Immersion journalism

Snapshots of Reality

What I gained as an immersion journalist in Iran

by Deborah Campbell
 
At a smoke-filled bar in the Gulf city-state of Dubai, the Filipino cover band rocks out to Guns N’ Roses as Canadian sailors on leave from patrolling the Gulf of Oman decorate their table with empty long-necked Budweisers. One of the more gregarious sailors is describing the lessons he’s learned since arriving in the Middle East. «They tell you this region is full of chaos, full of violence,» he says. «Then you get here and it’s nothing like what they say.»
 
We are sitting near the speakers and he has to shout over the band. «The people here are even more beautiful than the landscape.» He surmises on the discrepancy between portrayal and reality. «It’s the Americanization of the media. Fox News. In Canada we like to think we welcome all perspectives, but our media is becoming Americanized too.»
 
While sailors stationed in the Middle East may not be the best judges of the media — they are «end users,» like most people who partake of the news — it’s safe to say that the current emphasis on dramatic divides, war-on-terror rhetoric and «shock and awe» coverage leaves much to be desired. Yet journalists today struggle within the constraints of a 24/7 system that has, in many cases, already outlined «the story» for them, often leaving little recourse but to furnish an update or source a few quotes. For this reason, long-form journalism — narrative nonfiction, literary journalism, New Journalism, whatever term you prefer — offers a powerful counterpoint.
 
I like the term immersion journalism, which describes the kind of up-close, experiential work that has captivated me throughout my career. This work has required me to spend many months — even years — in the places I’ve covered, to learn the local languages to varying degrees of proficiency, and to conclude that the answers to the rifts segmenting our world are not to be found in press conferences or by quoting mediatrained officials alone. They are, as often as not, found among ordinary people who are living «the news» yet rarely have a voice in it.
 
There is no substitute for immersive experience, nor for taking the time to explore and understand the underlying issues. Our current media environment, with its insistence on merciless deadlines and its addiction to what sociologists call a media frame (which can be defined as preconceived notions of a story), mitigates against the best that journalism can offer. For all great journalism must grapple with reality as it is, and attempt to convey that.
 
As an independent journalist, I have had the luxury — it is a luxury — of avoiding some of the pitfalls faced by many foreign correspondents. The first is the five-star hotel, where the only customers are well-heeled professionals and other journalists — all essentially insulated from the realities they seek to cover. The second is «parachute journalism» (a cousin to «hotel journalism»), which has correspondents fly in to sort out a story in a few days, a couple of weeks at best, thus compelling them to rely less on direct knowledge than on what they’ve read in the newspapers back home by someone in the very same predicament.
 
During the six months I spent in Iran covering, among other things, the Iranian view of the nuclear issue and the election of a new president, I spent only three days in a hotel worthy of the name. Iranians are sin-gularly hospitable, and rarely did a day pass that I was not invited to one home or another, and usually encouraged to stay for extended periods. Whether sitting on the floor of a peasant’s stone hut drinking dugh (a sour yogurt drink), or enjoying a glass of tea in the goat-hair tent of a nomad, or drinking ouzo (mixed with dugh of course) with Kurdish fighters, the peshmerga, around a campfire in the trenches of a battlefield from the Iran-Iraq war, or sitting at the dining tables of Tehran’s elites, I was exposed to the contradictions, the panoply of opinions that make up modern Iran. Peeling back the layers, I found my preconceived notions challenged at every juncture. I suffered in the heat beneath the obligatory headscarf; shared water pipes with strangers; hitchhiked through mountain passes on the back of smugglers’ trucks; was arrested on the border with Iraq; and translated heavy-metal lyrics for university students who took me along to their classes. I could not have written a simplistic report if I’d wanted to.
 
The task of narrative journalism is to act as a camera lens, to capture snapshots of reality and sort out the meaning on the road to a rough sort of truth. As the late Polish literary journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, who chronicled Africa for 40 years, said of his writing, «I managed to stop for a fraction of a second this eternally fleeting life and show the image to others.» And through these images, these frozen moments, a view may emerge of places, of peoples, who are far more complex than we have been led to believe, far less easy to categorize, driven by hopes, fears and desires akin to our own. There may be, embedded in these images, hints at how we might resolve the grave conflicts threatening our world.
 
The other day, at a cafe in Dubai where I often go to write, the table next to me was occupied by two young women in conservative black abayas talking animatedly to a young man with a shaved head and a pierced eyebrow. And because I’m a practiced eavesdropper, I knew that the young women were locals from this tiny kingdom in the heart of the region’s war zones — 1,000 kilometres from Iraq, a mere 150 from Iran — and that the young man was an American Jew. And because such scenes don’t make the evening news, I will tell you what they were saying.
 
Among other things they discussed sex, celebrities, and whether they would marry someone «really hot» (they were university-aged after all). They discussed the foreign influence in the region: he thought Dubai was mimicking the United States at a time when the U.S. is losing traction globally; they just liked meeting people from other countries, since the Emirate is home to more than 180 nationalities. He explained why ultra-Orthodox Jews grow long forelocks. They explained the differences between Shi’a and Sunni Islam.
 
In lightly accented English, one of the women said, «If only everyone would sit and talk like this, people would understand one other.»
Until then, there is journalism.
 
Deborah Campbell is an adjunct professor of literary nonfiction at the University of British Columbia. The author of This Heated Place, an exploration of the Israel-Palestine conflict, she has written on international affairs for The Guardian, Asia Times, Ms. and The Walrus.
 

Observatorio de medios

Copio el link a un observatorio de medios independiente que funciona acá en la Arg. Y que vale la pena ver, ya que es lo más parecido a los observatorios de medios que existen en otros países: http://catedraa.blogspot.com/.

Está bueno compararlo con otro, que funciona hace tiempo y que está desactualizado hoy; es de la UTPBA y para variar, muy politizado y con un discurso/tono ya muy gastado, que va al choque: http://www.observatorio.org.ar/. Igual, viendo los temas que tratan y sus «investigaciones» no queda claro por qué se llama observatorio de medios.

La imagen según el joven Polanski

Por: Marina Kempny

Comparto un corto de 15′ de Roman Polanski. No lo había visto antes, si bien es muy conocido. Mas allá del mensaje, me pareció genial el tratamiento de la imagen… como si se tratara siempre de un álbum de fotos pero de fotos en movimiento. Buenísimo. Creo que para filmarlo contactó a un fotógrafo que nunca había hecho tomas en movimiento.

«Probablemente, el cortometraje más conocido de Roman Polanski… y también el primero en exhibirse públicamente. Lo realizó mientras estudiaba en la Escuela de Cine de Lodz (Polonia) y obtuvo con él cinco importantes premios internacionales, siete años antes de darse a conocer mundialmente por Repulsión».

Los primeros 90 días, clave para un nuevo puesto de trabajo

Seguimos con tema de liderarzgo y management!
Les paso parte del libro The First 90 Days, escrito por Michael Watkins.
Encontré un lugar donde bajarlo entero gratis pero no anda (o no lo entiendo), igual les paso varias paginas! Leí muy poco pero se ve interesante.
 
