Crawl, Walk, Run, Race... ... LEARN, PRACTICE, PLAY, WIN!
In writing the first few entries of this blog, I was trying to think of what to actually accomplish. Blogs are a great way to start writing 'free form'. We don't need to even think about what comes out. But them two months later, we realize that maybe we should have thought about it. But getting started is sometimes a high enough hurdle, so 'just do it' Nike style maybe worth a few posts not related to anything in particular.
My view of marketing on the web comes from small organization product management. By that I mean, small product management or marketing teams in medium size technology companies. I have worked in a dozen or so companies with marketing staff of one to five on a product. This is very common in technology products where a product is new or started recently. These are products which from market introduction ($0) would sell up to about $10 million. When products grow beyond the "small" size, more marketing resources are invested. Engineering staff on small products ranged from three to ten core "designers". Sometimes a product would have some supporting staff such as an application engineer or a CAD tools engineer.
Small and medium product marketing is a necessary function in most companies. Start-ups and spin-off companies usually go through the phase of getting a product launched in the market. This is classically the case with new products. Small organizations have been the driving force behind innovation, specially in the technology world. This area has also been the most opportunistic of all, sometimes we forget this simple fact. Not because we get old and jaded, or we are in a small 'bubble' in a big industry. I think we loose perspective because we either forget what it was like to use something truly new, or we don't see anything truly new that can be done in our own little 'bubble'. There could be other reasons, we are all a little different in how we think of new ideas and we are very different in how we proceed to describe them and eventually give them life. Sorry about the wordy introduction, but this is truly going somewhere.
When I started looking for examples of how people describe products, I didn't have a framework. But I did have lots of ideas in my head. Mostly ideas of what I saw and what I discovered. Basically, the dimension of vitality and "freshness" - maybe it is excitement or wonder at a new product, feature or technology. This is a dimension that we do not take into account very often in defining a product. We don't describe this enough in marketing, specially to people who don't know or use a product. To old users, an added feature is just that, another small improvement. But to some people, the new feature could turn a product that was not useful into something very useful. Sometimes this change is not clearly seen by the marketer or the potential new user. The writing here helped me in understanding how to break down two new categories, or what I would define as "dimensions". By dimensions I mean a quantitative or qualitative measure that can be rated. This could be expressed in a rating system 1 to 10 or a ruler for display similar to Google's relevancy indicator. These two dimensions help not just in the marketing content but also in strategy.
Well, this is my instalment for today. It has been an exciting experiment to look at sites and rate their marketing content. It is even more exciting to think of what can be done next. If you have similar resources or want to contribute to writing about marketing content, please e-Mail me. Also if you have any ideas that I should be looking at, please don't hesistate to contact me. Finally, start thinking on a more strategic basis about what you say and how you say it. About what can be said and how to present to different audiance. The web has flexibility in format, presentation and SIZE that we had never had before. Marketing effectively can win big here, but it takes brain and lots of elbow grease. THANKS FOR READING and COME BACK!
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