I just returned from Blog World 2010.  It was an eye opening experience and ignited a series of mental connections for me.  There are so many free tools out there providing real value today.  Unlike the dot.com era, these tools actually have real business models under the surface.  Most of the ones I ran into had paid versions for greater features or “private” installations versus public visibility.

I saw another great example of this today when I received an email from seekingalpha.com (the first email ever).  They wanted to let me know that Apps were now available on their site.  There were many free apps and as expected, paid versions as well.

Seeking Alpha is adding value and revenue streams in a way that I’m sure will delight their user base.  I expect to see an explosion of Apps on all kinds of sites that have large user populations.  It is no longer limited to the big boys like Apple or Salesforce.com.

Even Corporate websites would benefit from adding apps instead of “pages”.  It allows someone to configure their most often sought information into one place.  Now, for the big question…where is all this leading?  Let’s address that in a follow on post.

These past two years have challenged all sales organizations to re-assess how they sell.  Far fewer are revisiting how their prospects buy.  Every organization needs to confirm buying behaviors and preferences from time to time to avoid missing big trends.  Encyclopedia Britannica would have benefitted from this in the mid-nineties. They would have seen the emerging preferences for lower cost and easier methods of access.  Major disruptive events cause changes in buyers and it is a fair bet that your buyers are subtly changing right now.

Many sales leaders are taking the right steps to double down on their key accounts and put in place cost effective sales channels among other things to bolster sales results.  There is a tendency, though, to rush through planning and move on to the implementation.  After all, this takes time and a sales organization never has an abundance of time on their hands.  A little up front analysis on the buying process, though, can yield significant insights on how you should best organize your selling efforts.

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal Marketplace section provides a good example of how Estee Lauder has adjusted to changes in buying behavior.  Historically, there have never been visible prices at the counter…if you had to ask then you couldn’t afford it.  That had the benefit of creating panache but also qualifying buyers.  In this environment, that approach has had the negative effect of confirming a buyer’s initial suspicions that they can’t afford it.  Estee Lauder also noticed that women just wanted to try out their products without all those cosmetic technicians floating around.

In response to these changes, they started displaying prices and provided different options for experiencing their products via self serve, computer analysis or live interaction with a technician. Consider how things might have played out had Estee Lauder not revisited their buyer’s preferences and behaviors.  They might have responded by putting even more technicians on the floor or lowering prices.  Both options would have hurt profitability.

The article can be accessed here.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703915204575103604265214346.html?KEYWORDS=lauder#articleTabs%3Darticle

I was surprised and impressed to see Adobe announcing the acquisition of Omniture.  It shows that Adobe is ready and willing to move from the content creation realm into the management and delivery analytics of that information as it makes its way to the ultimate end user.  Earlier in my career, I recall someone telling me that the most value is created at the end nodes of a network.  It makes sense that the original producer enjoys less competition (possibly) and can influence price transparency more than the “middleman”.  The same goes for the entity that provides the last sale of the product in its final form.  The last provider benefits from the cumulative value that has been added along the way.  It seems that Adobe is going after the two ends of the value network for B2B digital marketing content.

As with any acquisition, there is the cultural challenge and whether or not the new products are truly complimentary to the current portfolio.  The end customer is the marketing department for both companies so they have a common buying center.  I participated in an Omniture study recently that ensured I would receive the results of the study once they were published.  I was blown away by the personalization of the study which included my responses right alongside my peer group and overall responses.  The study had a customized cover sheet describing my areas for improvement and linked those back to Omniture offerings.  That was the best content marketing example I have seen all year.

Ultimately, I think it is a wise move when your product portfolio includes tools that help measure and quantify the ROI of the rest of the tools in your offering.  There could be another not so well publicized reason for the acquisition.  There has been increased talk about outsourcing of marketing and if that trend really takes hold it would hurt sales of Adobe creative tools.  The management and monitoring of marketing’s contribution will likely stay within the four walls as a sort of check and balance – Omniture provides just the sort of oversight capability you would need here.

