Perceptint Musings

When I graduated from college in 1994 with a Liberal Arts degree with an emphasis on Media and Business Communications, employers weren’t beating down my door to give me a new and exciting opportunity. In fact, more than once, I was told that I knew too much about too many things. I needed to narrow my focus if I wanted a real career.

I’m glad I didn’t listen to those who tried to bridle me. Had I enlisted into their standard career model, I would have spent many years working my way from entry level to group manager, to a bigger manager, to a senior manager and so on. Or that’s how I was taught to think my career should go if I was a good worker.

But it didn’t feel right. I knew I had a lot to say, and things that people in positions higher up than the assistant manager needed to hear about. Trusting when it didn’t feel right, having a strong passion for my work, and educating myself constantly has empowered me to make the career decisions that I want, when I want, and move my career strategically ahead without following the traditional rungs up the corporate ladder.

The first step was walking out of the customer service center and into the boardroom. I quit my job as a desktop publisher at Kinko’s in Dallas, Texas to go and start a web design firm in Bend, Oregon in 1996. Four college friends determined that we had a good idea, headed wildly into the desert and carved a niche for ourselves that I’m still quite proud of.

It took every bit of time we had, every ounce of patience, and every dollar a credit card would extend to us at some points. I learned more in those 3 years about how business works and gained the confidence to share my ideas with presidents, VP’s, directors, on down.

I performed a combination role of writer/speaker, sales and project manager for our small team. We made plenty of mistakes, fought over things we didn’t even understand, but we pushed ourselves to create an award winning design firm that was well respected in the community.

We were excited to be on the verge of something big, something we knew was going to change how business was done. Over the three years, we also grew pragmatic and began to see how online marketing was evolving from nice looking websites into full fledged applications running in browsers. We didn’t have the right talent or revenue to reach that next plateau.

So we walked away from it. In the middle of our last summer, we told our clients that we were folding up shop. The reason: we wanted to keep their goodwill towards us and know that we knew the web was changing and we weren’t positioned to keep up. Many of them were shocked that we were walking away.

That was a hard decision because after three years of slogging through the swamp, the business was just settling in. But we foresaw our limitations and owned up to them, we were honest about our situation.

Honesty is a huge part of building trust and success I’ve found. I’ve walked away unharmed from projects that went down in bigger flames than the Hindenburg because I was honest. Because my client knew as much as I did as soon as I did. They trusted that I had nothing to hide, and eventually we’d work our way through anything.

Those moments of truth, when you realize something so universal that it has its own power, are the ones to seek out if you want to truly own your career. I needed to know more about software systems and how they were being delivered online.

A small software and design agency in Seattle happened to be looking for project managers and I fit their bill. The next thing I know, I’m talking with engineers with fifteen plus years experience building very dynamic, complex software systems.

And I’m representing my company on the Microsoft campus interacting with teams at Microsoft and MSN on various web marketing projects. I felt like Mr. Smith Goes to Redmond. Some starry eyed kid who suddenly had an opinion and a deadline for much bigger projects than I was used to.

I believe project management skills are another critical piece to going where you want in your career. Because I could manage my projects effeciently, I could adapt to the more complex requirements of each one during the extended time between milestones.

Everything you’re trying to do to find success in a corporation is a project. Whether it be influencing a decision, winning a sale, delivering a new website, tracking a campaign, writing briefs and more. Project management teaches you how to enlist a team to help you accomplish a task. Every time I’ve said I never want to manage another project, another project is on my desk needing my management and so I’m on it.

From my first agency job in Seattle through the present, I’ve seen a lot more than I would have ever expected to at this stage in my career. I believe it’s because I trusted my gut and always challenged myself to take a chance that I knew should be taken. I walked away from jobs that on paper looked fantastic. I walked into situations where I knew I was going to need to make an impact or failure loomed. Trusting in myself and growing a diversity of skills has always paid off.

The times it has been toughest mentally are the times when I let myself get stuck in that runaround rut, filling out countless timecards with meeting after meeting, while nothing gets done. And I wait it out thinking it will get better, or someone up top will finally get it.

Recently, I’ve put those days behind me and I’m back to whittling my own world. Belief in yourself, the excitement of not knowing, the fear of failure, the endless amount of possibilities you can make for yourself, these are what life can be about.

Carving a good career for yourself is part of creating a better life. Trust your gut and really listen to your heart, because they can lead you down a path you might never have put yourself on to begin with. If you have the dedication to see it through, you’ll be amazed where they’ll lead you. I can personally attest to that.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

I’m coming up on 13 years of working in digital marketing. It’s been an interesting ride that has only grown more complex and enormous. I expected that going in, but the sheer speed with which everything continues to lurch excites me still.