Y les paso el tip of the day de Harvard Business Review, que está muy bien. Según el tip, la anotacion en la agenda de hoy, por ejemplo, no sería «ir al showroom de Viva la Vida» sino «buscar en la guia T el bondi que me lleva»
 
Escriba una lista de tareas que funcione

Si usted es como la mayoría de las personas, en su lista de cosas por hacer hay tareas que le aterra realizar. Si las tareas parecen abrumadoras, suele ser porque usted las ve como si fueran proyectos completos y no como tareas individuales. Para crear una lista de tareas más abordable, divida cada proyecto en acciones puntuales y fáciles de realizar. Por ejemplo, planificar una reunión almuerzo consiste en tareas pequeñas como mandar e-mails a los participantes y reservar una sala para la reunión. Si usted escribe todas estas tareas pequeñas en su lista de cosas por hacer, en vez de un intimidante «planificar reunión almuerzo», usted encontrará que es mucho más fácil realizar las minitareas, porque cada una de ellas no requiere ni mucho tiempo ni mucha dedicación. Haga una cantidad suficiente de esas pequeñas tareas y su gran proyecto pronto estará terminado.
  
Este Tip of the Day fue adaptado de «How to Write To-Do Lists That Work», publicado el 13 de enero de 2009 por Gina Trapani en «Conversation Starter».

La pregunta clave en una entrevista de trabajo

The Interview Question You Should Always Ask

9:36 AM Tuesday January 27, 2009
by Peter Bregman

Captain Greg Davis is an outstanding fishing guide. I went out with him early one morning off the coast of Savannah, GA and came back a few hours later with several fish like the one in the picture. Most other guides came back that morning with nothing.
What makes Greg such a remarkable guide? If you were hiring guides, could you predict he would be a star?
Those of us who run businesses, departments, or teams are faced with this question all the time. How can we distinguish the stars from the merely competent? Of all the candidates whose resumés we receive, how do we place our bet on the one who will stand out from the rest?
On January 15th, 2009, Captain C.B. Sullenberger made an emergency landing of his 50-ton passenger aircraft, softly gliding it onto the Hudson River in New York City, saving the lives of all 155 people on board. Miraculous? Or predictable?
What do we know about Captain Sullenberger? If you were looking for a new pilot, could you have predicted he would have the skill, the presence, the leadership to become the star he is today?
Earlier in my career I spent four years working in a management consulting company creating models to use in hiring people. Our clients, mostly large public companies, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on research we performed in their companies to predict who would be a star performer.
Here was our process: we interviewed both star and average performers in a client company and identified the characteristics that distinguished the stars from the rest. Then we helped the company interview people and hire the ones who fit the model.
Sounds reasonable. But it’s not. It’s tremendously expensive and time-consuming. It requires intensive interviews that demand a great deal of skill; it’s only as effective as the person doing the interviewing and hiring. And even if you have the money, time, and skill, you end up hiring past stars, not future ones.
Some would argue, as Malcolm Gladwell does in his excellent New Yorker article, Most Likely to Succeed, that the only thing that predicts success in a job is actual success in that job,. That’s why financial services firms hire close to ten times the number of analysts they need and then, a year or two later, keep the ones who succeed and let the others go. Of course, that’s even more expensive and time-consuming than our modeling process.
There is a much cheaper, easier way to raise the odds of finding your Captain Sullenberger, and it’s rarely factored into the selection process. After you have narrowed the pool of applicants down to those with the skills, experience, and knowledge to do the job, ask each candidate one question:

What do you do in your spare time?
In Captain Sullenberger’s case, the first clue that he would become Captain Sullenberger the hero is that, in his teens, when most of his friends were getting their driver’s licenses, he got his pilot’s license. What did he do for fun? He flew glider planes. Which is basically what he did when he landed in the Hudson River with no engines. Extracurricular activities? He was an Accident Investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association and worked with federal aviation officials to improve training and methods for evacuating aircraft in emergencies.
As a boy, he built model aircraft carriers with tiny planes on them, careful to paint every last piece. Perhaps that attention to detail explains why he walked through the cabin twice, making sure no one was left behind before he escaped the sinking plane himself.
But here’s the thing: given his personality, it is unlikely you would have discovered any of this without asking directly about it. When Michael Balboni, New York State’s deputy secretary for public safety, thanked him for a job done brilliantly, he responded in the most unaffected, humble way, «That’s what we’re trained to do.»
Even if you had learned about all of Captain Sullenberger’s activities, you might have considered his obsession dysfunctional. Wouldn’t you rather hire someone well rounded? Someone who has interests beyond the particular? Someone who might be a better communicator?
But people are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them. Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a person’s obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. The thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.
Not all jobs are as clear-cut as being a pilot. What if you were hiring a receptionist? What spare-time activities would suggest to you that a candidate might be a star?
Well, what do star receptionists do? Don’t think of all the million things they might do. Just think of the one or two most important things. Perhaps the best ones are super friendly and well organized. Well, if a candidate likes to spend his spare time alone reading a book, he probably won’t be your star. But if he throws a dinner party once a week, you’ll know you’ve got a winner.
Greg Davis, my friend the fishing guide, is on the water fishing with clients six days a week. Can you guess what he does on his one day off?

Management y liderazgo – Pasar del yo al nosotros

Hola, les regalo este artículo que saqué del Harvard Management Update y que a mi me sirvió mucho. Ojalá haga lo propio con ustedes.
Para hoy, una Aquarius de pera bien fría, y el tema Jigsaw falling into place (Radiohead)

Moving from «Me» to «We»
7:53 PM Friday January 16, 2009
by Anne Field

When a top-performing engineer at a pharmaceutical company was promoted to his first management job, he started his duties raring to go. Unfortunately, his great enthusiasm didn’t translate into great performance.
Why? Because he was accustomed to being in the spotlight as an individual performer and winning continual praise for his work, and he assumed it would be business as usual in his new position. What he failed to recognize–what he had never been trained to recognize–was that, as a manager, his focus had to shift from producing results himself to getting the best results from others. So he proceeded to approach his duties in his tried-and-true way: focusing on his own performance and skills, telling everyone else what to do, and generally behaving like the smartest kid in the room.
The result: His team quickly grew to resent their new manager–to such an extent, in fact, that they started to go over his head, complaining about their treatment to higher-ups in the organization.
«His boss was ready to demote him,» says Stanlee Phelps, an executive coach and a senior vice president with Lee Hecht Harrison in Irvine, Calif., who was called in to help turn the new manager’s behavior around.
Thankfully, Phelps’s intervention worked. When, much to the new manager’s surprise, he learned that his department was on the verge of a palace revolt, he agreed to make some changes–asking for other people’s opinions, for example, and regularly rotating responsibility for running meetings among team members. In time, he transformed his approach, and the group’s opinion.
The transition didn’t need to be so challenging. Indeed, there are several steps organizations can take to help individual performers make the transition from a «me» mentality to a «we» mentality. We’ll get to those in a few paragraphs. But, first, it’s important to understand the root of the problem.
A Difficult Shift
Becoming a manager for the first time poses many challenges. One of the more subtle–and difficult–has to do with the necessary shift in mindset: the move from «me» to «we.» At the heart of this challenge is that what got the person promoted–sterling individual performance–is no longer what the job is about. In fact, the new imperative is the opposite–focusing on everyone else: getting the best performance from a team, rather than from just oneself, and developing the skills and potential of direct reports.
As a manager, says Hal Leavitt, Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, «You’re only going to be as good as your people’s performance.»
Although this may be obvious to experienced managers, it’s not second nature to everyone. And many organizations neglect to make this point explicit when moving high performers into their first management roles. «Generally, no one will have told them the rules have changed,» says Phelps.
What’s more, since their own particular performance brought them success, new managers often assume that their job requires their continuing to do whatever they did before, just more visibly so.
There’s also the matter of something even deeper–how they define themselves. «They have a highly built-up sense of identity based on the performance of technical skills,» says Michael Watkins, professor of practice at Insead, based in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore, and author of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels. In addition, since many new managers are accustomed to receiving recognition for their own contributions, they might just have a hard time stepping back and letting others share the limelight.
In fact, the move from «me» to «we» is something that managers, if not properly coached, may take years to achieve. «Many people never make this transition,» says Susan Howington, senior vice president and managing director at Lee Hecht Harrison. Thus, it’s critically important for senior executives to take steps as early as possible to help new managers with the switch. Some possible tactics include:

• Assigning a mentor.
• Showing them how they are perceived by their reports.
• Tying key management metrics to pay and promotion.
• Focusing discussions on team members’ efforts.
• Helping them see the bigger picture.
• Modeling appropriate behavior.

