News. Microsoft executive is not Putz.

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Jeremiah and Ian sound off on Web marketing budget allocation. I guess I could add some value since I am currently going into a budget cycle and am the VP of Marketing for a ~$140M software company.

I always prefer to talk in % allocation and follow 3 basic principles of marketing budget allocation:

1. Don’t peanut-butter your budget. Marketing folks tend to do this in most cases. Spend 10% on SEO, 10% on PPC, 10% on Social media, etc. I dont like it because it assumes they are not willing to take a risk. I dont buy the argument that “you need to be everywhere since you dont know what’s going to work”.

2. Web Marketing is a part of our budget, but its a only a part. Marketing budgets should focus on the “preferred” outreach method of the customer / prospect. Since most of our customers still seem to prefer face to face interaction, we spend more on events and lunches than web marketing. We do offer online mechanisms, but overwhelmingly our customers prefer the “meet and greet”. This might change in the future and we are willing to change it, but right now they “prefer” the mechanism they are used to.

3. Experiment. I have a guideline with our spending. Spend 10% on “one risky new mechanism” so you can experiment – high risk, high reward scenario. 90% of the budget tends to focus on “proven” mechanisms.

So how does our marketing budget look (this does not include headcount):

1. Lead Generation: 45%

1. Online & Web (includes PPC, Email marketing, list management): 23%
2. Social Media (mostly blogging): 2%
3. Promotional syndication: Whitepapers: 15%
4. Web seminars, independent research sponsorship: 5%
5. (Traditional) advertising – 0%

2. AR & PR: 25%

1. Analyst Relations: 15%
2. Press Relations: 9%
3. Customer reference program: 1%

3. Marcom: 5%

1. Content creation (whitepapers, datasheets, etc.

4. Events: 25%

1. Industry events (trade shows, seminars, conferences): 20%
2. Customer events (lunches, baseball games, etc.): 5%

Comments welcome. Do you think we are doing it right? What would you change?

Nick talks about why an economist stopped comments on his blog and makes the argument that if the # of users drops off, most “prominent” bloggers will stop blogging since their time is better spent elsewhere.

“If blogging is a successful means of establishing underappreciated
credentials – of remedying a failure in the idea market – then
ultimately the talent will be noticed and the talented economics
bloggers will move into positions in which their time will be better
applied to other pursuits, such as research or executive decision
making, in which they have greater advantage than they have in
blogging. Ultimately, you want the smartest economists to devote
themselves to something other than blogging, even if blogging may serve
a temporary role in helping those people move into positions in which
the value of their intellect can be fully exploited.”

Not sure I agree and will quote another very good blogger on what he learned on his “10 year anniversary” of cartoons drawn on the back of business cards:

“One of the smartest moves I ever made was to figure out that making money indirectly off the cartoons was far easier than trying to make the money directly. If I could teach gapingvoid readers just one thing, that would be it.”

What does this have to do with communities?

1. Most community members join and promote a cause not for the monetary benefit. Sure they have other things to do with their time and its probably better spent elsewhere, but this is what they would “really” like to do.

2. There are more indirect benefits of participating in the community than just the monetary ones that economists seem to care about.

3. Your early adopters and selfless promoters of the community are the ones to nurture always even though after a certain tipping point (in terms of # of people in the community) their influence starts to wane.

If you have been blogging for any amount of time, you’ll know that there are some metrics that are more important than others. Here are some metrics that dont matter:

1. Number of page views that your blog gets: Why? Lot of readers are “fly by”.
2. # of “RSS subscribers” – while this is a good metric for some, # of people that actually READ your feeds on a frequent enough basis is more relevant

There are a few other metrics that are “motivating”. What I mean by that is you feel like blogging because of these metrics:

1. # of, frequency of and type of people commenting. True measure of people reading, bothering to understand and offer an opinion.

2. # of “relevant”, inline links back to your post / content. This one is indicative of the fact that others think this is relevant enough to talk about or cite.

So what does this have to do with Robert? (Scoble). He get probably more comments per post than I do in a month of blogging. His pagerank relative to the things he does is very high (indicative of how many people cite his writing.

The #1 question I get from anyone in the early stages of a community is:

“How do we get the participants to talk?”.

