Let's Have a Paradigm Shift Away from the Term "Paradigm Shift"

I've been trying to avoid using the term Paradigm Shift in a number of articles on this blog. The gravitational pull to the term has been enormous, but I've managed it. I realise I'm not the only one - this item on Media Orchard - Idea Grove's blog, taught me where the term came from, and showed me someone's even more fed up with it than I am!

Technorati Tags : Paradigm

Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace

Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace (IPB) is the systematic and continuous analysis of the adversary, terrain, and conditions in the assigned or potential battlespace. It is an analytic framework for organizing information to help provide timely, accurate, and relevant intelligence to the military decisionmaking process (MDMP). Right - now substitute marketing for military, and we are talking business rather than army or special forces.

I was thinking about the importance of market intelligence today while I was speaking to one of my prospects. They are a small, well organised, family run accounting practice, that presents a bigger image to the world at large. Their main partner was explaining to me how he looks for new business, using lists of new starter companies in his area, and how he put together his main marketing letter that he sends to those new prospects. These are his target market, but he has a reputation for being choosy about the clients he takes on. What he told me reminded me how important it is for any organisation to get the marketing basics right, but how often we fall in to the trap of drawing on all of our years of experience, and then not bothering to test it with the target audience. He'd written and refined his introductory letter several times, but before he sent it out he decided to review it with two of his existing clients. Both of them said the same thing - that it was pretty good, explained what the practice does, but that it would be destined for the bin in both cases!

He asked them to refine it for him - probably 80% of the text of the letter remained, and the changes were subtle, but very important. The letter offers a free initial meeting, but majors on the message that you should not put off getting professional advice until a later stage of your business (as new start ups so often do). The letter doesn't cover much detail on what the practice does - they're accountants after all, everybody knows what an accountant does! The letter explains that they are a small business too, so they understand the issues the client is facing at first hand. It points out that the partner is a member of the Institute of Business Advisors (more than just an accountant). It explains that they have a fixed fee structure, so the client will always know where they stand on the bill, and that advice and support on the phone is always free. It explains that they understand how busy the client must be so they can meet in the evening or the weekend, and at the client's home if they wish - that endeavours to get away from the waiting room syndrome where a visit to the accountant begins to feel like a visit to the dentist! These are all good ways that this practice differentiates themselves from the herd, and it works, because the prospective clients often refer back to the letter several times in the early conversations.

As in any campaign, military or marketing - it's about good intelligence and executing the basics!

Update: The family practice in question is Holden Associates, and Jason Holden was explaining his story.

Technorati Tags : Marketing, leads, intelligence, preparation, tactics, testing, business

 

Rebranding and Web Two Point Doh!

Earlier in the year I was advising a software house client on rebranding their company. While I was pondering and brainstorming on new names I found a plethora of sites for ideas, like Wordlab or Igor's Snark Hunting, but also some silly ones like Jeremy Keith's which suggests name and mission for your New Media company.

But now with the new phase of the Internet, the speed that new companies are being formed, and the VC interest in the topic, it was inevitable that someone would have some fun with it - take a look at Web Two Point Oh!

Technorati Tags : Marketing, branding, Web2.0

Is it Safe?

Like a current UK advert for Revels where I wonder how many understand the homage to The Deer Hunter, is it only people of a certain age who will think dentists, Laurence Olivier and Marathon Man? But actually I mean your data. I had one of those scary moments this morning. A worrying looking blue screen, and I suffered an adrenaline rush of the wrong kind - when was the last time I'd hit the Onetouch save button? Oh dear... about 8 days ago. I'm amazed how many professionals, or even organisations are just too blasé with their data. Those of us who come from an earlier time in IT, when disks went wrong on a regular basis, will have a particular device that was the bain of their lives - for me it was the IBM 3370 (which was the first thin film technology disk). These days disks are so reliable, people get away with sloppy personal IT management. My solution to the problem is a Maxtor Onetouch external USB drive . When I leave the PC at the end of the day, I press the button on the front and anything new or changed gets saved - easy, providing you remember to do it!