Assigning a Mentor
Helping managers develop a new mindset is a long-term process, says Watkins. For that reason, it can be very useful to provide them with a coach or mentor to meet with on an ongoing basis. That might be the person’s boss, but it can also be someone else who enjoys the process of developing skills in junior employees. No matter what, it’s best if the coach and manager can meet face-to-face regularly. If that’s not possible, then try weekly or monthly phone calls.
Part of the mentor’s role is to follow the manager’s progress closely and keep tabs on problems as they arise, so she can step in–before it’s too late.
Richard Lamond, chief human resources officer for Spherion, a staffing and recruiting company headquartered in Ft. Lauderdale, cites a chemical engineering company he worked for, where he was assigned to be the coach of a newcomer hired through a college recruiting program. Soon after his arrival, the young man was assigned a rotating position as supervisor in a manufacturing plant. A few months into the new manager’s assignment, during a talk with a superintendent at the plant, Lamond discovered there were problems with his charge. Eager to make a good impression with higher-ups, the new manager had alienated older, more experienced workers by acting in what they saw as a high-handed way: not giving serious consideration to anyone else’s suggestions, failing to develop his direct reports’ skills, and in general just putting himself first.
At their next meeting, Lamond brought the issue to the new manager’s attention. «It could have been a showstopper from the standpoint of advancing further in management ranks, but he prevailed» by working hard to change his approach, says Lamond. After two years, the man went on to become a plant manager.
Showing How They Are Perceived by Their Reports
Often, new managers don’t have a clear understanding of just how «me» focused they are. Probably the most effective way to show them is to do a 360-degree evaluation, so managers can really see what people think of their performance. «It’s like a baseball bat over the head,» says Lee Hecht Harrison’s Phelps. This is especially useful for analytical types who need all the facts before they can be convinced of anything.
No matter who the managers are, however, wait two to three months after they’ve started: you want them to be in the job long enough for others to be able to see them in action but not too long that their behavior becomes deeply embedded.
Phelps points to a newly promoted manager in a construction company who, after being given the results of a 360-degree review, was shocked to learn that her direct reports found her demanding and unwilling to listen to their ideas. An exceptionally brilliant and talented professional, usually several steps ahead of anyone else she worked with, the woman was accustomed to coming up with the best ideas herself and then making them happen on her own. So, she simply continued that behavior as a manager, not realizing she was stepping on team members’ toes–and making them feel incompetent.

Tying Key Management Metrics to Pay and Promotion
Include in managers’ performance reviews their ability to develop and coach their people, as well as how successful their direct reports have been in their work. Note such things as whether their direct reports have been hired by other departments. That’s a sign that the manager has worked effectively at coaching employees and promoting their efforts.
Also, base raise and bonus formulas, at least in part, on the accomplishments of team members. At Fast Search & Transfer, an Oslo-based enterprise search firm, for example, up to 50% of managers’ goals are tied to the successful completion of individual direct reports’ objectives. To push managers to recognize the contributions of all team members, «the company doesn’t celebrate when we land a contract but when we deliver a successful project to a customer,» says Ali Riaz, president and CFO. «That way, the manager is forced to include more parts of the value chain in the event–and think about the group as a whole.»
What’s more, when announcing promotions, Riaz makes a point of praising the individual’s teamwork. «You can’t talk about the importance of the ‘we,’ then promote the ‘me,'» he says.

Focusing Discussions on Team Members’–Not Just the Manager’s–Efforts
If a manager who reports to you doesn’t readily discuss the contributions individual direct reports are making–or tends to take all the credit–don’t let it slide. Make a point, when discussing successful projects, to draw out from the manager the role played by his team. Riaz, for example, regularly sits down with managers after they complete an assignment and asks them to share team members’ contributions.
He recalls one new manager who had created animosity among his direct reports thanks to his tendency to take all the credit for successful projects. So, after one particular project, Riaz sat him down and made him describe just what other people had done. «By the end of the conversation, I learned that five others had helped him and how they’d helped,» he says.
Later, the manager e-mailed the five and thanked each of them for their work. Their attitudes began to change after that–as did his.
Helping Them See the Bigger Picture
The «we» mentality is about more than how managers handle their direct reports. It’s also about embracing the idea that they–and the department they’re heading–are part of a larger organization. «You need to open up the world view of how they fit it into the total picture,» says Howington.
The «we» mentality requires embracing the idea that the manager and her unit are part of a larger organization.
Blythe McGarvie, founder and president of LIF Group, a management consulting firm in Williamsburg, Va., and author of Fit In, Stand Out: Mastering the FISO Factor–The Key to Leadership Effectiveness in Business and Life (McGraw-Hill, 2005), offers a case in point. When she was CFO of a large supermarket chain, she made a point of inviting new managers to cross-functional meetings. She recalls an IT manager who, after attending one such meeting, experienced a real eye-opener regarding a new system under development and how it would fit into the processes of the larger organization.
«After talking to the operations people, he realized, for example, why it was so crucial for the system to work smoothly with the store manager’s job and not require him to make changes in the way he worked,» she says.
The upshot: The manager began to gain new insights into the role he–and his team–played in the company as a whole, a key promoter of «we» thinking.
Modeling Appropriate Behavior
When problems come up, mentors of new managers should point out times that they dealt with similar issues. Spherion’s Lamond, for example, recalls that part of his discussion with that college recruit focused on his own first stabs at management right out of school. Lamond says he related his experiences as a second lieutenant, when he was thrown into command of a group of people, many of whom were older and more experienced than he. He talked about how he initially failed to respect their opinions and how he eventually learned to change his attitude.
By practicing this type of personalization and displaying this level of empathy for the challenges a new manager faces, experienced executives can have a profound impact on the growth of the next generation of organizational leaders.
Analyzing Team Member Styles
Often, new managers figure that the way to make team members successful is by having them work the same way they do. The assumption: That other people are motivated by the things that motivate the manager.
But managers cannot treat direct reports as if they are simply differently sized and shaped versions of themselves. To do an effective job of coaching and developing their employees–in short, to become a «we»-focused boss–managers need to develop insights into what makes each individual tick.
Some executives encourage new managers to give their direct reports personality assessments, such as the DISC Personal Profile System, which can provide insights into traits such as whether their direct reports are more analytical or intuitive in their decision-making approach.
But often a more direct tack can be just as useful. Encourage new managers to meet with employees individually for the sole purpose of getting to know them better. Examples of some things you might suggest they say: «Tell me about something that worked well for you,» or «What’s something you did here that you’re particularly proud of?» Says Richard Lamond, chief HR officer for the staffing and recruiting firm Spherion: «My experience is that people are willing to open up.»
At the same time, suggest language that managers can use in daily interactions to create a «we» feeling, such as «I’m really interested in your reaction.» It may seem like a no-brainer, but new managers often overlook the importance of such simple conversation starters.
Remember: What seems obvious to seasoned managers is not yet second nature to those with less experience. Besides, new managers often are bombarded with so many new tasks and responsibilities that it’s not surprising that they will tend to rely on a crutch or two. Doing what they’ve done well in the past instead of delegating the work and building up their team’s strength is one of the most commonly used starter executive crutches. Even the simplest suggestions, such as effective conversation starters, can go a long way to helping the difficult transition from «me» to «we.»
Anne Field is a Pelham, N.Y.-based business writer.