One of the skills I’ve relied most heavily upon, day in and day out, has been translation. Speaking the language of a technologist, while being fluent in the subtle art of marketing speak. It’s an ever evolving vocabulary of technology, emotion and synonyms. In the middle of it all, my job is striving to help my clients find the simplicity.

15 years ago, people in information technology (IT) and marketing only crossed paths during a desktop upgrade, or at the internal support desk when a virus had come into the office from a home diskette.

These two kingdoms lived off a host of stable practices built to handle their own tasks, supporting their own worlds. IT maintained the networking and infrastructure of the corporate beast. Marketing’s agencies and creative made sure the castle was strong and full.

Now IT and marketing folk sit across the table from each other enjoying a chaotic feast, as digital marketing has made them patrons of each other. Often speaking two distinct languages, they each protect their own territory while negotiating for parts of the other.

Binary code versus bountful boasts, a verbal standoff ending with dialectic phrases like IT’s ”server load” or marketings ”cost-per-acquisition”. In very large organizations, many of the same players from 15 years ago that ran the infrastructure or marketing of the old world are charged with running the infrastructure or marketing of the new world. Along the way, they’ve grown a myopic view of the organization. And the trick is, these two camps have to get along for organizations today to stay successful.

Translating effectively between the two is one of the keys to success in the evolving digital world. In the IT world, there is a strong code of formality, requirements and protections. In the marketing world, there are brush fires and then there are forest fires. As the corporate winds shift, so can the heat on marketing.

In my experience getting the two camps on the same page can be challenging, but critical for organizational success. It boils down to how information is shared and mandatory meetings. Mandatory meetings because these two groups need to remember that each begins life as a human.

Information sharing and translation is the next step. For marketers it’s agreeing to join the more detailed world of business cases, formal release cycles, project scoping and more. It’s patience and planning 101. For IT, it means understanding and helping better realize business goals and maintaining a nimble attitude all the while.

There are other needs too. IT needs to know that marketers understand the enormity of requests they make. It’s very easy to say you need to deploy a new mini-site and think that happens at the push of a button down in IT.

IT also owes it to marketing to provide a better education about the technology platform (i.e. the website, online functionality, future releases, etc.) and any technical limitations that IT’s requirement gathering foresaw. Not including nimble marketing goals and infrastructure support in IT planning is ignoring how the world operates today.

In the old world, the IT “cave” was the preferred habitat of engineers. A dimly lit by monitors cavern, only the trusted were allowed entry. It’s charter was organizational support and improved effeciency. It didn’t have to worry about being exposed to networks outside of their own, or how anonymous users might interact with their products and services. Only that the workforce was growing in effeciency and operating at new levels of productivity.

In the new world, the light is on IT at all times, and they’ve been given new digs. They maintain organizational support, but now also carry the burden of everything that’s connected publicly or privately through the Internet. They have a highly visible spot in the organization alongside stalwarts like marketing, sales and support. Success in the organization’s world is driven by executive summary and sharing information up.

Marketing has to educate the organization about how every group affects its ability to deliver. And sell IT on the fact that the floor is shifting often without their control. One day their goal could be new customers, the next about defending the integrity of the brand, the next a new affiliate strategy they have to implement with no time because they couldn’t work out a contract with their old vendor. Or, their boss just asked them why they weren’t building a Facebook widget?

A marketers toolset has grown quickly over the past decade, so it’s not like IT is alone in the pace of change. Direct mail lists, television, radio, billboards - the old toolset didn’t provide a highly traceable picture. Marketers relied on agencies and executives to weigh their success. If sales were up, marketing was doing its job. If sales were slumping, the agency was to blame, not the product or organization. They just needed a better marketing plan.

Today, every marketing campaign you launch online should be trackable in some way. The amount of data most marketers I know are faced with crunching through is enormous. Hundreds of campaigns generating thousands of data points, tied back into overall web site metrics, it takes an army of analysts to understand and get through it all. Organizations have to embrace the shift in skills needed to run successful marketing programs in 2008.

Running all of those campaigns on top of a well-oiled internal and external network requires that IT and marketing interactions must be crisp, clear and consensual. In the late 90’s, most meetings I went into were near standoffs between these two parties. Today the years they’ve spent together has made them more loving, but they still suffer from localized camp slang.

I have been lucky enough to have my skill-set put me snugly between these two worlds. Enough of a tech head to speak IT’s language, and enough of an impassioned marketer and writer to help marketers better understand the new world they’re operating in.

Turning a marketing goal into a use case, or taking a requirements document and turning it into an executive summary, I like being a translator in the middle of it all. And since things don’t seem to be slowing down, I expect I have a lot more translating to do to help this digital revolution roll along.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

I am continually surprised by how many marketers are just pushing buttons to launch campaigns supposedly built to support their website or other important initiatives. They’re sending millions of emails, placing hundreds of banners, testing five versions of their creative in paid placement and signing up for as many co-reg programs as they can to grow their email list.