 Thankfully for me, the adrenaline fuelled wait after I'd hit the power off, then on button ended in XP Professional clearing itself up and starting properly. I hit that Onetouch button as soon as the restart finished. Phew! But it reminded me that with the various Software as a Service (SaaS) systems I use, there was no problem. All that backup and recovery for my accounting system, various intranets, content management system and demo systems are someone else's headache, and with a much better disaster recovery solution than most individual organisations can afford - some of them mirror their data to servers on the other side of the world every 24 hours. It's one of the key reasons why company's should be taking SaaS very seriously. Is your system safe?

Technorati Tags : SaaS, technology, disaster, recovery, backup, IBM, disks

Millions of Markets of Dozens

Rather than dozens of markets of millions. These are words taken from Joe Kraus's Bnoopy blog. I referenced him in a earlier piece - he's the guy behind Excite, and now JotSpot. He posted a very long item on Software's Long tail that you should go and read, but I'm going to try to summarise a few of his points for you here and add a little of my own spin.

The purpose of software in business is to support an organisations processes - selling, ordering, hiring, manufacturing, warehousing, accounting. Some of these processes are similar enough between businesses that they can be addressed with standard software, like ERP. A large number of these processes might have the same name in different companies (e.g. recruitment) but actually happen in completely different ways. Then there are many other processes that will be unique to the particular business.

There are plenty of software products available for the mainstream business application areas, where the market volumes make it economic for them to be developed, marketed, and sold in thousands or millions of standard copies. But there is an enormous volume of processes that are never touched, because they could only be sold in 100s or 10s or 1s - software's long tail.

However these application areas do get addressed by most organisations with 2 standard tools - the spreadsheet and e-mail. The same problems that give us a headache with Excel in the traditional area of accounting occur here too. Have I got the right version of the spreadsheet? Someone else has updated it but forgotten to mail it to me. No integration between the spreadsheet items, and the mails and documents they relate to.

Many of the tools that are emerging in the Web 2.0 world - cost effective intranets, wiki based intranets, and blogs are tools that can do a much better job of addressing these applications than isolated spreadsheets and e-mails. They provide platforms to integrate the data and with version control and history. You should be looking to apply these to your business to take better control of the ad hoc systems that have evolved.

And lastly, this long tail presents business opportunities for software developers and entrepreneurs. Joe wraps it up in these words:

"Whatever business your starting, think about how to serve millions of markets of dozens instead of dozens of markets of millions. Serving the head isn’t a bad strategy. You can build a great business. But, figure out how to serve the tail of your market efficiently and you’ve got a blockbuster."

Technorati Tags : Marketing, markets, entrepreneurs, JotsSpot, software, long, tail, SaaS, Web2.0

Forbes - Attack of the Blogs!

I am indebted to Dennis Howlett and Owen Barder (a Londoner transplanted to Berkeley, California) for highlighting a Forbes front cover story that attacks we bloggers and the blogosphere, calling us a lynch mob. I can't add to Dennis or Owen's words, so please go and read about it there.

One thing I can say, is that I am completely unimpressed by Forbes.com. You have to register with the site to get at the article, which is free, but you have to wade through pages of tick boxes to subscribe/not subscribe to various newsletters, then you get a big advertising page to skip, and then a congratulations page pointing at the wrong article, at which point I had to go back to Dennis's site, and click the link again to find it. An ideal example of how not to do your site advertising.

But the thing that really upset me was that my country was not on the drop down list in the registration page. Now I know "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" might be a bit long for the drop down, but no UK, or even Great Britain. Thankfully they had remembered England. It's the kind of thing that gives those Yanks a bad name!

Technorati Tags : Blogging, blogs, marketing, Forbes

Paxman 2.0 and a Flock of geeks

As I've said before, I'm amazed how many people I meet in the software business who aren't aware of Web 2.0 and don't realise the blog wave is upon us. Only today I was talking to a good, experienced guy who is selling Software as a Service collaboration solutions for a living, but admitted he isn't as up to speed on wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and the way collaboration solutions are evolving as he should be. Maybe that will begin to change. I just heard Web 2.0 mentioned by Jeremy Paxman and Newsnight .

They did an interesting piece, by Paul Mason, on a new product called Flock, but what was more interesting were the topics mentioned within the item, which they coined as "Internet Part II". Flock appears to be a new browser environment, related to Firefox, and intended to integrate browser, blog, and collaboration functions together in one place, rather than separate products you have to access through the browser. One of the experts had a job title of Director of User Experience, and there was a lot of talk around the user interface. I'd heard the name, knew it was an open source project, but now I know a little more, and that it integrates with the del.icio.us bookmark and Flickr photo sharing services.