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Ford – estrategia de Social Media

Can Ford’s New Social Media Strategy Help It Become the Leading Social Automotive Brand?
By: FC Expert Blogger Allyson KapinTue Jan 20, 2009 at 1:46 PM | Advertising Age

On a December Wednesday morning Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company’s social media strategist (aka Global Digital and Multi-Media Communications Manager) woke up to a potential PR nightmare and it had nothing to do with the bailout. Ford was threatening to sue The Ranger Station, a fan website run by Jim Oakes that was selling counterfeit products using Ford’s logo. Ford was demanding that The Ranger Station surrender its website URL and pay Ford $5,000 in damages. Oakes sent out a call for help and blogged “TRS is being attacked by the Ford Motor Company.” Ford instantly felt the backlash as the fan community quickly caught wind of the lawsuit and began blogging and tweeting angry comments. Monty jumped on Twitter, followed the chatter and sent tweets to his 5600 followers saying “I’m in active discussions with our legal department to resolve it. Please retweet.”
Being the communications pro and problem solver that he is, Monty called Oakes to get his side of the story and worked out an agreement between Ford’s legal department and Oakes. Following the agreement, Monty tweeted it and Oakes blogged about it.
Ford dodged a major bullet that Wednesday not only because of Monty’s rapid response using social media tools but because he was honest about the events as they unfolded. Instead of playing the CYA game and constantly defending Ford’s position with legal jargon he blogged comments such as “I’m on it…. Trying to stop a PR nightmare.” Monty says his transparent approach helped Ford. “My greatest fear was that people would be more interested in retweeting Ford’s seemingly heavy-handed legal actions than they would about the correction,” said Monty. But “taken as a whole, all of my efforts bore the hallmark of a real person interacting with the community throughout, and I think to those who witnessed it happening, it made a huge difference. The firestorm was quashed almost as quickly as it developed.”
When Monty was hired by Ford in July of 2008 to spearhead their social media strategy, senior management welcomed him with open arms. “There seemed to be a sense of relief and enthusiasm, rather than the head-scratching and upselling that you might normally expect in such a situation,” said Monty.
Monty was immediately tasked with making Ford the world’s leading social automotive brand. So what’s Monty’s big plan? “Create content and set it free, allowing anyone who is interested to be able to share it on any of the major platforms, on a global basis. Internally, we’re going to connect Ford employees with each other and empower any employee who wants to be an online spokesperson for the company,” said Monty.
Social media tools that Ford has had success with include social media press releases which features YouTube videos and Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr. “We’re lucky enough to have fans from all over the world who create pages dedicated to our company and products on Facebook and Twitter so we interact there as members of the community,” said Monty.
So how does Ford measure its return on investment in the social media world? One of the tools that Ford uses is a proprietary tool that its agency, the Social Media Group developed called the Conversation Index. It covers 100 representative blogs and media ranging from Autoblog.com to Leftlanenews.com, measuring how Ford stacks up in a dozen areas and compares it to their competition (notably Honda & Toyota), in terms of frequency of mention, as well as sentiment. Ford follows the trends on a monthly basis and is able to discern areas where Ford is pulling ahead or lacking. “It’s important to monitor what’s being said about you. If you’re not watching the online conversations, you could be missing a lot,” said Monty.

Para ganar clientes, posicione sus productos de maneras inesperadas

Va el tip of the day de Harvard Business Review. 
 
Para ganar clientes, posicione sus productos de maneras inesperadas  
¿Está agregando nuevos beneficios a sus productos existentes para renovarlos? En ese caso, sus productos mejorados están pasando de moda, y requieren cada vez más retoques para que los clientes sigan considerándolos interesantes. Nadie gana. Todos los dentífricos, incluso los genéricos, «eliminan la placa», «refrescan el aliento», «combaten la caries» y «blanquean los dientes». Para separarse del rebaño, posicione sus productos de maneras inesperadas. Por ejemplo, utilice este «posicionamiento de separación» para vincular su producto con una categoría radicalmente distinta de la original. Swatch, por ejemplo, comercializó sus relojes como accesorios de moda, no como joyería. Si su producto es imperfecto en términos tecnológicos, utilice un «posicionamiento furtivo». Sony hizo esto presentando su robot AIBO como una mascota divertida.
  
Este Tip of the Day fue adaptado del artículo de HBR «Libérese del ciclo de vida del producto», de Youngme Moon, publicado en mayo de 2005.  
Y les paso un link para un momento del día de oficina con el street photographer nick turpin.

La marca Obama

 

(febrero de 2009)

The Brand Called Obama

By: Ellen McGirtMon Jan 19, 2009 at 3:01 PM
 

Win or lose, Barack Obama’s rise changes business as usual for everyone. Here’s why.

Whatever you do, don’t hurt Barack!» It was the afternoon of Super Tuesday, and the Chicago sky threatened snow. Senator Barack Obama had just returned to his hometown as voters in 22 states were making history by choosing between a black man and a white woman to be the Democratic nominee for president. The road-weary candidate put off calling fund-raisers or leading one last rally. Instead, he headed over to a downtown gym to play basketball with his nephew, his brother-in-law, and a few buddies. He needed to take a few minutes to chill out, and hoops was his therapy.
Among those on the court would be his old friend — and major contributor — John W. Rogers Jr. Rogers is the founder and chairman of Ariel Capital, an investment firm with some $13 billion in assets under management. He is a neighbor of Obama’s in Hyde Park and has traded elbows with him on the hardwood dozens of times. But as Rogers left for the gym, he was accosted at the door by his colleague, Ariel president Mellody Hobson. A friend of Obama and his wife, Michelle, Hobson knew that Rogers, usually a shy sort, could be aggressive on the court. So she implored him to go easy on the senator: «He can’t look all beat up!» It wouldn’t be good if the candidate showed up on TV later that evening with a black eye.
Hobson had no need to worry, and not because Rogers held back. As Obama has been known to joke before he hits the boards — or the podium — «Relax, I’ve got game. I’ve got plenty of game.» Super Tuesday proved him right: On the court, his team won two of three contests, and he walked off without a scratch. At the polls, he took 13 states to Hillary Clinton’s 9, generating momentum that would build from the Potomac to the Pacific and, in some eyes, make him the Democratic front-runner.
The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news. What has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well. Politics, after all, is about marketing — about projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume. The promotion of the brand called Obama is a case study of where the American marketplace — and, potentially, the global one — is moving. His openness to the way consumers today communicate with one another, his recognition of their desire for authentic «products,» and his understanding of the need for a new global image — all are valuable signals for marketers everywhere.
«Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand,» says Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide. «New, different, and attractive. That’s as good as it gets.» Obama has his greatest strength among the young, roughly 18 to 29 years old, that advertisers covet, the cohort known as millennials — who will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010. They are black, white, yellow, and various shades of brown, but what they share — new media, online social networks, a distaste for top-down sales pitches — connects them more than traditional barriers, such as ethnicity, divide them.

