Planning is Guessing
McKinsey research shows that equity analysts’ earnings-growth estimates were almost 100 percent too high on average for the past quarter century.

Who Has The Most Influence Online?
How to leverage social networks to expand your “influence on influencers” is at the heart of many BtoB online strategies. Forrester’s new Peer Influence Analysis report may help quantify, reach and connect efficiently with influencers online. According to the survey, people in the U.S generate more than 500 billion online impressions on each other regarding products and services — more than one-fourth the number of impressions advertisers make. Foresters’ most interesting point is to risk a profiling of social influencers, that actually helps think differently of the average online influencer and refine strategies accordingly:
- Social Broadcasters: top bloggers with a lot of followers looking to them for news and advice on the latest and greatest. They have scale but lack trust. You need them for awareness, but they are poor advocates.
- Mass Influencers: the minority that creates the majority of the influence may be at the core of any successful SM strategy. They make up only 16% of the influencers but account for 80% of the influence impressions about products and services.
- Potential Influencers have primarily networks of people they actually know in an offline context (friends, family, peers). These people are the most trusted by peers, but the most difficult to reach and activate. They make up 84% of the total population.
The full analysis ($499) is available on the Forrester website. Barb Dybwad also wrote an extensive (free) article about Forrester’s Peer Influence Analysis model on Mashable.
Reality Check
For its newly released 2010 ERP Report , Panorama Consulting surveyed over 1,600 organizations on recent ERP implementations, with the objective to compare the benefits of SaaS and On-Premise software implementations. Time to check the reality behind the claim:
Other findings are not more encouraging for ERP vendors of all kinds:
- 57% of ERP implementations take longer than expected, with an average of 18.4 months.
- 54% end over budget.
So much for the promise of fast implementation and cost-effectiveness.
You can download the full report here (registration required).
Social Media Influence on BtoB Buyers
Here’s an interesting report on BtoB buyers’ use of social media (the single largest category of purchases referred to by buyers in this survey was IT equipment or systems).
A couple of take aways:
- While supplier websites remain a major source of information for BtoB buyers, social media channels such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook have the most influence at every stage of the buying process and in the final decision.
- 20 to 25% of the buyers under 30 year old use social media channels as part of their decision making process, which is up to five times more than “older” buyers.
> Download the report (PDF)
Web marketers are usually more interested in developing ‘front-end’ web strategies than discussing ‘back-end’ integration into their business processes. And so am I. Unfortunately, failing to implement the processes and systems that are supporting it may durably hinder the most brilliant web strategy. The devil is in the details. And among those painful details, I stumbled today across the issue of integrating web-originated data into our new CRM system.
The idea is to wire forms from different websites into a single CRM database to help manage prospects’ inquiries consistently across business units. I realize that “the idea” sounds very much like a basic requirement in the era of “smart businesses seeking conversations with customers through social media”. However, it might be a basic worth to explore for the rest of us.
Integrating multiple data sources into one system inevitably creates a risk of duplicate entries and inconsistency across the system. Born in the era of direct marketing, most CRM systems are designed to manage duplicate entries effectively. By using postal codes, phone numbers and street addresses as a key, they keep a clear track of contacts for telemarketing and mailing purposes. CRM systems are keen on detecting that John Smith, Ohio, does not share much with John Smith, Arizona. But what if the address is missing? Some systems simply avoid the challenge by making THE postal address a mandatory information for new contacts. Including contacts from your website.
Unfortunately, only few Web users are likely to disclose their street address and phone number to access a free download or subscribe to a news feed. Understandably so, they don’t see the point of giving a physical address to get information that can be delivered electronically. More importantly, they don’t always value the information they’ll get at the price of completing an endless form.
As a result, most businesses rely on disparate systems to capture — and nurture — the fragments of information that they get from potential customers such as newsletter subscribers, PDF downloaders and other Facebook fans. If they capture anything at all that would not pass the ‘CRM compliance test’. But without a coherent system able to manage traces of interest from the early stages of the decision making process, they don’t leverage the full potential of their web marketing investment.
