PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

I was in New York recently listening to some focus groups on enterprise security. The people on the other side of the glass oversaw the safety of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. They were smart and articulate (and God bless them, they also liked our creative). When we came to the channel survey portion of each group, it was striking how many subjects enthusiastically supported the idea of a one-minute video or even a one-minute podcast as a call to action.

“Sure,” one of the more cranky executives said, “I’d give a minute of my time to hear more.” (more…)

As much as I admire and like a lot of industry analysts we talk to (we’re actually a Gartner customer: makes me feel wistful that some of these people get to think about one industry niche 24 x 7 x 365), there’s always a Cassandra-like note in their reports, not unlike a Tom Peters book. Something along the lines of, “If you don’t undertake these 11 priorities this quarter and reinvent your business process platform by end of year, you’ll be seriously behind your competitors or pushing up the daisies. Et cetera.”

Which would be a serious problem if a lot of companies didn’t have those ‘job’ things to do. One antidote to these pronouncements came recently when I was interviewing a CEO about recent job cuts and whether he was worried about retaining his big stars. His response: “Most of them don’t have the option to go, honestly. And of the few that do, half of those are subject to the same inertia that everybody is subject to, so they’re not going anywhere.”

As you probably know, Forrester now creates a lot of reports for “marketing leadership professionals.” Or as I thought to myself on first seeing one of these documents, “Oh, great. They’re not satisfied making my clients feel guilty about falling behind; now they’re doing the same thing with agencies.”

All this throat-clearing aside, I have read and can recommend a recent report called The Connected Agency by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim that’s getting a lot of buzz (and yes, you can check the records: I did pay my $279 for it). (more…)

Our friends at Cymfony, now TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony (proving a theory of mine that all CGM companies will ultimately be acquired) have just released a new survey of 60 marketers at companies in North America, France, and the U.K.. The report concludes that when it comes to social media, marketing agencies are “ill equipped,” to quote AdWeek and “don’t get it,” to quote the survey report.

The report brings back the words of an AT&T executive who is a “friend of the agency,” as the saying goes. In essence, she said that “agencies talk a good game about integrating print and online, but I’ve been hearing it for years and I just don’t see it.” Well, she used more PG-13 language than that, but you hear the same kind of frustration as we’re now hearing about social media.

Although BtoB has traditionally lagged consumer markets in marketing innovation, we find that social media provides a great opportunity to step out and “punch above your weight,” since larger companies tend to arrive at the party later. Of course, there are a few ground rules to be laid down after, to quote Jim Nail from Cymfony, we “put up a good presentation about what social media is.” In no particular order, these are: (more…)

A recent Network World survey supports what PJA’s second wave of original research with ITtoolbox showed late last year: IT professionals are increasingly taking up the tools of social networking – LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, etc. – and using them for business purposes. According to the new survey, nearly half of IT professionals use social networking for business. As the Forrester analyst put it, “We don’t really go to Toastmasters anymore.”

As available content becomes richer, especially on YouTube, I think we’ll see an even sharper rise in the number of business users making the site a go-to destination. MySpace activity may be dropping, as the recent BusinessWeek article “Generation MySpace is Getting Fed Up” pointed out, but that drop seems pretty closely linked to boredom with static profile pages and annoyance with ads. Which is precisely the point about why IT and life science audiences are using social media more these days: Content, not ads. Information, not self-promotion. YouTube remains a terrific way to get any technical content out to the world without the need for AAA production values. Anyone who has been sent the link for a live demo of root canal surgery knows the sky is the limit with sharing (maybe that should be over-sharing) and education using video online.

In our BtoB world, several of our clients are considering programs that are less focused on messaging themselves and more focused on a point of view about content – content that relates to their technology in action or to the larger lifestyle interests of their customers – so it’s no surprise that appreciation of these channels continues to grow as people discover their ease of use.

I’m happy to announce that we have just completed our first research study with BioInformatics, LLC, a PJA research partner with an online forum of more than 30,000 scientists.

The study topic? Life scientists and social media.

And what did we find? More than I expected, certainly. Here are some of the highlights: (more…)