But just because you use those channels, does it mean you’re a smart marketer? Are you listening to and participating in the conversation about your products and services that are taking place online? Or does your consumer base see you as a one way communicator, a blind corporation pushing buttons you think they want or need? Do you even know what people’s opinion is of your brand online? It’s time to stop and listen.

Marketing in general should start with business goals. The goals in turn drive the appropriate marketing channels. I don’t think I’m into any rocket science yet. With the mad rush that started in the late 90’s to “be online” most marketers were charged with ambiguous goals like growing traffic to their site or simply delivering a lower cost-per-lead. The lack of resolve bleeds through and communicating consumers can tell the companies that are “online and get it” and those that don’t.

Those defined expectations are beginning to shift within some companies, but not in waves. Channels like paid search and paid inclusion can demonstrate very quickly that they are a much cheaper source per lead. In some instances, I’ve seen clients cost per lead drop by as much as 800% or greater. But just buying those leads doesn’t really support the overall growth of your business online. It just means you’re a qwerty input device, programmed for short-term success.

How much of a real conversation can you engage in from a search result? A very limited amount in my experience. You can ensure your Titles and tags and ad copy speak as much to your target audience as possible. We’re talking about a small number of characters at most, just a few snippets, to get a short conversation started.

Before you rush into another channel your agency is recommending, it’s important first for your company to identify the three to five critical marketing goals that your various channels must support. Reinforcing your brand and reputation, beating your competition, growing your customer base, retaining your current and new customers and producing cost-savings for your organization - all are valid goals to try and achieve with digital marketing technologies.

Each goal should have a separate and defined strategy and a clearly identified metric for measuring success. It should also begin to answer questions like where is your target audience congregating? Are they on topical discussion boards sharing stories and tips with others? Are they active in the social networking world? How do those locations match up with the things you are trying to influence them towards? Answering these questions is critical to evolving from push button marketing online to creating connections and deeper conversations with your market.

Your brand is the extension of your organization and should represent the goodwill that your customers have toward your products and services every day. Branding goals should revolve around maintaining positive ambassadors for your organization, both internal employees and loyal customers, whose passion for your brand is strong without appearing biased.

This is a fine line for many organizations, especially when they’re considering internal brand ambassadors. Blogs, discussion forums and social networks force conversations to happen and they force organizations to listen as well.

The conversation won’t always be positive and your company likely won’t have an angels perfect record. But if you ignore and refuse to participate in the conversation, you’re implying that the negative points are true and need not be refuted. Just like you would defend your trademark, maintaining your reputation online is just as important.

It requires the same level of diligence and follow up. Setting up news feeds with your company name, subscribing to blog monitoring services, trolling through forums and social networks to make sure you have a view of the bigger conversation must be done. And this can also help in monitoring what your competition is up to online.

Let’s be clear, this doesn’t mean all out negative wars against your detractors. It means showing an adult level of patience, letting the steam out before you start talking, sticking to your guns and making the points you want to make in the conversation. And the expectations have changed from you pushing your marketing message out, to you being expected to be honest, without an air of spin and ready to talk when consumers are. Not when your PR agent blesses a carefully crafted message.

Know your competition inside and out. Are you watching what they’re doing? Are you keeping track of their initiatives and the channels they’re exploring? If you have strong  competition online, they might even be releasing new products and services based on information they’re getting from a two way conversation with their market.

The more you understand your market and its conversation online, the more influence you have in growing your customer base. If you’re just pushing the online marketing buttons, every channel will degrade over time. No budget can save you from that reality. Your customers want to engage your brand on their terms and how you respect what they tell you says a lot about what your brand brings to the relationship.

If you’re running a large paid search campaign and every keyword ad points to the same landing page, you’re signalling your market that you are disengaged and only interested in the power you hold in the relationship. Someone searching for “golf club” and “golf” probably aren’t ready to buy your new putter yet. The whole relationshop feels weird from the first click.

If you’re running a large paid search campaign with ads tailored specifically to a keywords position in the buying cycle, you’re signalling that you want to engage your market on their terms. If it’s information they want, give them as much as they can handle. If they want to start chatting with a service rep or call someone, make it easy for them. Good service and good brand experience starts this early in the marketing chain, so don’t ignore what your customers want.

And if it doesn’t feel right to you, just ask them. If they are the potential ambassadors your brand needs in the 21st century, they’re ready to tell you much more than you might imagine. But you have to ask, and not with the 20th century marketing hammer.

The same goes for retaining your customers. I think its okay and up front to ask people how, if ever, they want to hear from you. And then follow through with it. Be prepared to act on the learning’s of the few or many who will speak up. They represent even more of your base than you imagine.