 
«Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand: New, different, and attractive. That’s as good as it gets.»
— Keith Reinhard, DDB Worldwide

 
Obama has risen above what he calls a «funny» name, an unusual life story, and — contrary to the now popular (and mistaken) notion that nobody sees race anymore — a persistent racial divide to become a reflection of what America will be: a postboomer society. He has moved beyond traditional identity politics. And whether it’s now or a decade from now, the new reality he reflects will eventually win out. Any forward-thinking business would be wise to examine the implications of his ascent, from marketing strategies and leadership styles to the future of the American workplace.
 
COMMAND AND CONTROL
When People Magazine asked a slew of presidential hopefuls late last year what they never leave home without, the answers were revealing. Mitt Romney’s choice, homemade granola in his Dora the Explorer bowl, left the blogosphere snickering. Clinton cited her BlackBerry — efficient, businesslike, and an homage to the Web 1.0 world. Obama’s response, via his wife, Michelle, was a half-step ahead: a Webcam. «We talk at the end of the day when the girls and I are in Chicago and Barack is out on the road.»
Obama has deftly embraced — and been embraced by — the Internet. His campaign has deputized soccer grandmoms and hipsters alike to generate new heights of viral support. And he has been exceptionally successful at converting online clicks into real-world currency: rallies in the heartland, videos on YouTube, and most important, donations and votes.
The question is how. Social networking poses challenges for marketers, no matter what — or whom — they’re selling. Traditional top-down messages don’t often work in an ecosystem where the masses are in charge. Marketers must cede a certain degree of control over their brands. And that can be terrifying. (Remember that «I got a crush on … Obama» lip-synched YouTube tribute?)
Yet giving up control online, in the right way, unleashes its own power. And more than any other «national product» to date — and far more than any other presidential candidate — Obama has tapped into that power. The campaign’s secret weapon: a fresh-faced 24-year-old named Chris Hughes. Four years ago, he was at Harvard, helping launch Facebook with his roommates, kids named Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. Just over a year ago, Hughes took a leave from Facebook to do online organizing for Obama. A history and literature major who did no coding at Facebook, he brought with him a mastery of the human side of social networking that has translated into real results for the campaign. Early on, when resources and credibility were in shorter supply, one insider told me, «We were completely focused on making sure that people knew on a very basic level how, where, and why to caucus in Iowa. And a local network, like Facebook, was ideal for that.» It was a cheap and effective way to leverage supporters’ personal connections.
The campaign’s Web site is «far more dynamic than any of the others,» says Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who has been studying Web sites and social media in campaigns with her colleague Jeff Gulati. BarackObama.com features constant updates, videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events to give supporters a reason to come back to the site. On mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s quasi-social network, Obamaniacs can create their own blogs around platform issues, send policy recommendations directly to the campaign, set up their own mini fund-raising site, organize an event, even use a phone-bank widget to get call lists and scripts to tele-canvass from home.
The Obama crew has also tapped into other online communities. «One of our members had excerpted a portion of a Vibe profile of Obama,» recalls Kay Madati, vice president of Community Connect, a suite of niche demographic Web sites including blackplanet.com, asianave.com, migente.com, GLEE.com, and faithbase.com. A flurry of discussion drove traffic to BarackObama.com, drawing the attention of Scott Goodstein, who runs the campaign’s external Web strategy. He called Madati, who invited all the candidates to create profiles for each of his company’s targeted communities. Only the Obama people, Madati says, have created credible presences: «They sometimes update daily; they even update more than Oprah.» It has worked. The Obama profile on BlackPlanet has more than 450,000 «friends.»
«This is where the Obama campaign has been strategic and smart,» says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a Web site that explores how technology is changing politics. «They’ve made sure the message machine was providing the message where people were already assembled. They’ve turned themselves into a media organization.»
They’ve also taken advantage of messages created by others. The «Yes We Can» mashup by the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am, starring a handful of his famous friends, cost the campaign nothing and became a viral hit. By comparison, a Clinton mockumentary called «Hillary’s Leaving the Band» — young rockers, clearly actors, lament the loss of their favorite guitar player — fell flat. It seemed ad-agency slick and forced. «It’s even easier to reveal inauthenticity in the online world,» Bentley’s Gulati says. «If it doesn’t resonate in the offline world, it won’t resonate in the online world.»
What’s true in politics is no less true in business. «There is a new, authoritative consumer empowered by the Web,» says Karen Scholl, a creative director at the digital-advertising agency Resource Interactive. «And they can smell a fake.» The agency has coined the term «OPEN brand,» an acronym for on-demand, personal, engaging, and networks; it is a framework for companies to think about distributing brand messages in new ways. With Obama, «not only do people feel they know who he is, they feel trusted to share their views,» Scholl says. «And they get constant feedback from the campaign and from each other.»

 
«There is a new, authoritative consumer empowered by the Web. And they can smell a fake.»
— Karen Scholl, Resource Interactive, a digital ad agency

 
Being an OPEN brand can be daunting when something as simple as starting a company blog can entail interdepartmental reviews and legal vetting. But, Scholl points out, «you don’t have to cede all control, just some.» A case in point: the do-it-yourself ads for Doritos during the 2007 Super Bowl. More than 1,000 snack-food fans submitted their entries — but it was Frito-Lay that decided which ones would run.
The Obama campaign plays its own version of this game. The candidate himself has been made available to the press in strictly controlled doses. (The campaign declined requests for a sit-down interview with Fast Company.) And while the Web site may have set the bar high in terms of openness, the campaign still keeps an eye on the imagery and messaging associated with the movement. When supporter Joe Anthony’s «BarackObama» fan page on MySpace attracted 160,000 friends, the campaign found itself in a tug-of-war over ownership. Ultimately, MySpace brokered a peace treaty; Anthony gave up the domain name but kept his friends. Obama’s emails urging supporters to take action — «Tell the superdelegates what’s on your mind,» a recent blast implored — are often signed simply «Barack,» implying intimacy without risking exposure.
 
