The book is published...

I just received some copies of the book, so those folks that have pre-ordered should be getting them any day now, Christmas post permitting. Our case study contributors and draft proof reviewers will receive their copies direct from the publisher.

Now comes the hard part - marketing and selling!

Whither the book?

The book is supposed to be officially out. Except it's not - delays in the printing process.

I apologise if this has ruined your Christmas, though I suspect only my closest relatives are really fretting.

If it really will cause you grief let me know. Otherwise, consider it something meaty to start in 2008.

Thanks for your patience...

Carter Lusher's new gig

You may have heard that Carter, who ran AR at HP in the US, departed HP recently. He emailed me yesterday to point out his new role, heading up a reborn SageCircle AR firm. I read Carter's blog while he was at HP, so his SageCircle Blog should be similarly stimulating. Good luck on the new gig, Carter.

Interestingly, the blog site names this blog as an AR blog, not the first time I've been pigeonholed as such. Lord help anyone visiting here expecting advice on how to run an AR practice. Read this post from Skip, then come back and see analysts in the holistic context of influencer ecosystems...

I also note that SageCircle blogs cite (what I guess are) SageCircle's competitors - ASG, KCG, Lighthouse, Tiger Lily, etc. Good on you, SageCircle. It's a small market and the more informed the target audience the better for all. Grow the pie, as they say.

It's also good influencing strategy, as your competitors are usually influencing your audience. Engage with them, arther than ignore them. It nearly always has benefits.

“We can’t find out who our influencers are…”

Reuters reports that US PR companies are struggling to identify social media influencers, because they are using criteria out of step with the social networks being influenced. PR companies think quality of content, relevance and search engine rankings are important in influencing social media users. Social media users in fact value participation levels (e.g. number of comments), frequency of posting, and name recognition of the individual.

Two key points here:

Firstly, PR is out of step with its target audience, and the research by Society for New Communications Research is therefore very timely. Importantly, PR firms under-estimate the value of engagement in influencing through social media.

Secondly, I think the study shows that influence itself is a social phenomenon, whether exerted through social media or via more traditional channels. A great way to engage with your target audience is to engage with its influencers, but this has to be done in an appropriate social context.

That’s why establishing communities of influencers works well. We say often at Influencer50 that influencers love to influence, but they also love to interact with other influencers – that how they get much of their influence in the first place. Firms that facilitate this interaction are much valued – like the CMO Council.

CMO Council talk transcript

It’s available for unrestricted download here…

The paper on the Insanity of Marketing, which I referred to, is here (one-time registration required, or just login).

Marketing efficiency versus marketing effectiveness

How do you measure marketing?

I think that marketing should be measured by sales. Whether you use incremental sales, or total sales, or marketing-budget-to-sales ratio, or sales velocity, or some other metric, it all comes down to sales. Market awareness or “propensity to purchase” and other such things are pointless if they don’t ultimately lead to sales.

The difficulty comes in tying specific campaigns to sales. How do you know if the event you ran caused someone to buy when they wouldn’t have otherwise? So most marketing organisations track overall operational effectiveness and/or efficiency.

Fair enough. But I was shown the following chart by a client. It plots IDC's assessment of 99 firms on two scales: how efficient marketing is (vertical scale), and how effective it is (horizontal).

The chart comes from IDC’s CMO programme, Marketing Investment Planner 2008: Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators, published in September 2007. (You have to subscribe to this service, which I recommend if you want to benchmark your marketing against peers, or purchase the report to see the whole document,).

What does this chart show us? The startling thing about this scatter diagram is the degree of scatter. It looks pretty much random. I’m guessing that if there is any correlation between effectiveness (how useful marketing is) and efficiency (how well marketing is performed) it’s tiny.

For example, the most efficient marketing operation faired no better in its effectiveness than many less efficient operations.

Put simply, how well you do marketing has little effect on how useful marketing is.

Ouch! What we have here is a case of measuring for measure’s sake. It’s a problem I’ve detected with the whole Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM) movement. It’s all very well measuring marketing, but does it actually help?

Focus on marketing effectiveness, measured in sales, and you won’t go far wrong. Efficiency can come later.

CMO Summit thoughts

Last week I was at the CMO Summit, run by the CMO Council Europe, in the splendid Hotel Adlon Kempinski in Berlin. I'll post some of my more detailed thoughts on specific presentations shortly. But the overall impression is that the quality of presenters and attendees was very high. From Malcolm MacDonald to David Haigh of Brand Finance, the first day was top notch, and I learned a lot.


I'm usually very sceptical towards the value of conferences, as they tend to be vendor-sponsorred pitching opportunities. But at the CMO Summit there was very little pitch, and it created a rare occassion for CMOs to gather as a community.


I gave an after-dinner talk on why marketing is insane and what to do about it - transcript to be posted soon.


The lasting impression of the Summit is that I had planned to be tough on marketers and marketing - "you're insane..." and all that. But more than a few presenters beat me to it. There is an apparent consensus amongst commentators on marketing that there is a lot of nonsense and poor practice in the industry.


Will, or can, marketers change old habits and mindsets?