But the item explained a little about the blogging phenomenon, covered collaboration and the business benefits of the open source software approach, and used the term Web 2.0. Sadly, as well as bringing this important stuff in to the mainstream of news coverage, the guys that develop Flock are the classic, stereotypical geeks, seen brainstorming over beer and coffee with a whole…. crowd of their brethren. It would be enough to confirm in the normal person's mind that this stuff obviously needs a level of technical geekness beyond mere mortals, and so should be avoided. A great shame, but the situation is improved by a good write up on the BBC website.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0, SaaS, wiki, blogs, Flock, social, bookmarking, BBC

Fascinating, exciting and frightening - but Blogs mean Business

This blog is less than a week old, and I've only been investigating the phenomenon (see 80,001 blogs today!) for a few months, but two things are crystal clear - blogging as a marketing tool works, and every company, no matter what size, needs to embrace the blog as a key part of their marketing mix. I'm indebted to Dennis Howlett who, in a number of ways, has been an inspiration. And I'm flattered to see that my company is the example in one of his latest items "ROI - little man v 800lb gorilla". I won't repeat it here, please go and read it there, but it highlights that a company can spend a significant sum on a campaign in a major "publication" and get a pretty good return in conventional terms of "cost per lead". However, a well read blog, like Dennis's, can do a product review because they are interested in the topic, and generate leads at only the cost of some time and effort. A very good return indeed, and the key is that the blog has the right audience of decision makers who regularly come and visit, because there is useful and diverse material there, and interesting comments from the readership.

I'd often heard it quoted that a Saville Row tailor started a blog last Christmas for a tiny sum, and his business has got global PR coverage from it, and grown astronomically. Dennis's piece refers you to a nice broadcast at Marketplace which uses that as one of several case studies. I now know that he was Thomas Mahon, with a blog called English Cut (hey! I just sent a few more visitors his way!). Interestingly, and as I expected, the blog should not be a hard sell, or even necessarily about the product at all. As long as it has appealing content for your target audience, they will come and read, and find out about what you do as a by-product.

The key message is that blogs are cheap, direct and ideal for niche industries. Start ups, small businesses and niche players generally have very modest marketing budgets, so cheap is good. However, it can't be the only lead generation tool. For my company the conventional and the new approach were inextricably linked. I found the company to do the traditional campaign was going to be worthwhile by posting messages on their site. That produced results, which led me to decide to use from for the traditional campaign. The traditional campaign produced results, which was how I made contact with Dennis, and then in turn ended up getting leads from his blog. It's the viral marketing thing. But the trick here is to pick the ingredients properly - use the conventional methods that still work in the current environment and combine that with the fact that blogs means business.

Technorati Tags : Business, marketing, blogs, blogging

Blockbusters are limited and Amazons have long tails

This new Web 2.0 world is a wonderful place. It means small can be beautiful. It's a boon to the consumer, both in terms of price and availability, and it means that the esoteric or the eccentric can be easy to find. As well as for consumers, it's great for entrepreneurs, because the barriers for entry to a market, or to collect together the capital and tools required to start a new venture have never been lower or cheaper. Let me explain.

The retail trends of the 80s and the 90s meant that finding my favourite jazz record (and then CD) became harder and harder, as my local record store disappeared to be replaced by an Our Price or some such. Big focus on the top 50 albums, less space for my Jazz. I had to start going to the larger HMVs, Virgin Megastores or Tower Records. Often I would head for strange and dusty specialist shops, with very odd people behind the counter, décor from the previous owner, and fixtures made from poorly painted chipboard. I'd find what I wanted, but it wouldn't be cheap. In an initial wave Amazon has changed all of that. In a second wave iTunes is changing it further. At Amazon, the shelves are limitless. All of the old, and strange and esoteric stuff that was hard to find and beyond the economics of the record shop to be able to stock, is under the fingertips of my search engine. The cost to store it in the warehouse is no different to the latest Kylie. Usually it arrives by first class post the next day, and it's price isn't that different from a top 10 CD in the high street. And the other major factor, is how I get recommendations. In the old days, the dodgy guy behind the counter "might" put on an album I'd not heard that I might like. Or the guy next to me might say "that one's good". These days it's much safer. Amazon recommends that people buying this also bought that. I can even listen to snippets (and it usually only takes 30 seconds to decide if you like it or not). And Amazon are doing the same with books. My local Borders might stock 100,000 books. I can find lots of stuff in there, but Amazon stock loads more, with easy access to reviews, and even the first few pages. And the key fact - Amazon makes more than half or their book sales on titles from outside the top 100,000.

