Wide Angle

One of the best things about working in social media is memes – the tracking and analysis of the periodic hilarious stories that spread virally throughout the internet. The story of Stephen Slater was one such meme; the riotous “Double Rainbow” video from earlier this summer was another. These memes, for a fleeting moment, sew the far-flung reaches of the web into a single fabric of mutual laughter and/or mockery; in a time of sharp public and political divisions, they’re a welcome respite from the norm. Read More »

If your company is like many others out there, the economic downturn resulted in you having to slash your training budgets, including most of the training efforts for your marketing organization.

The question is- can you afford not to invest in training your marketers?

These are the people that are developing your strategic marketing plans, writing messaging that meets your target market needs, choosing the initiatives that will have the best ROI while meeting your brand goals, and so much more.  It is more than a little unnerving to know that while they handle such critical tasks, 2/3rds of them actually don’t have a marketing background, as shown in a survey of 65,000 marketers by the Marketing Excellence Survey. Read More »

Often times in an organizational structure, the approval chain of command can be quite unclear.  Logically, the CEO would make all the executive decisions, and the CMO would sign off on all marketing decisions.  But is it really efficient or even necessary for the big cheese to approve everything the company makes in his or her respected department?  Seeing as there are more than likely bigger fish to fry, it probably isn’t. 

Questions about organization structure are very popular in our recently-launched Marketing Org & Ops Forum, where one executive question asks, “What type of communications get what type of approval?”

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Running a commercial organization is hard – no one denies that. How do we come up with a unique value proposition that will resonate with customers? How do we coach our reps to become commercial teachers? How do we keep our employees focused on their jobs now that the fourth season of Mad Men is on?

But you would think that one of the easier parts of running a commercial organization would be knowing who owns what tasks. You put Employee #1 in charge of voice of the customer, Employee #2 in charge of sales support, Employee #3 in charge of customer portfolio management, and you take care of commercial strategy. Sounds simple enough, right?

Actually, no. The results from MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that:

• 67% of companies don’t know who is in charge of Voice of the Customer
• 63% don’t know who is in charge of Commercial Strategy
• 64% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Portfolio Management
• 54% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Segmentation
• 50% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Experience Management. Read More »

MLC’s survey data from 200+ companies shows that executive leadership of social media is critical to success.  Indeed, 57% of brands with CMO leaders of social media see strong returns on their social efforts, compared to just 18% of companies without CMO leaders.

The reason?

Social media enable brands to build strong customer relationships that deliver value to multiple functions e.g., new product ideas (NPD), answers to customer questions (Customer Service), or advocacy (Marketing).  Managing these shared relationships requires strong cross-functional collaboration, which only a leader with significant clout and authority can achieve.  As the customer champion, the CMO is uniquely positioned to play this role. Read More »

My colleague Aaron dubbed 2010 “Year of the Re-Org” in January – and the member interest we’ve seen in organizational structure bears this out.  As planning season rolls around, we’ve been examining various org designs.  We’ve identified six archetypes that optimize to different benefits: Read More »

The Sales and Marketing relationship at many B2B companies can be characterized by the term “managed dissatisfaction”.  Competing goals and time horizons prevent the functions from seeing eye-to-eye, resulting in Marketing and Sales doing just enough to placate each other while pursuing separate agendas.

Marketing and Sales have traditionally seemed resigned to this, content to work around each other if they couldn’t work together.  That’s changing.  We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the attention marketers are paying to alignment with their sales counterparts.  Three factors are driving this interest in improved coordination across the commercial organization: Read More »

Einstein proffered that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.

Then I must ask the rhetorical question: how close do marketers come to that definition when it comes to marketing planning? The search term ‘marketing planning’ has appeared in the top five search terms on the MLC website for 24 months running. Our annual executive survey has reported ‘planning’ as a top-five area of improvement nearly every year since the poll’s inception.

Sincerely now, what do marketers keep doing year after year that keeps yielding the same underwhelming results?

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If your company is like mine, the beginning of the fiscal year (now, for most of us) is when we’re thinking about project portfolios and operating plans – and, it’s the one time we managers have to focus on our direct reports’ development plans.  Setting development goals for staff while creating these “IDPs” (as we call them: “individual development plans”) is easy for some functions. Sales has revenue goals. Procurement has cost-cutting goals. But for marketing, setting development goals – and understanding the underlying functional competencies marketing staffers need to develop (and then creating action plans that line up to their current projects) – can be a little tricky. Why? Read More »

Tired of playing 20 questions with your legal team?  Let Lizzie help.

As Digital Web Lead at Allstate Insurance, Lizzie Schreier has faced her share of legal battles.  After jumping through hoops to persuade Allstate’s legal team to embrace (or at least accept) social media, she’s ready to share her key lessons learned. 

Here’s her advice on how you can make the marketing / legal partnership a little less painful: Read More »