5 technology trends every software marketer needs to know about

You don’t build products, write code, design architectures, or fix bugs. So why on earth should you want to be aware major trends that are happening in the software development space?

Because these current trends are big, transformative, and are changing the nature of how software is built, delivered, and sold. As a B2B marketer in the software space, these trends will likely have a major impact on how you do your job, or whether your job exists in the coming year or two. These trends are crucial to understand in order to see potential new opportunities, anticipate competitive threats, and be in front of emerging trends.

Here are 5 new trends in the software development landscape that will likely have a significant effect on our role as marketers of software:

1) Development Speed:
Looking back at software development in ancient times – like the early 2000s – it was *much* slower than it is today. This is not a “back in my day” rant, it’s just the nature of the business. Software, in many ways, works like Lego. You work with building blocks to create something. However, much like Lego, the building blocks evolve over time, and new pieces are developed that snap in quickly to do a task that used to take many weeks of coding.

Note for Marketers: Expect new capabilities in your space to pop up, fully formed, much more rapidly than they did just a few years ago.


2) Selling without Transactions:
Once you convince someone that your product is worthy, the “transaction” part of the sale has always been real work; taking credit cards, establishing AR departments, dealing with credit scores. However, major platforms like the iTunes purchase network that sits behind iPods, iPhones, and iPads makes this disappear. Sure, Apple gets a hefty cut, but a software developer does not need to build any “transaction” capabilities.

Note for Marketers: Brainstorm on how your business model might be attacked by a new entrant, with very low costs, selling $0.99 transactions.


3) Devices Everywhere:
The proliferation of high-end mobile devices like the iPhone, Droid, and iPad means that developing location-aware, mass-market software is, for the first time, very viable. Expect these capabilities to challenge the way in which we think about the “standard set of capabilities” of the markets that we are in.

Note for Marketers: Analyze whether your technology could benefit from location-awareness in any way. Someone will be trying this angle.


4) Connections Everywhere:
While we have heard about technical stuff like Web Services, APIs, and REST for a long time, it has always been squarely in the realm of the technologists. The important trend to be aware of now, as marketers, is that finally this trend has reached critical mass. Nearly all major platforms now have robust ways of hooking into each other quickly, easily, and seamlessly. Think about how prevalent the Facebook “Like” button has become as it is “snapped in” to websites around the world, bring a small element of Facebook functionality to those websites.

Note for Marketers: Assess whether a competitor might leapfrog you by “snapping in” capabilities from an ecosystem of providers. Assess whether similar opportunities exist for your team to leapfrog others in your space.


5) Innovating in the Cloud:
There’s been a lot of buzzword confusion when it comes to “Cloud” these days, as it seems like every vendor is renaming themselves a “Cloud” vendor. However, there’s one very interesting new trend to watch – the ability for developers to quickly create and deploy new applications on platforms like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, with only monthly costs, means that we can expect a faster pace of interesting new innovations in the SaaS space. While some of these innovations will be stand-alone software applications, many of them will be quick add-ons and enhancements to existing software.

Note for Marketers: Look for ways that your ecosystem of clients and partners can help you innovate and explore new areas and verticals through add-ons and extensions, rather than exploring this all in-house.


Things are changing rapidly in the development space, and while much of this change is not worth being aware of, these 5 major trends may have influences that extend well beyond the bits and bytes of software development.

6 Ways For Marketing to Help with Social Media

I can almost hear the comments already - shouldn't Marketing be "doing" social media, not "helping" with social media?

Yes.

Sort of.

But there's more to it than that.

The problem is that in many marketing teams, there's "marketing" and then there's "social media". The "marketing" group believes strongly in social media, and agree that it's crucial, but what they "do" is run events, launch promotions, spend ad budgets, and optimize keywords. The "social media" person manages the Twitter handle, the Facebook page, and the blog.

I might be oversimplifying, but this problem is one I've seen often enough to generalize.

The reason is that most B2B marketing teams are not set up to truly invest in social media. Most are organized more around "lightning strike" rather than "flywheel" investment patterns, and often marketing teams do not contain the real subject matter experts needed as content creators for great social media efforts.