So what can you learn from Robert:

1. It takes time. Robert’s been doing this for years.

2. It takes engagement. I think he practically responds to “every” comment and truly ties to understand their point of view.

3. MOST IMPORTANT: Its genuine or as Rohit called it – Authentic. I have met Robert several times at many geek events and parties. I know he meets over 50 people daily. Not once (even the first time I met him a year ago) did he make me feel like I was another nobody in large set of people.

The only reason he gets so many comments and his audience is engaged is that he “truly” tries to connect with people. Its not artificial.

That’s the #1 tip when you are starting to build a community.

There is a new magic quadrant out for Enterprise Team Collaboration and Social Software. This is the first MQ that focuses on this nascent space, so if Gartner has a quadrant they are getting a lot of inquiries from enterprise customers about these offerings.

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Some thoughts:

1. They have grouped Wiki’s, Blogging tools, Collaboration products and Community Software all in one MQ. Its obvious that these tools do very different things. In fact I dont even see companies choosing between SocialText and Jive Software. Usually they need both.

2. There are quite a few other smaller vendors they have missed. Take a look at this more extensive list of vendors in the community space.

3. They have missed very good open source vendors such as WordPress and Drupal (which a lot of people use for communities)

I would expect Jeremiah and Mike to provide more color, but this is a start, not sure if I’d call it a good start. My friend Dan has a good introduction to the MQ itself.

Update: Read the report in detail. It does have Pros and Con’s listed by vendor. It also talks about vendors they did not include: Cisco, Novell, Oracle and Sun. Some insight on the inclusion / exclusion of certain vendors:

“Note that although we look for evidence of market presence (10 customers with 500 users each
in production) in order to exclude some of the very small vendors, we deliberately do not have an
explicit test for minimum revenue. This has meant that the Magic Quadrant includes products
from less-established vendors, from vendors experimenting with new pricing models, and opensource
products. This helps to reflect some of the innovation and alternative sourcing options
available in this market. However, although the size, revenues and profitability of the vendors was
taken into account when assessing their ability to execute, you should be aware that some of the
vendors here represent more risk than those in Magic Quadrants with a high revenue threshold.”

 (C) Gartner 2007. All Rights are theirs.

Businessweek has a good piece on Old media.”the story of American
newspapers in the 21st century. The industry has reached a near-crisis
point. Many dailies are losing circulation at an alarming rate, and
local newspaper ad spending fell 3.1% last year, to $24.4 billion,
while Internet advertising rose 17.3%, to $9.8 billion, according to
Advertising Age.“

What do you think?

Baris has a video of Paul Pott in the British version of American Idol.

“Thomas Lee, who was also on the Boeing 747’s first commercial flight
from New York to London in 1970, described the latest experience as
“spectacular … fantastic … incredible.””

“I have never been in anything like this in the air before in my
life,” said Australian Tony Elwood, reclining with his wife, Julie, on
the double bed in their private first-class suite.

“It is going
to make everything else after this simply awful,” he said, sipping Dom
Perignon champagne after a lunch of marinated lobster and double boiled
chicken soup. He paid $50,000 for the two places.

Flight attendants handed out champagne and certificates to passengers,
some of whom paid tens of thousands of dollars in an online auction for
seats.

Most times I fly and someone asks me I say “uneventful, and safe”.

Regardless of how much they paid, why cant every flight be like this one – fantastic, incredible.

I dont think its a matter of cost – just a matter that airlines (especially ones in America) dont care or give a damm.

Larrysays MSFT put $250 Million as an investment in facebook. Valuation $15 Billion as expected. Wow. Makes Ning’s $42 Million palein comparison.

Vinnie asks a burning question on conferences. which do you attend, and what do you do to get most from them?

Jeff gives some tips on getting most of conferences.

I have previously covered 5 things to do and 3 things to not do at BarCamp.

Here are my tips on getting value from conferences:

1.      1.
  Have a list of 5 burning questions that I ask
everyone – end user, vendor, etc. Mostly around things we are trying to get a
better handle on

2.      2.
  Plan on “meeting many” but only networking (deep
meaningful conversations) with 5 (MAX for me)

3.      3. 
  Blog immediately about it so I can hear other
opinions (live blogging)