LEADING BY LISTENING
Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, has long considered himself a political independent. An Obama encounter at a campaign event inspired him to take up arms for the Democratic candidate. But he can’t quite explain why. «I’m still struggling to articulate what it is about him beyond the issues that I care about,» he says. Newmark then fumbles his way to this realization: «I see him as a leader rather than a boss.» A leader, he notes, gets people to do things on their own, through inspiration, respect, and trust. «A boss can order you to do things, sure, but you do them because it’s part of the contract.»
What Newmark is describing is more complicated — and more modern — than it might appear. There have long been leaders who are bosses, and bosses who are leaders. Having a vision and inspiring or instructing others to follow that vision have long been hallmarks of business and politics. But Obama epitomizes a new way of thinking called «adaptive leadership,» which is now being taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School, among other places. This approach, as Stephen Bouwhuis recently wrote in The Australian Journal of Public Administration, is effective in handling problems that necessitate «a shift … in ways of thinking across a community.» While a visionary puts forth a specific plan to be implemented, an adaptive leader works with constituents to devise one together.
Obama has tapped into this adaptive-leadership vein by inviting voters in with his «Yes we can» slogan, then reinforcing it with attacks on the complacency and withdrawal from politics of many Americans, particularly the young. «Change will not come if we wait for some other person,» he said on Super Tuesday, «or if we wait for some other time… We are the hope of the future.» Marty Linsky, professor at the Kennedy School and cofounder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, is among those who’ve taken note of Obama’s adaptive style. «Obama often proposes process plans that involve a trust in the community at large,» Linsky says. The potential ramifications for business leadership are enormous. The cult of the imperial chief executive officer still reigns in most C-suites and boardrooms. But winning tomorrow’s talent — and tomorrow’s consumer — may require a dramatically different approach.
And not only to reach the young: Dennis Edwards, a white 50-year-old small-businessman from South Carolina, told me that his main issue in the presidential campaign is health care. «I know that no candidate can push their plan completely through,» he says. «That’s not cynicism, that’s reality. But I believe Obama can get people to the table to talk. I think he’ll listen to other points of view. I also believe he can move it further in the right direction than anyone else.»
«Obama and Clinton make an interesting contrast in brands,» says Professor John Quelch, senior associate dean at Harvard Business School and coauthor of Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy. «Obama communicates that he loves people, and Clinton communicates that she loves policy.» Consider Starbucks, Quelch says. «People love it for the experience, not for the specifications of the coffee.» Obama, through his inclusive Web site and, yes, his lofty rhetoric, reinforces the notion that everyone is included and that this movement is actually a conversation to which everyone is invited.
 
RACE STILL MATTERS
«The coloration of society is changing.» Harriet Michel is president of the National Minority Supplier Council, which helps corporations find qualified Asian, African American, Hispanic, and Native American vendors. When the organization started 35 years ago, Michel continues, «people felt forced to check boxes instead of thinking about how new suppliers might help their businesses.» Today, census data make clear that a changing population means new markets and new opportunities. «The ‘right thing to do’ is tired, quite frankly. It’s business,» she says. «This is economics. Now when you’re talking about imperatives, they accrue to the bottom line of the company.»
Michel is an Obama supporter. «The success of his candidacy indicates that we have moved a bit beyond our tortured past as it relates to race,» she says. «If he’s credentialed enough and experienced enough to be elected by all the people, it will make a difference to how everyone views America and Americans.»
The fact that a black man may soon be a major-party nominee, or even sit in the Oval Office, has far-reaching implications for a business community that’s still overwhelmingly white at the top. As of 2005, one third of the Fortune 500 had no African-American directors; of 5,572 available seats, 449 were held by 245 black board members. Of course, executive ranks are also overwhelmingly male — 85% of Fortune 500 boards — making Clinton’s rise, too, a challenge to the business status quo.
Ariel’s Mellody Hobson personifies both of those constituencies. At 38, she is the president of the firm and one of the few women of color in a C-suite. She sits on the board of public companies including Starbucks, Estée Lauder, and DreamWorks Animation, as well as private organizations such as the Sundance Institute, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Public Education Fund. She is a trustee of Princeton University. She is self-made, smart, and outspoken. It’s hard not to be impressed, and a little intimidated, by all she has achieved. And yet, she says, «I still feel the bias.» Biases are baked into the human condition — «we all have them,» she says — but they don’t have to be baked into the structure of American business. «We haven’t come nearly far enough.» Would a black president make a difference? «Yes,» she replies without hesitation. «It would send a message. But there is so much more work to do.»
Her boss, John Rogers — who played hoops with Obama on Super Tuesday — has been leading some of that work. Rogers cofounded an informal group of black directors of major publicly traded companies in 2002. At that first meeting, about 30 people showed up. «My concern was that African Americans on corporate boards were uncomfortable addressing civil rights issues, and worried about being typecast as a minority member and wouldn’t speak up,» says Rogers, who sits on the boards of McDonald’s and Aon Corp. «If not us, then who will?»
The meeting, which has become the annual Black Corporate Directors Conference, now attracts more than 100 business bigwigs and last year featured Time Warner’s Dick Parsons and Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott, along with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien as moderator. The group spends a good deal of time talking about the distinction between being a black board member and a board member who happens to be black. Rogers explains: When you are in the room, do you shortchange your fiduciary duties by advocating for diversity? «Diversity benefits the bottom line substantially, for all sorts of reasons,» he says. «But it also takes years to establish a culture, with all the benefits that come with that. If there is only an immediate business imperative, then you might end up creating expectations that might not be met.»
Tory Clarke, who is British, and Larry Griffin, an African American, have heard these debates for years. As the founders of Bridge Partners, a boutique executive-search firm that specializes in placing minority candidates at senior levels, «we’ve seen the shift from a quota mind-set to a business case mind-set,» says Clarke. «Now we hear very specific requests — we want a Latino male or an African-American female — specifically so our clients can better approach a particular market, or solve a problem with a particular community.» They cite the recent election of Avon CEO Andrea Jung to the Apple board — its sole Asian and only its second woman. Business acumen aside, Jung offers a direct conduit to millions of female customers, a segment that Apple would dearly love to exploit. She also speaks fluent Mandarin, a plus for a company that has just invested $40 million in its first store in Beijing.
Both Griffin and Clarke acknowledge that minority representation at the upper echelons of business remains «abysmal.» As a result, Griffin explains, the closer minority hires get to the corner office or the boardroom, the more they become symbols. Even people recruited for their legal or financial expertise may be pressed to become what Griffin calls «internal brands.» «They may be asked to show up at campus recruiting events, or take a more public-facing role than they are prepared for,» he says.
While some observers hoped the Sarbanes-Oxley provision calling on companies to seek out new independent board members would bring about more change, progress has been slow. But with census data projecting that 40% of Americans will be nonwhite by 2010, business leaders who are charged with inspiring and attracting the best talent and satisfying an increasingly diverse pool of shareholders may soon find that diversity is a business imperative.
 
BRAND AMERICA
Should Obama become president, his leadership style — not to mention his brown skin and African name — could give a new face to the image America telegraphs to the rest of the world. «It’s already made a difference that a minority could rise this far through the democratic process,» asserts Harvard’s Quelch.