One (important) thing is to strategize a multi-channel, closed-loop marketing approach with the objective to nurture the interest of as many visitors of your website as possible. But executing the plan promptly and properly is as much as a challenge. In some cases, it starts with implementing a CRM system flexible enough to consider e-mail addresses, Twitter accounts and LinkedIn profiles as valuable targets for marketing operations as street addresses and phone numbers!
The Day The Mouse Will Be Dead
It all started with a mouse… and it was not so long ago!
How are we going to interact with our digital world in 5 or 10 years?
Watch this (short) conference, and start dreaming!
“How To” articles are a great way to drive traffic to your website. It’s probably the primary type of content that professional bloggers and their sponsors are pushing on the Web today to grow their ranking in search engines. There’s an army of teachers out there ready to teach you ‘how to’ do things like looking good in skinny jeans, overcoming chronic laziness, or—as I just learned on YouTube today with my daughter—how to thread a circular knitting machine! And as the social marketing sphere grows, web marketing sites get filled with How To’s as well. Unless you never bothered to search, there’s no way you’ve not been prompted to learn how to improve your blog, write great posts or use Twitter for business by now.
So I hesitated to add to this overwhelming learning agenda and teach you how to use Facebook as your press room. But I decided to go for it because:
- This is actually something I find valuable for the many small businesses my company is partnering with.
- It’s a pragmatic use of Facebook for BtoB marketers (and I did not find so many others).
- How To’s are great way to feature bulleted lists in my posts, which is something that was highly recommended in the latest “How to make a great blog” lesson that I’ve read.
- I don’t have many How To’s in my blog, and this is supposed to drive more traffic to it.
- It won’t cost me much as I found a great article to re-post about this recently (not sure “re-post” is a word. I’m assuming it is, since “re-tweeting” became mainstream!).
So here you go: Read this article by Josh Peters on Mashable and you’ll have a newsroom up and running on Facebook in no time! I’m joking about How To’s—many of them are not worth reading—but this one should really be considered by the “all-in-one marketers” as I like to call marketing generalists, who are struggling with a thousand priorities and rarely get a chance to dedicate time to PR.
What How To’s do not teach you though, is WHAT to do with the “thing” you learned to do. And Josh’s article is no exception. But what you’re going to do with your Facebook newsroom is essential to its success. You’ll probably have to spend some time to think it through before jumping on this great social opportunity. Where are you going to find frequent and interesting news to publish about your business? What makes a news interesting to your customers, prospects and partners? Can you commit some extra time to this?
There are many ways for a small business to increase awareness at low cost with a good PR strategy. Even if you’re thinking that you don’t have ‘enough news’ to sustain a current newsroom, and I’m sure that you have, give it a second thought. Consider your business in its environment: your partners, your suppliers, your customers, your industry! Beyond your walls, there’s a lot that you can leverage to demonstrate your business expertise and provide interesting news to readers. Facebook is just a vehicle. Don’t jump on it if you’re not ready. But it’s a great vehicle to consider when you’re a small business that does not get natural attention from journalists and industry analysts.
While most companies are playing defense—or keep silent—to cope with the launch of new products by competitors, playing offense is often a better strategy. There’s always some benefits to gain from change, even when change does not look to be in your favor in the first place, provided you’re flexible and creative enough to play around a well-built competitive battle card.
Since their first appearance in 2006, Apple’s PC-Mac commercials successfully positioned the brand as the most innovative in the industry, with remarkably simple, effective, and funny ads. Playing the Innovation card against Microsoft’s Leadership has been a successful strategy. That was then: As Microsoft is catching up on innovation with its new ‘Mac-like’ Windows 7 operating system, there’s little exclusive features left to Mac OS X. Time to revise Apple’s battle card: Against Innovation, play the Trust card. And play it loud!
Remarkably effective. The more so as it remains simple, and funny.