This means that the "marketing" folks generally work with two major levers:

- A Budget for campaign spend (ads, search keywords, event promotions, show attendance)
- A Marketing Database of interested or potentially interested prospects

Because they don't fit into these two major levers, the "social media" person's efforts often feel a bit disconnected from the major promotions being run.

So what can be done?

6 Ways Marketing Can Invest in Social Media

Smart marketing teams are applying these two major levers to turbocharge their social media efforts in 6 ways:

1) Content as Advertisement: Instead of spending ad budgets to promote high level branding ad spots, smart marketers are spending ad budgets to share the rich content their team is creating with a much broader audience of potential viewers.

2) Social Content as Nurturing: Rather than creating separate content for each nurture campaign or newsletter, leveraging the best content that the team has created (measured by the number of tweets, for example) gives you a sure win in terms of audience engagement, and lets your content be discoverable by the broader audience in your marketing database.

3) Hiring for Content Creators: If the subject matter experts in your organization are not creating a steady stream of rich content, hire a journalist to facilitate the process (credit for this idea goes to David Meerman Scott). A daily stream of interesting and inspiring content should be no problem for a professional.

4) Sourcing Data for Insight: If the ideas for what to write about are running dry among your content creation team, fund a survey to provide data and insights on topic areas that they suggest. Most organizations surprise themselves with how much mileage they can get out of unique and interesting survey data.

5) Fanning the Flames of Engagement: When your subject matter experts do write content, the marketing team can fan the flames of engagement. Sharing and promoting each new piece of content in the networks it's relevant to (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Delicious, etc) helps build awareness, and motivates your subject matter experts to continue creating more great content.

6) Leveraging Search to Showcase Content: Rather than use your search marketing budget to drive traffic from the same set of terms to the same set of landing pages, leverage your search budget to help each blog post, video, or eBook "get found". The content on each post is very likely long-tail or niche oriented, so the traffic volumes for each one will not be large, but the relevance will be very high.


Done well, the marketing team facilitates the growth of a healthy and vibrant community that is aware of and engaged with the rich, relevant content your subject matter experts and social media team are creating.

While the flywheel vs lightning strike dynamic is a real challenge, these investment options allow marketing teams to work in a coordinated fashion towards true social media success.

What have you done to get the "marketing" and "social media" people on your marketing team to operate in a more coordinated way?

Friends, Avatars, Countrymen, lend me your ears

David Meerman Scott had a great post the other day on “I do not friend logos”. Very well put, and I agree with him.

As you know we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with the best way to apply social media in the B2B marketing realm, and David’s post hit on one of the biggest challenges we’re all facing – what to do about Facebook as B2B marketers. The numbers are undeniable, the active population on Facebook is huge. However, the challenge we’ve all faced, as DM Scott puts so well, is that companies are not really “friendable”.

So, how about a personality… in our next B2B marketing experiment, we’re exploring the idea of a corporate “personality” in the social space. For anyone who is part of the Eloqua community, you may already have met Drake. He now has a Facebook page, a growing bunch of friends, and a personality.

Having a personality is a good start, but how can one translate that into real market traction? For one, a personality opens up more avenues for having fun than a corporate logo does. As the first example, Drake has launched his first contest – take a photo with him, and you might win an iPad. Not something that would fly with a corporate logo.

Is this taking the idea of “personas” a bit too far? Will this crack the code on B2B marketing on Facebook? We’re not sure, but you’ll be the first to know. Well, maybe not the “first”; that honor might go to David Meerman Scott – he is, after all, friends with Drake on Facebook.

LinkedIn as Facebook for the Business World

(note, this post was cross-posted on It's All About Revenue last week)

I've long been a bit skeptical about the use of Facebook for sharing business content. It is a great medium for personal sharing, and works well when businesses hit on the rare, but brilliant creative campaigns that go viral because they are cute, funny, or whimsical. However, for content like whitepapers, it just does not work.

I'm currently running an experiment to see if B2B content is "likeable" on Facebook, and while I have not compiled the data yet, the answers are looking bleak.

However, interesting developments continue at LinkedIn, with their recent promotion of a sharing bookmarklet. The technology is really simple:

1) Drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar:


2) Click it to share any page you are on:

3) Your status is updated with that link:


But the implications are more interesting. By doubling their investment in the status update as a communication metaphor that Twitter and Facebook have leveraged with great success, LinkedIn seems to be attempting to become a similar communications hub for the business world.