 
«It’s already made a difference that a minority could rise this far through the democratic process.»
— John Quelch,Harvard Business School
 

That brand U.S.A. has suffered in recent years is indisputable. According to the Pew Charitable Trust Global Attitudes Survey, updated in the spring of 2007, the country’s favorable ratings have declined over the past five years in 26 of 33 countries — including most of our European allies — and are particularly negative in the Middle East. A BBC International poll from 2007 is even more dismaying: A survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries shows that three out of four disapprove of how the United States is dealing with Iraq, Guantanamo, global warming, Iran, and North Korea.
«It’s a constant discussion point in international business,» says Keith Reinhard, whose DDB Worldwide has offices in 99 countries and has been the steward of such premier global brands as Hasbro and Anheuser-Busch. «We’re seen as culturally insensitive on a personal level, and on a corporate brand level,» he says. Determined to do something about it, Reinhard dipped into his own pocket in 2002 and started Business for Diplomatic Action, a coalition of marketing, political science, and media professionals aimed at improving the standing of America in the world through business outreach. (He has scaled back his work at DDB to work for the coalition full time.) After commissioning research and testifying before Congress, Reinhard can distill his advice to brands to one word: Listen. «Everywhere I go, from CEOs to people on the street, I hear the same thing,» Reinhard told me as he rushed between conferences in Frankfurt, Germany, and Doha, Qatar. «The U.S. needs to listen to the world.»
This is precisely the strategy that Obama professes in international relations: to engage, even with countries that have been viewed as America’s enemies — in much the same way that businesses from McDonald’s to ExxonMobil often find themselves engaging in places where regimes are not necessarily to their liking. Obama’s strategy is not one that all geopolitical experts agree with, but it is consistent with how American business has conducted itself. It is also consistent with his criticism at home of what he terms «a politics that says it’s okay to demonize your political opponents when we should be coming together to solve problems.»
Obama’s candidacy and its call for change may already be resonating in countries that have lamented U.S. policy but still want to believe in the promise of American leadership. «That Obama exists has already begun to recalibrate the way the world sees us,» Reinhard contends. «This is a good thing.»
 
«LOOKING FOR A CHANGE»
Sitting at the bar in the Chicago Hyatt on Super Tuesday, I scarfed a burger before rejoining the Obama press circus. My 24-year-old waiter seemed bored by the chaos, but took some time to admire my iPhone and chat. He’d known only a Clinton or Bush in the White House, he said. «I’m sort of looking for a change.» Then he caught sight of Obama on CNN over my shoulder, tossed his dreadlocks, and smiled. «But that guy,» he patted his chest, «he makes me believe.»
Barack Obama may not win his party’s nomination. And even if he is nominated, he may lose at the polls. If that happens, pundits will be quick to point out strategic or tactical missteps, and some will say America just isn’t ready to elect a black man as president. Such a pat analysis is to be expected. But there is no question that the brand of Obama — what he represents to the next generation of Americans — is important. A business that ignores this message does so at its own peril.
 
Comments:

Henry Jenkins argued in his keynote at SXSW Interactive two weeks ago that accusing Obama of plagiarism (as the Clinton camp did when it brought forward that Obama had borrowed words from past speeches of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick) misses the point: It’s a remix culture, stupid! The Obama brand is all software and only a little hardware, and it comes with an open SDK (software developer kit) — a dynamic, modular platform that both individual campaigners and institutional networks can plug into. Obama’s entire campaign is based on the principle of “picture-in-picture web,” as Steve Rubel coins it. Or, to borrow another one of Rubel’s lines: Obama is a web service, not a web site. He is the “blue ocean” and not the (little) rock. He is a franchise brand that anyone can hijack, re-shape, and remix a la carte. That makes him vulnerable and volatile but at the same time powerful and unstoppable. When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.

Cómo convertir una blind date en un cliente

(enero de 2009)

Blind Date to White Wedding: Best Practices in Lead Nurturing
(6/29/2007) CRM Project Volume 7
By Marketo, Inc., Marketo

No one enjoys blind dates. Whether you’re introduced by friends, the Internet, or your neighborhood matchmaker, it’s nerve-wracking to meet for the first time.

Conversely, everyone loves weddings. The flowers, the tradition, the drunken dancing at the reception, you can find something you like.
Everything that comes in between is the interesting part. When you’re dating, you’re learning about each other: what you like to do, the things he doesn’t eat, the stuff she does on Saturdays. And you’re discovering the things that you do well together.
It’s no different when it comes to B2B marketing. You need to deepen your relationship with prospects over time, interacting in a variety of settings, learning more about each other’s needs and capabilities while progressing seamlessly from one interaction to the next. And you need to know when to commit more resources to the relationship as well as when to pull back and give the prospect some space.
In the B2B marketing world, this dating process is called lead nurturing, defined as the process of building a relationship with qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time.
Just as in dating, lead nurturing can be described with defined stages, including:

1. The Introduction
2. The First Date
3. Dating
4. The Proposal
5. The Wedding

 
The Introduction
The introduction is the first time your future betrothed hears of you. It is up to your friend, online profile, or matchmaker to make you seem interesting and attractive. You don’t have direct control over the introduction, but the more you can do to influence it, the better.
 
Discover your ideal prospect
The first step in the introduction should be to determine your ideal prospect. Just as you know you like tall, dark and handsome, you should also know that the best prospects for your products and solutions are companies in the United States with 100 or more employees, in the pharmaceutical and healthcare verticals. It’s not usually this simple, but having an idea of what your ideal prospect looks like will help you focus your marketing to certain locales and mediums. If you know that tall, dark and handsome is often at your alma mater’s tailgate parties, you’ll probably want to be there, early and often.
 
Build your brand
If you’re wondering whether branding matters in B2B marketing, RainToday has issued a report that says the answer is yes, concluding, «If you are well known, whatever lead generation tactics you employ are likely to work better.» In fact, 65% of companies that claim they are well known report being good or excellent at lead generation, while only 44% of the not well known companies report being good or excellent.
Brand matters because B2B buyers are still people and emotions impact economic decision-making. B2B buyers are overwhelmed with choices and information more than any buyer could evaluate rationally. This means that no matter how disciplined a buying process is, emotional brand impressions do influence vendor selection.
Web 2.0 is also changing the way marketers build their brand. With the growing popularity of blogs, podcasts, social media and the like, buyers would rather talk to each other, instead of listening to a marketing message. So take advantage of this by creating thought leadership, using Web 2.0 techniques.
 
Create thought leadership
One way B2B companies can build their brand is by helping buyers research early in the sales cycle, demonstrating that they are trusted advisers who understand the prospect’s problems. By using thought leadership to engage prospects early, you build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.
Creating thought leadership helps your prospects learn more about you, your background and how you think. It helps build the foundations of a relationship: familiarity and trust. At this stage, don’t hide your thought leadership content behind registration forms. Set this content free to allow it to spread virally.
 
Write white papers
White papers are used at almost any stage of the pipeline, from lead generation to customer retention. They typically range from four to eight pages, and shouldn’t be more than 12 pages long. According to Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers, white paper is a persuasive document that usually describes approach of an article and weaves in persuasive corporate messages typically found in brochures.
And studies have shown that white papers are highly viral; that is, they are passed around by 60% of technology professionals. According to a study by MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm, this is because white papers are considered to be credible resources for thought leadership and subject matter expertise.
 
Create eBooks
As an alternative to white papers, consider eBooks, defined by David Meerman Scott as the «hip and stylish younger sibling to the nerdy whitepaper.» An eBook delivers the content in a form that’s designed for quick scanning and reading online. The content tends to come in more bite-sized chunks (as in a presentation). With newer versions of Microsoft PowerPoint, audio can be added to each page/slide.
 
Use social media
Social media continues to grow in popularity, and has become another conduit to your prospects. Sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace allow people to build online relationships by joining groups, chatting and commenting about products and services. On LinkedIn, for instance, you frequently see questions from your network asking for recommendations for products and consultants.
Blogging is a great way to build thought leadership and, therefore, your brand. Your blog should fill the information needs of your prospects and invites comments from readers. Podcasts essentially audio clips of you speaking instead of writing, or of an interview with another thought leader are a great attachment to your blog. RSS feeds and content formatted for mobile devices such as Blackberry, Treo and iPhone extend your blog reach. The YouTube phenomenon cannot be forgotten. A funny or clever short video that goes viral can quickly build your brand.
In B2B marketing, social media has a big role to play in driving traffic, building thought leadership, and facilitating word of mouth referrals. It’s one more tactic in a portfolio of techniques that best practice companies use to generate awareness, drive leads, and nurture relationships.
Social networking for B2B relationships is similar to your personal relationships. You meet someone through friends, whether at a party or on Facebook, share your thoughts and dreams, and if all goes well, you decide to have your first date.
 
