Web 2.0 is upon us – or is it? The foundation is in place and all the offerings are there for marketers to take advantage of, but is the audience ready to freely participate? At this point, the answer seems to be no, or at least not without the proper incentive. To this point, people will read your blog, listen to your podcast, watch your video, view your wiki, but they are not generating content yet. On two of the largest user generated content outposts on the internet, YouTube and Wikipedia have only .2% and 5% users contributing content respectively. These stats look very Web 1.0 to me. So what is the hook? What else? Money. In an effort to provide more incentive for users to contribute videos to its site, YouTube announced that it was going to begin sharing ad revenue with content creators.

So this is the simple answer for IT marketers looking to drive user generated content and integrate into their marketing efforts, right? The truth is that most marketers do not have the traffic or the resources to reward users like YouTube can. But the other side of the argument is that YouTube is not a true community that would embrace an exchange of ideas and content – it’s an entertainment outlet. In the world of IT marketing, we don’t necessarily need monetary incentives because we deal in a different currency – information. Information is what will get people to your site and is what will keep them coming back. To take the next step and incentivize users to contribute, you must first listen to what they have to say and optimize their experiences based upon it. Then, you must recognize that even though they are on your site, they don’t just want to hear about you, they want to hear from you – give them a forum in which they can leverage information and experiences directly from you and also leverage experiences of their peers. Lastly, understand the above stats on user generated content (UCG) and be patient.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and any successes (or failures) you are having with UCG.

Often companies launch a lead generation marketing program without key metrics in place to determine the success.
Brian Carroll’s ebook, “Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation”, discusses eight critical methods when launching lead generation programs.
What approach does your company use in building lead generation marketing programs?

While you were sleeping, Google made a move that solidifies its position as a media industry giant. Late Friday afternoon, Google announced that it was purchasing DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion, double what they paid for YouTube. Google beat Yahoo! and Microsoft to the punch in a true end-game move that extends its dominance in search to display advertising, essentially giving them ownership of a significant portion of the online advertising industry.

But they have not just stopped at online. This deal comes on the heels of aggressive partnerships to distribute the Google AdSense model to offline sources such as radio and TV, opportunities created in part by another Google acquisition, dMarc, a broadcast advertising management platform they purchased in 2006.  

As Google ventures into Orwellian territory (see this list of 17 Google acquisitions over the last few years), it will be interesting to see what kind of impact it will make on both media buying and ROI measurement for the industry as a whole. My senses tell me that it will be significant.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Web 2.0 is changing the face of branding. Now it is all about creating an online community in which your brand can grow and achieve affinity. Social Signal, a specialist in building online communities, had a recent marketing blog post that introduced reflective glory marketing (RGM). They define this form of new marketing as using Web 2.0 to create an online community that has intrinsic value, and let the activities of that community reflect positively on the parent company’s brand.

How will this marketing strategy impact technology branding? Are there specific types of IT professionals who respond better to user generated content? Developers were the first group of technology professionals to grow and develop user generated content. How do network admins respond? Are security professionals comfortable in contributing to UGC? These type of questions need to be answered to determine the most effective way to grow a community of technology pros who are aligned with your brand.

You may be shocked to learn that it actually has an awful lot to do with marketing. To find out more, check out this marketing post from Seth Godin. In it, he raises an important question that marketers need to be asking themselves: Do I have a reactive platform based on the reasons why people don’t buy my product or does my platform focus on the reasons why people choose it? What is your focus?

Marilou introduced you to our new marketing research report put out in conjunction with the CMO Council last week. According to the findings, IT Vendor websites are one of the most frequently used sources for individuals looking for information about enterprise technology, alongside IT Publishers and Search Engines.

In this day and age, your website is the single strongest marketing platform and representation of your brand for any potential customers that you may have. And I would argue that no major technology purchase is made without first visiting that company’s website in some way, shape, or form.

At this point, you probably don’t need any research to understand the importance of having a website. However, it is critical to understand how to optimize your website so it meets your customer’s needs. They are already coming to find out information – but how do you get them to stay longer, come back, and interact with you?

This post from Vario Creative Blog has some great tips on how “humanizing” your business website will help you accomplish this.

Last Friday marked the one year anniversary of My Educated Guess!  The Client Consulting team at TechTarget would like to thank all of our readers for their knowledge, comments and readership over the past year. 

As a recap for those who have found our blog recently, here are some of the posts that received the heaviest traffic and the most comments of this past year.

Media Product Performance Comparisons for Lead-Gen Campaigns, by Karen Lefkowitz
Podcasting for IT Pros, by Garrett Mann
The Making of a Global Brand, by Melissa Marron

Again, thank you all for a rewarding year of blogging and here’s to many more just like it!

Sincerely,
Marilou Barsam

As the online marketing landscape expands, maximizing existing lead acquisition channels and trying to understand new channels is a challenge all its own.  But, the ultimate goal of building a valuable marketing database remains crucial to the success of today’s marketing programs.

In the beginning, our focus was on member quantity and establishing our brand to both vendors and the IT users. We relied on traditional web-based marketing channels such as list rentals and co-marketing partnerships. However, as online audiences, particularly IT pros, have gotten more sophisticated, so too have our audience development methods and marketing outreach. Today, we’re focused on building a quality member base with lots of defining criteria. The more we know about our members, the more we can target and customize our customer/ prospect marketing programs, which results in an increased client ROI as well as member satisfaction.

Two acquisition channels that currently enable us to capture qualifying member data, which we can later use when developing client programs, are search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO).

On the SEM side, we’re running ad word campaigns in Google, for example, to generate interest in specific products and IT topics. By running highly targeted campaigns that point to relevant landing pages with incentives, we generate members who indicate their IT topics of interest, as well as share their job or product needs. We also generate leads for products including events, print pubs and search-site specific programs.

In contrast to SEM, search engine optimization is first and foremost a company-wide effort aimed at increasing site traffic.  Acquisition or conversion success is a result of how well we align our marketing messages and registration incentives with the content on those trafficked pages.

There are consistent challenges with both the SEM and SEO channels, however, through both channels we have converted and captured valuable information that can later be used to create a pre-qualified list or audience for vendor campaigns.

Now we use all three of these channels to support our marketing strategy and meet goals. Our approach to building and mining our marketing database has proven its value many times over to clients as increased ROI as well as member satisfaction.

If you’d like to hear how we made this work, join me for a webcast and I’ll share all the details.  “Building a Targeted, Receptive and Valuable Audience”

A marketing survey that the ANA released found the top concerns on the minds of senior marketing executives are “integrated marketing communications” and “marketing accountability.”

Integrated Markeing leverages multiple media and marketing vehicles to work together rather than permitting each to work in isolation. Integrated marketing increases your share of voice and allows you to target decision makers at every phase of the buying cycle.
We have seen over and over again, that integrated marketing will result in greater recall of your brand.

What has your experience been with integrated marketing?