Anthony Milner

No entries since June, in fact the year has been a bit of blur. We were playing foosball in January and then February hit and the business went into overdrive. This wasn’t unexpected but the sudden intensity was a bit of a shock to the system. From all accounts the rapid uptick in enterprise Web Content Management projects has been widespread with many vendors reporting triple digit revenue growth.  It seems the web may have been the antidote for the GFC.  After all, the Web channel is a relatively inexpensive medium compared to TV, print and radio and if it’s done well it can be a lot more effective.

This got me thinking. In a market which is full of vendors and potential customers how do you target your offering, what is your point of differentiation and where is your sweet spot? I love graphs and I visualised this 2 x 2…

Right now in the year 2009 there are still many organisations that are just discovering that they can manage their own website. On the other hand, there are many organisations with in-house web teams embracing social media and forging concepts that may indeed become known as “web 3.0”.

In the middle of these diametrically opposed organisations (technologically speaking) is corporate middle Australia. These are organisations with moderate web maturity. They’ve learnt some hard lessons and are only beginning to implement 2nd and 3rd generation solutions. They tend to outsource their web requirements but have moved to bring in limited web resources, moving responsibility away from I.T into the hands of marketing (or should I say, marketing has wrested control from I.T.)

These organisations are quickly developing an appetite for online marketing and ecommerce. High end vendors may scoff at these relative newbies as “difficult” but they do so at their peril.

These are the organisations we love to help and this is where our technology offering excels. This is our sweet spot!

Here’s a cool way to promote that position you’re trying to fill.

 http://www.standoutjobs.com/

I was at the SEM / SEO conference at CeBIT today. There were a range of both business and technical sessions and an audience who seemed really eager to find some gold SEO nuggets. Question time was fairly active and one keen bean had to have the microphone practically wrestled away from him after asking one question too many. Well done to Fred Schebesta who handled the barrage gracefully. One of the speakers, Anne Costello, talked about business blogging and commented on the concept of trust in marketing…

“Today people build trust in a fundamentally different way. They increasingly distrust institutions and trust people like themselves”

This resonated with me. People are increasingly using the web to educate themselves and others regarding purchasing decisions. Wether its in the form of email, blogs, forums or wikis this sophisticated consumer savvy must be changing the marketing/purchasing landscape. The web consumer knows what works and what doesn’t because they’ve found a reputable and independent voice that has written a review; or it may be the consumer that posts a review after making a bad purchasing decision (taken a hit for the boys as a good friend calls it). This “consumer networking” we are seeing is probably only in its infancy but as this sophistication penetrates the masses surely traditional marketing is set for even more shakeup.

Was marketing 1.0 all about positioning the company and product in a way that made it look and feel great, even if it wasn’t? Marketing today should be about having an honest relationship with the customer and delivering on the promise.  Consumer networking will increasingly push businesses (in some cases kicking and screaming) into dealing with the consumer in a transparent, ethical and “organic” way and that’s a major plus if you’re a consumer.

Is this what the Google guys meant when they said  “don’t be evil”. Technology compelling businesses to educate themselves, improve their offerings and be honest with consumer because the world is reading and posting.

We discussed our Vision statement today and used the words Mission and Vision interchangeably. This niggled me so I went to ask the great Oracle, no not Larry’s company (well not that Larry, the other Larry) which led me to Google Scholar and this document which explained…

Although often used interchangeably, mission and vision statements are distinctly different, and each has its own purpose, style, criteria, and components…. ….a mission is for today’s goals and the vision is for tomorrow’s goals. The mission statement identifies an organization’s customers and critical processes, often with a qualifier of what level of performance the organization is dedicated to delivering. The mission consists of those things that the organization concentrates on daily to survive.

A vision statement, on the other hand, is a long-range prospector state of being that is worked on every day but will not be accomplished in the near future. The vision is that perfect state that might never be reached, but which you never stop trying to achieve. The mission-vision relationship is analogous to your personal life, in which you can categorize daily efforts into those that you do to survive today, such as going to work or fixing the car, and those that you do to prepare for tomorrow, such as attending school to obtain a graduate degree or taking on a special project to prepare for higher responsibilities…