Kudos to Adobe for venturing upstream while most are looking for safe harbors.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about the Ford ad on the cover of Esquire that was the first ever digital ad in a magazine.  Now, CBS has teamed up with Pepsi to create an ad in Entertainment Weekly featuring a small video player.  I’m surprised it took this long but the appetite for an expensive new ad form has been suppressed by budget freezes this year.  You can read more about it on CMO.com.

The ad form is similar to the greeting cards that sing to you when you open it.  No doubt, greeting cards will soon have video capability.  Consider the fact that the video cards will probably cost around $3 to $5 and the newsstand price of Entertainment Weekly is $3.00.

I have to wonder who will profit more from the use of the technology?  Hallmark gets the same amount of money per consumer but puts in way less effort and raw material to produce their product.  Entertainment Weekly will need to charge a steep premium on this ad type which will keep demand down in the short run.

This technology is going to have to trim down in size before we start seeing lots of these ads in a single issue but this will come as well.  Now, what I haven’t seen yet is the first direct mail piece incorporating digital video in print.  Will it be Microsoft’s next OS launch?  What other product company has the cash and ubiquity to support such an expensive campaign?

It has been many months since I last posted to this blog and I want to get back to contributing on a regular basis.  Today, I saw an interesting announcement that StrongMail had acquired popularMedia.  What caught my attention was the fact that an email marketing provider would see enough value in a social media solutions firm to part with their money in this environment.  StrongMail is clearly focused on a platform strategy in my opinion.

These events typically set off a series of copy-cat moves in an industry so we are likely to see more activity soon.  What is more interesting though is where this is all headed.  The adoption and leveraging of any technology is proportional to how easy it is to adopt in the first place.  StrongMail will make it easier for their customers to use advanced web ads and social media.  That moves Strongmail up one level closer to the source of lead generation.  If you think about it, StrongMail customers need leads to send emails to so initial lead capture is a high value capability.

So, where are we headed?  PopularMedia provides a demo on their website of their Influencer Ads product using the Chicago Fire professional soccer organization.  It is a video of the “goal of the week” and the call to action is to share it with others to build interest in attending games.  That’s cool but imagine this scenario:

• The best moments of the game are captured immediately from the replay reel on the big screen at the stadium
• An SMS text number is provided to get the mobile web page address for fans that want to share that play right now with friends
• The fan receives the link then clicks – they are directed to popularmedia’s interactive ad
• The fan shares the play with a message “wish you were here!”

It is only a matter of time before this type of real time content is provided by the venue as opposed to individuals via their camera phones.  It is much more relevant and compelling in the moment which is what we strive for in marketing communication.  We will look back on these current “goal of the week” type marketing campaigns and wonder why it took us so long to wake up.

Over the past couple weeks we have seen Rackspace acquire JungleDisk and Slicehost to counter Amazon S3 and EC2 as well as Microsoft’s announcement of their own Windows Cloud, Azure.  My own company, EMC, has established a Cloud Division which houses the Pi and Mozy acquisitions. There are more annoucements coming in this area from EMC.  What is interesting is how these Cloud Services are being rolled out to the general public.

There are two main camps developing around public versus private Clouds.  EMC VMware is focusing on private Clouds and there is quite a few vendors out there deploying public cloud platforms.  Given the evolution that VMware took, I would guess that private clouds will achieve higher adoption by large corporations in the near term.  VMware had a lot of initial deployments in the Test/Dev environments of IT and as it proved its worth, those companies moved to apply virtualiztion to their production environments.

It is a logical extension to think big business will deploy clouds internally first to understand them and develop expertise and processes for managing these environments.  The next couple of years’ economic outlook will most likely drive smaller companies to explore public cloud services.  Large companies will have to research the public cloud offerings if for no other reason than checking the box for the higher ups asking for possible approaches to lowering IT spend.  As we move into better times, the increase in adoption could be substantial.