Whether they will be successful in becoming "Facebook for the business world" is unclear, but there are a few factors in their favour, and a few against worth considering:

3 Factors working in LinkedIn's favour:
- their presence as the defacto network of business connections gets them over the hurdle of network adoption quickly

- their deeper knowledge of business profiles means that they can (theoretically) do a much better job of understanding influence networks than alternatives

- the gulf between our social selves and our business selves is probably implanted deep in the brain stem, and may be impossible for Facebook to overcome as an inherently "social" ecosystem


3 Factors working against them:
- they are late to the party when it comes to building a robust developer ecosystem to extend and innovate on the core

- their application usage scenario feels a lot more like a CRM system (looking up contact and company details) than a communication platform like Twitter or Facebook. Making this shift will be difficult

- Each network has an implied "hurdle" of becoming connected (Twitter is very low, for example). LinkedIn has historically been a relatively "high" hurdle, which doesn't lead to broad sharing of ideas through many loose connections


What's your bet? Will LinkedIn succeed with this initiative and become Facebook for the business world?

Personalization and the bottom end of the scale

I'm a big fan of increasing relevance through carefully personalized content. The more that is known about an individual with whom you are going to communicate, the more you can target a message that captures their attention and pushes them forward.

This insight into the individual can be based on their digital body language, but it can also be based on their interaction with your software if you happen to be a software company. The insight provided through looking at software usage patterns can be among the most powerful, as you can build highly relevant content, based on very specific knowledge of an individual - in context of your application.

Many of today's social networking systems have leveraged this beautifully, with communications about visits, friends, comments, and activities that compel the recipient to remain engaged and deepen their usage profile.

However, in doing so, it's critical to set things up for the bottom end of usage that recognizes lack of usage as a pattern, and caters to it.

As an example of this, the screenshot is from an email of this type that I received. I don't have anything bad to say about Naymz, and many people I know use the service. I just don't happen to use it myself - I set up a profile, but never really adopted it. However, the personalization I receive is clearly targeted at amplifying my usage. If I saw 25 visits to my profile in the last week, I might be tempted to dive in a bit further, however with 0 visits, I'm pushed in the opposite direction.

In setting up the personalization systems that we all use, the temptation is there to focus on the highly engaged, and amplify their engagement. Whether it is with product trials, education, or event attendance, we're all tempted to focus on this keen minority, as they are the most fun. However, in doing so, there's a risk we might alienate those who are not yet engaged.

How do you cater your personalization to the non-engaged? What have you seen that worked well in identifying and re-engaging this end of the spectrum?

Content as Advertisement

Content has long been a key driver of success for great B2B marketers in today's world. That's nothing new, and we've talked about related topics such as the content gap and the need to get more subject matter experts involved.

However, one challenge that remains is how to draw attention to your content. Earning attention is certainly the best way, by steadily creating great content, winning over the hearts and minds of a loyal following, and having that loyal following share your message with still more audience members.

That's a great way to build an audience, but it is NOT a fast way.

The Challenge of Earned Media

In a recent post, I talked about the flywheel effect that these investments had; slowly building a following over time that built up momentum and energy, but based on the continual push of great content, rather than the blast of major marketing spend.

An interesting hybrid option has been appearing recently, here's one I saw from American Express:


And here's a similar example from Accenture:



These are ad placements - these happened to be on LinkedIn, but where is less important than what. They are regular, paid ad placements that advertise not promotions or brand-related things, but pure content.

Buying Your Way to Earned Media

This is not a shortcut of the mantra of earned media; for this strategy to work, the content has to be interesting, relevant, useful, and valuable. It is, however, a turbo-charging of it. By using advertising to broaden the discovery of the information, Accenture and American Express are just fast-tracking the process.

The content must still stand on its own merits, but for those with a reasonable advertising budget, the laborious process of building a loyal audience can be facilitated with a bit of cash.

I'm sure that this is an affront to many content marketing purists, so I welcome what I'm sure will be an interesting discussion. Have you tried using content as an advertisement in this way? Did it work?