Now with iTunes, the revolution goes further. I get access to the large library, I get reviews and recommendations, and I even get to buy the one track I like rather than the whole album. Currently I still get dragged down Blockbuster by my son and daughter for movies and PS2 games. I would guess the store must stock 3,000 titles. I'm being regularly bombarded by mail shots and adverts for the online rental stores that have 25,000 or 32,000 titles in their inventory. For a modest monthly fee I get to rent a certain number, and I keep them for as long as I like. No more forgetting the day it was supposed to go back and forking out for another rental charge. I get this feeling I won't be visiting that Blockbuster store at all soon.

So the technology of Web 2.0 means that big companies like Amazon or eBay can access the long tail of the market and make it profitable. There is a great (though long) article on the topic, and particularly the media side by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine, called The Long Tail.

I looked at a presentation recently by Joe Kraus, founder of search company Excite (if you remember them) and now JotSpot. He said:

"You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day."

They could make money on the 3% of traffic in their top 10 searches for sex, MP3 and Britney Spears, but not on the 97% of searches on everything else. Google figured out a way to make money on that long tail. But it's not just great for Google, who got big, it's great for the small business entrepreneur. This is a special kind of marketplace where small advertisers can reach small markets efficiently.

That access to the long tail at an affordable level is one of the factors that is lowering the barriers for new start ups, and creating the opportunity for small, specialist niche players to thrive. Joe says that to start Excite back in the 90s cost $3,000,000 from idea to launch, but to start JotSpot this year it cost $100,000 (a much easier sum for many people to raise than $3m). There are many factors to explain the difference, but it is better to hear the story from Joe at his Bnoopy blog. (Hey - and I didn't mention clicks or bricks once!)

What's this Web 2.0 stuff anyway?

I was explaining what this blog is all about to a friend who knows a lot about the software business, but who hadn't come across the Web 2.0 term. So I thought an explanation and some reference points were in order. There are major market forces being generated by this particular family of discontinuous innovations, with new categories of products evolving, some with breakthrough technology. Before I get in to explaining the phenomenon, to get a steer on the best business strategy in this environment, you can do no better than read Geoffrey A. Moore's Inside the Tornado (and Crossing the Chasm), which have examples from an earlier time before the Dot.com shakeout, but with messages that still hold true.

The term itself was first coined at a conference brainstorming session between Tim O'Reilly and MediaLive International, which also spawned the Web 2.0 Conference (second annual, held earlier this month). Consequently, the best explanation I could find was on O'Reilly's website. Some suggest it's just a marketing buzzword (and I know it's regularly misused that way) but it is much more important, and all about viewing the web as an applications platform.

One of the shorthand ways to describe what it's all about comes from this extract from his article:

"In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as "Web 1.0" and another as "Web 2.0"?"

Tim's article goes on to explain that the characteristics of Web 2.0 companies include offering scalable services rather than packaged software. Their approach will harness collective intelligence in some way - from blogging to the Open Source Software model. They will use some form of customer self service model, and adopt a very different, "lighter" business model compared to traditional software vendors. It's all very exciting. Read more here.

I did, however, have to look up some of the jargon and buzzwords in the article - folksonomy for example. See the Bullfighter, elsewhere on this site!

From Marketing Warfare to The Origin of Brands

Even in the Web 2.0 world, the basic laws of marketing still apply. Many years ago I picked up a book called Marketing Warfare, just because the title appealed to me. Consequently I discovered the best books on the marketing topic, written by All Ries and Jack Trout. They include Positioning, Bottom-Up Marketing, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - all great. Al now writes with his daughter Laura, and they run Ries & Ries Consulting together. Although their examples are usually American, and very "big brand" oriented, their messages are universal and can be applied to your business in your sector and geography, or your client's.