Now, I’m not discounting the challenges…these public cloud offerings will have to overcome the perception of poor service levels (i.e. S3 and EC2 outages earlier this year).  There is always the issue of security and performance but these will get worked out over time.  A recent article about Drop.io’s exclusive use of cloud infrastrucuture gives some good perspective on the decision process they went through.

I had read recently about Ford being the first to use e-ink for an advertisement in a magazine but I didn’t see it until today in the airport magazine stand. Web Content and DIgital Asset Management are obvious beneficiaries of this new medium and dynamic billboards will be everywhere in the next few years.

I see a major disruption in the signage industry looming. As the cost of e-ink film comes down it will surely replace traditional print signage. The folks that build huge roadside billboards have some of the technical expertise to manage and support this new medium but your typical print shop will be ill-equipped to provide turn key solutions. There’s an opportunity for someone to create straight forward solutions that the print shops can market to the SMB space.

It will get a lot more interesting when cab drivers have e-ink film plastered on their cars and marketplaces develop to dynamically display ads that are geo-aware…”Hungry for a Slice of Pizza? Look behind you!”.

Here is a good video:

Here is another video and explanation of the esquire cover from their editor.

The single most interesting thing about social media is how the individual has been empowered to communicate their ideas and opinions on a global scale. My own blog is a venue for getting out new ideas on the future of business that extends well beyond my friends and co-workers.  Today, you can know quite a bit about someone without ever having met them or had a conversation about them just by reading their blog.

In fact, I stumbled across one of my competitors’ engineer’s bio on LinkedIn that tipped me off that he was working on a new feature for his company’s software. That made me wonder if I could look up my sales peers from other companies and get more insight or find them on FriendFeed and monitor what they are doing. Unfortunately, sales people are not really big into Web 2.0 whereas their sales engineer companions are pretty heavy into all that is new on the tech front.

So, this got me thinking about whether anyone has looked at scraping traffic on mico-blogging sites to determine profiles on users based on their conversations. Obviously, if they keep talking about digital cameras then they probably have an affinity for them. You really can learn more about someone from listening to them rather than looking over their shoulder while they surf the web.

Which leads me back to the title of my post – If you have a lot of important stuff to say, be careful who is listening.

— Added post note 7/14/08: Looks like someone is scraping micro-blogging feeds…summize.com and it is exactly what I thought it would be.  It even refreshes results in real time. Now, that is interesting.

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On July 8th, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on Targeted Ads and focused on NebuAd and Phorm. There is a good summary write up with links to the history of telcos relationship with these vendors located here:

Senate hearing on NebuAd, privacy set for tomorrow

Cable companies and telcos say they need software like NebuAd-and it’s British comrade-in-arms, Phorm-to help them develop targeted advertising for subgroups of Internet and television service users. The ad dollars, they say, are critical to their growth. Check out this Wall Street Journal story for a different look at the controversy. — Jim O’Neill

These technologies are being called into question by Congress due to the fact that it can be interpreted as wiretapping.  Cookies, Adware, Spyware, etc. have always bothered me and its amazing how much latitude these technologies and those that develop it have had over the years. This all seems symptomatic of a larger problem these days. Going back to my theme of “too much of anything isn’t good”, there is an enormous amount of product out there looking to be marketed to large audiences in the hopes that it becomes mainstream or at the very least just captures a bit of the long tail.

EMC recently acquired Document Sciences and this will open up a lot of new conversations with our customers. HP had acquired the other big player in the Document Output Management Space, Exstream, back in January 2008. The ability to merge print communications with web, SMS (text) and email is the eventual destination for large companies trying to integrate their marketing message across all these channels.

I got a mailer at home the other day that was the only piece of direct mail (EVER!) to make it past the trash bin and onto my refrigerator. It was a customized postcard with my last name spelled out in the sky with the sun setting on the ocean below. Here’s an example from the website of the company that produces the postcards for the Realtor that sent me mine…