence you positively in order to draft your influence in the market.

Exactly.

Workday got it right!  They're looking for insight from multiple parties with multiple viewpoints.  That's what its all about.  Not just driving affiliations.  It has been five years since SAP took down those walls.  The fact that stuff like this still happens and it happens to influential bloggers caught me off guard.   Oracle has evolved their BR function to create a credible and effective program for bloggers.  But my belly button says that there is still a lot of old thinking out there regarding the boxes that companies think they should be placing influencers into and what access they should be accorded. The lines are quite artificial.   Market influencers are market influencers and if one is important enough to a company to be invited to be there then a blogger should be accorded the access that any another influencer would be accorded.

AbleAdvisory: Does Your Language Affect How You Think?

Fascinating article in of all places the NYTimes on how your native tongue affects the way one thinks.

And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

There is data to support such a notion...

French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Where's the Personalization in the Enterprise Software Buying Experience?

Can someone please point me to all those great personalized B2B web sites?  You know the ones... they kinda ask you as you hit the home page who you are, gather some basic demographics/firmographics and then proceed to customize the content experience for you so you're more likely to find what you need.  

  I get that experience when I visit B2C web sites... Amazon for instance.  They've used past  behavior to craft a personalized experience for me that I enjoy.  And in the words of the man himself (from a 1998 interview):

 “In the online world, businesses have the opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers, both through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge...to accelerate their discovery process.

If we can do that, then the customers are going to feel a deep loyalty to us, because we know them so well. And if they switch to a competitive website, as long as we never give them a reason to switch, as long as we're not trying to charge higher prices or providing lousy service, or don't have the selection that they require; as long as none of those things happen, they're going to stick with us because they are going to be able to get a personalized service, a customized website that takes into account the years of relationship we've built with them.”

How about that? ...

 ..."accelerate the discovery process" -> make it EASY and FAST to find the content that satisfies

..."feel a deep loyalty to us: -> Brand affinity is the crown jewel of a great customer experience

...acknowledging and building upon "the years of relationship we've built with them." 

If that's what can happen in B2C environment, don't you think some of that might be useful in B2B interactions?  Is there such a chasm in thinking between what works in a consumer oriented engagement vs. a B2B oriented engagement?  I guess so.

Name me an enterprise software play today that doesn't have years worth of relationships built up with the majority of their customers.   The millions of members of the community sites associated with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are a testament to those relationships. And these community sites are quite personalized. But what about the core web experiences of these organizations... and what about (hush!) the prospects?   

Don't they deserve to have an "individualized" experience as well? Why wouldn't they? Would you agree with me that most software today, regardless of provider has "right to play" functionality?  That the capabilities of various solutions whether on-premise or on-demand aim for "good enough" equivalency? Yes, I know a lot of you may have issues with that statement and I grant ahead of time that of course each vendor has a sweet spot (or is that a 'suite-spot' ?), or their technology aligns better with the prospect's IT environment or processes  or the look and feel appeals more (OK, have I covered all eventual issues now?). So if the functionality is roughly equivalent, don't these organizations stand apart from the pack based on relationship and ultimately Brand affinity? What was that Bezos was saying about customer loyalty? Oh yeah its the key to his business.

Most sales professionals I speak to tell me that its all about the relationship.  Its the relationship that sells the deal.  Customers say the same thing!  That being said, then the earlier a firm starts building that relationship with a prospective customer and the richness of those early building blocks are keys to winning the deal. Its about getting folks to the rich content they need as quickly as possible.  Its about creating an immersive and fun experience for the prospect, who when they finally leave your site say to themselves, "wow, they had exactly the content I was looking for" (read: they made my work life easier).  "I'm going to look at these guys more closely."

Personalization is not an end in and of itself.  Personalization is a cornerstone for relationship-building. Many times your a prospect's first impression of you is online.  Don't you want to put your best foot forward?

11 Methods To Get 25 Items From 8 Platforms For 3 Reasons Using Web 2.0

I gotta tell ya. I'm tired. I'm tired of reading posts like:

...5 methods for improving your Web copy...

...8 strategies for taking your marketing to the next level...

...4 apps that rock your iPad...

...3 experiences Starbuck's should focus on to make their customer's happy...

Please... and I say this with all respect, ENOUGH!!!!  Has our attention waned so much that we can only consume short lists of information?  Have we as authors become so in need of a "read fix" that we have dumbed down our thoughts so as to be consumable in easy to digest bits?

There are folks like Seth Godin who do in fact write pretty short posts but they are not only pithy but packed. Packed full of short parables of useful information. Even his books are on the short side.  There's nothing wrong with SHORT (I'm 5'7"!!!!) but there's a difference between short vs. a dumbed down list.

The things we talk about. The things we care about are not meant to be distilled down to a few short lists. Length is not an enemy. Dullness is. Passion and creativity can't be encapsulated in bullet points. 

Don't be afraid of prose and impactful meaningful words.  Bring them back.  They are in short supply!

AbleAdvisory: FEED Webzine 2.0

One of the original "webzines" FEED has published its archives. FEED was Launched in May of 1995 and was among the first Webzines out there. FEED was notorious for breaking the traditional publishing paradigms and for exploring what it meant to use the web as a publishing vehicle.  Enjoy this... there's some good S___ out there!!!

A periodic table for information junkies

I'm a visual thinker and have done a lot of thinking on adapting the cognitive/linguistic theory around conversational implicature  to visual design with a home brewed concept known as iconic implicature. If any of you are interested, here's an example.  Imagine 2 people sitting in a class room:

Person Number 1:  Boy it sure is cold in here!
Person Number 2:  Action: Gets up  and closes the window.

Person number 1 never asked for person number 2 to close the window but implied it by stating it was cold in the room.  A simple example of conversational implicature.  Iconic implicature is an attempt drive the same types of implied meanings thru superb visual and interface design.

So now that you know the type of nerd I am, I was enthralled by this post by Kate over at Adaptive Path:

I’ll admit to being a total information visualization junkie.

When I’m stuck in a rut, shifting things around unlocks new perspectives. Reframing a problem can fundamentally change how I think about the situation and freshen my eyes to new possibilities. And having a full palette of visualization options is a great way to mix it up and uncover new patterns.

So, when I found the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, I got all verklempt. It’s a compelling way to preview different visualizations, and the organizing principle of the periodic table allows for a lot of metadata to be embedded in the summary view for quick reference.

Thanks to Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler of visual-literacy.org for this nice gift.