The following words are lifted direct from their site, and offer a taster of their last book. You can even download a free summarised 20 page version there - great material, and timeless ideas.

Divide & conquer. Every category tends to expand in many different directions, creating opportunities for narrowly focused brands. The typical American coffee shop that served everything has been upstaged by chains that focus on hamburgers (McDonald's), chicken (KFC), pizza (Pizza Hut), donuts (Dunkin' Donuts), submarine sandwiches (Subway), roast beef (Arby's), ice cream (Baskin-Robbins) and many others.
Exploit divergence. Every category tends to branch off, creating many brand-building opportunities. The soft-drink category branched off to become a cinnamon-flavored drink (DrPepper), an all-natural drink (Snapple) a sports drink (Gatorade), an energy drink (Red Bull) and many others.
Survival of the firstest. The first brand into the mind has an enormous advantage. Amazon, California Closets, Nike, PowerBar, Swatch, Starbucks, WD40 and many others. A small lead early in the game can become an insurmountable lead later on.
Survival of the secondest. If you're not first, you can still be successful by being the opposite of the leader. Listerine, the bad-tasting mouthwash, was the leader so Scope became a No. 2 brand by being the good tasting mouthwash. BMW became the opposite of Mercedes-Benz; Pepsi-Cola, the opposite of Coke; Lowe's, the opposite of Home Depot.
The power of pruning. As a category diverges into two or more different categories, a company needs to decide what operations to prune. Trying to cover every single diverging branch with a single brand name is the biggest mistake a company can make.

Find out more about the book here - The Origin of Brands

Why business people speak like idiots!

"This is just the kind of synergistic, customer-centric, upsell-driven, out-of-the-box, customizable, strategically tactical, best-of-breed thought leadership that will help our clients track to true north. Let's fly this up the flagpole and see where the pushback is."

"Why business people speak like idiots" is the name of a book by by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky. They know that every day, we get bombarded by an endless stream of filtered, jargon-filled corporate speak, all of which makes it harder to get heard, harder to be authentic, and definitely harder to have fun. You can find out more about them and their book at the Fight the bull website.

Their key message is that this epidemic of bull and boredom presents a real opportunity to us. All those human beings who went to work Monday morning want something better. They don't want disclaimers, non-promises, sugar-coated news or canned speeches. They want someone to capture their imagination, stir their enthusiasm and tell them the truth.

You can also download Fight the bull's rather interesting free software Bullfighter. They describe it as the epoch-defining software that works with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to help you find and eliminate jargon in your documents. It was originally developed by Deloitte Consulting, but is now distributed free through their site. Well worth a visit - plain English and a good sense of humour.

80,001 blogs today!

Apparently there are 80,000 blogs created on the web every day. Well today it must be 80,001 because Business Two Zero came in to existence earlier this afternoon. If you've just stumbled across this site by accident, been hiding in a cupboard for the last few years, or maybe you just got back from an expedition down the Amazon, and you aren't sure what a blog is, then you should find out more about this phenomenon. They tell me there are 140 million blogs on the web already, and it is affecting the whole world of publishing and media in a big way. That means that you need to know about it, know how it will change some of the traditional ways you've done business in the past, and learn how to use it to your advantage.

One place to start to make sense of what is available, and what might be useful to you, is to look at CNET's Blog 100. If you want to find out about the basics, the history of the way web logging has developed, how it has become a legitimate news source, begun to influence politics, then a good place to start, as with so many topics, is the Wikipedia entry.

The one thing that is assured, is that blogging will grow in importance. At a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products, or make plans to create blogs as a means of communicating with their customer base. Read Forrester's research and thoughts on the topic - Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal?

Inspiration from another nation

Spain actually. Last Friday I had a long conversation with Dennis Howlett, who lives somewhere north of Benidorm. He writes an excellent blog at www.accmanpro.com and we were swapping ideas about Software as a Service, and the online accounting product that my company has just launched called Twinfield. We talked about a lot of other things too, including wikis, practice management, music, the rise and fall of certain enterprise software companies and the key factors at work changing the nature of the software business. But all of that inspired me to start this blog. So - a big thank you to Dennis - and please take a look at his blog.