The First Date
The first date is all about making a good first impression. Don’t come on too strong or you’ll scare your prospect away. And don’t talk only about yourself. Use the first date as an opportunity to learn more about your prospect’s wants and needs, as well as to share some relevant information about yourself.
In B2B marketing, this means you should deliver some form of premium content that is worth registering for. While thought leadership content should influence and guide people before they’re in a buying cycle, the content here should be targeted to those who are just beginning to look for solutions, such as self-running video demos and customer case studies. Either way, they should be short and to the point. You’re trying to make a good first impression.
 
Create short videos or demos
A few tips from the Foneshow blog: Make it short. Snack-sized content needs to have a single idea, should be easy to share, and should require little or no commitment. If it can be viewed on a mobile device during an elevator ride, you are on the right track. Create short, two- to three-minute videos that showcase your value proposition, or use Adobe Captivate or TechSmith’s Camtasia to demo your product at work.
 
Develop case studies
Also known as success stories, case studies are short, one or two page documents that evangelize a customer’s success and ROI from use of your solution. Sections typically include an intro, challenge and solution. And don’t forget to include a customer quote or two and a short section at the end that tells about your product and company.
 
Dating
This is where the lead nurturing comes in. Your prospect has shown at least some interest in you. You don’t want to ruin a good first impression by calling too often or asking for too much commitment too soon. Instead, develop the relationship by sharing additional information at the right time. If tall, dark and handsome responds to your overtures, you want to talk to him and try to gather more information: Is he single? Is he interesting? In B2B relationships, it’s much the same: make offers of more information at respectable intervals and determine the level of interest at each stage. The goal, of course, is to date exclusively.
 
Schedule webinars
While some webinars are designed to generate leads, others can have content that moves prospects farther along in your pipeline. These latter kinds of webinars should assume a certain level of familiarity with your product, since you are making this offer only after positive responses to other nurturing activities.
Webinars that feature an industry analyst or expert not associated with your company are particularly proficient at moving prospects along in the nurturing process. One thing to keep in mind is that, according to MarketingSherpa, decision-makers are more likely to attend webinars than contributors, so webinar attendance might weigh heavier later in your nurturing process.
 
Share relevant third party information
You don’t need to create all the lead nurturing content yourself. You can demonstrate how well you understand each prospect’s wants and needs by sharing relevant third party content with then. This can be as simple as emailing a news article and saying «Based on our conversation last week, I thought you’d find this interesting.»
 
Make it personal
Remember, the goal of «dating» is to build a relationship with a real person. B2B buyers are people, so the human touch matters. Lead nurturing is a conversation, not a series of disjointed campaigns. Personalize email responders and landing pages. Make sure each step connects with the prior one. And except for webinar invitations, don’t make the same offer twice in one email flow.
 
The Proposal
When creating your ideal customer, marketing and sales must work together to determine the best indicators of success, in terms of what the customer looks like (demographics, etc.). During this discussion, you should also determine the activities that result in a sales-ready lead. For instance, if a prospect fit your demographic target, clicked on one of your pay per click ads and watched a short demo, then downloaded an eBook from your email follow-up, you might consider him to be moderately qualified (a 7 out of 10, for instance). But if he then attended a webinar from an invitation you sent and went to the «pricing» section of your website, you might consider him a 9 out of 10, which tells you that he’s ready for a contact by your sales team. Your sales team would then go to work (with your help, of course).
 
Make outbound calls
Your sales team takes the action to follow-up on your qualified leads with a phone call. Their job is to further qualify the lead and deepen the relationship. Marketing can help by providing call scripts (including qualifying questions) that make it easy for the inside sales team follow-up from the campaign. They also indicate which product the customer is most likely to be interested in based on the campaign.
 
Send personal follow-up emails
Since marketing typically stops nurturing when the prospect is sent to sales, the inside sales team should also have a set of emails to send depending upon the level of interest shown by the prospect (and whether calls are completed). Marketing can assist by providing detailed email templates that continue the lead nurturing process.
 
Use customer references
Customer references are always excellent ways of closing new customers. Marketing should cultivate and nurture existing customers and gain permission to use them as references. Care should be taken with references to ensure any single reference isn’t over-used. Remember that they’re doing you a favor.
 
Conduct ROI analyses
An essential sales tool for many companies is an ROI analysis tool. Plugging in numbers of employees, current costs, and the like, then comparing to your solution is an outstanding method of showing costs and comparing benefits. Don’t forget to train the sales team and to provide written explanations for each section of the ROI tool. A results document that sales can send as a follow-up further cements the activity.
 
The Wedding
The Deal. The Close. The Win. Ultimately, making the sales is up to your sales team, but by implementing a sound nurturing and scoring process, you have helped them by establishing a relationship and positioning your company as a leader with the prospect.
 
The Tools
Just as a nice haircut and a manicure prepare you for that first date, every marketer should prepare for that introduction. You’ll need easy to use tools to help you nurture leads, including email, landing pages, forms, and lead scoring: essentially, a lead management solution.
 
Send triggered emails
Send a series of emails as part of a drip marketing campaign, or triggered based on specific prospect activities. Each email offers a document (or webinar, or trial software, etc.) that helps move your target along in their decision-making process.
 
Use custom landing pages
Don’t forget that custom landing pages can increase conversion rates by up to 48% during your lead nurturing as well as your lead generation activities. You only have eight seconds to get their attention, so use bullets, short forms, and no external navigation. And have only one call to action!
 
Use smart forms
You will get better response rates by using a form as the call to action on your landing pages, but why use the same form with the same fields over and over? Just like you wouldn’t ask your date for his or her name every time you see them, you shouldn’t ask for contact information again and again. Smart forms recognize known visitors and can fill in the fields you already know. Since you don’t have to ask for this, ask for other info, such as company size, time until decision, etc. Building the profile over time will help you in scoring the lead.
 
Use web analysis and lead scoring
Knowing which pages your prospects visit on your site can be very beneficial to determining their interest as well as their level of engagement. Being able to connect anonymous visits to actual prospects? Priceless.
 
Automate and measure
Salesforce.com and other customer relationship management (CRM) products are great, but they typically fall flat in their marketing capabilities. As marketers we need to automate the everyday tasks of building and managing lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. We also need to more objectively score leads according to their company demographics as well as their activities on our websites, landing pages, emails and other campaigns. And a single lead source doesn’t cut it when lead nurturing. It’s great to know where we first encountered the prospect, but knowing what happens between that first meeting and closing the sale is imperative in these days of marketing accountability.
 
Evaluate
As you move through the nurturing process, you’ll probably discover that some of the assumptions you made are incorrect; for instance, that downloading a particular white paper means that they are close to buying or that sending a particular email would elicit a good response. Don’t forget that lead nurturing and marketing in general is constantly changing. You’ll want to stay flexible and be ready to change your lead nurturing process as you experiment with new tactics and learn what works.