One fear I’ve heard brought up around this idea is that the loony or fringe customers will be the loudest. That may be true sometimes, but its a disservice to your customer base to dismiss them that easily.

What do you do if someone walks in your office building every day and yells, “FIRE”? After a few days, that person is intercepted on a routine basis and led to nicer sidewalks by security. So it is with online communication. The true hot heads will run out of steam if given a blowhole to spew into. Don’t forget to set one up.

I’ll close with this. If digital marketing channels aren’t producing more cost effective results for your organization, you are doing something wrong. Jumping into dynamic markets like Google AdWords with no real strategy, marketers can blow through budgets faster than NASA trying to get to the moon, racing after some misconceived idea that their whole market could be captured by a few keywords in that L-shaped slice of real estate heaven.

Marketers who use AdWords as part of a bigger online marketing strategy, one that supports all of their unique goals and needs, are the ones that never talk about how good its performing. They don’t want to mess up that temporary mojo they’ve found in the river. They know they might need to engage their market differently as soon as tomorrow. But today, while the fishing is good, they’re going to hang tight and catch what they know is there.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

More than half of being a good consultant is navigating the waters of corporate politics. When you’re dealing with Directors and above, life can be a daily forest fire. As one of my clients likes to say, “the big swirl”.

The president of the company I used to work for always reinforced what it was to consult for a client, “If we’re good consultants, we’re like our clients Samurai.”

Noble warriors charging into political minefields, and usually being the first to suffer the fire of internal retributions. Sometimes leading the victorious charge, other times fumbling through a prickly political maneuver that goes sour. And even taking one on the chin for your client, in their battle, and licking your wounds later over drinks.

A good consultant is like a skydiver, jumping headfirst into that tempetuous air between internal marketers, IT staff,  agencies and contractors, — all playing in an amorphous dance of dollars, diplomacy, and danger. It’s easy not to realize how new it is to all of us still today. Or what a complex dance we’re trying to coordinate.

Digital marketing has been here more than a decade now, and there are always new elements, new players, new tracking, shifts in preference, growth in bandwidth and the band plays on. Explosive movements continue to erupt online, a Google killer lies in wait in some dark grassy knoll. And agencies and consultants that don’t keep up get left to wither in dry, lonely fields.

The digital marketing evolution plows right through the world of the corporate and individual id. Reputations. Personal pride. Questioning of one’s expertise. What does a brand really mean to its market today?

The clash between IT and marketing continues to spill over from the run-up days of the web. Mammoth web systems continue to be put in place to facilitate massive scale customer session loads, all while needing to support ever evolving marketing functions. And no one has been trained to do everything they used to do offline in a new faster world. 

To deliver value and success for your client, that’s the game. Making sure yours is the first “A paper” should be on your mind everyday. And being virtuous in your value leads to greater topics.

Diplomacy, for one, is a practiced skill. Knowing when it’s your turn to speak, knowing when your opinion matters and when it doesn’t. Understanding when everything is on the line because your clients reputation is at stake. It’s a subtle skill to learn over years of dealing with c-level clients.

Patience is a virture as well. You shouldn’t be in a hurry to exit a job in which you are adding daily value. Every day that you are there, and in turn value you deliver to your client, the more likely you are to stick around.  

Listening will never fail you. You have to know and track what’s going on in the corporation, what’s the buzz, what are people reacting to? Who does your client need to impress to get a promotion? Who might you be presenting to if you’re taken up to “the show”, the infamous CEO, CTO, CMO meeting, with twenty-seven attorneys in the back.

Observe the players, how they play, and trust your gut in telling you how to kindle a relationship with them. Know when it’s right to sit back, watch, and learn what not to do. The biggest mistakes you could make as a consultant are likely to be made by someone within the organization, or another vendor, if you are practicing some of our earlier exercises in patience.

Learning is a daily exercise, you must  stay that half step ahead. No questions on this allowed.

Now that corporations are realizing their first decade of web investments won’t be enough, and new investments will always need to be made, internal marketers find themselves faced with an ever mounting list of Web 1.0 and 2.0 issues to deal with.

And they are piling on fast. Most large corporate marketing staffs are tracking hundreds of campaigns a year. Almost always with limited staff compared to traditional marketing groups.

And the final exam essay for Politics 301 is the dreaded “you never want to get it” smear factor when a project goes horribly wrong, or someone higher up than your client, thinks it did. Because once the taint is on your shoulders, whether individual or agency, it is almost never shed from the organization’s belief system. You’ll likely be in new pastures soon, without a reference.

And since I brought it up, Web 2.0 is dead to me. Web 3.0, 4.0, 5.5, 6.2, it’s just not right. We’re evolving faster than software features. Why should we compare ourselves to a release candidate? We shouldn’t. So you won’t hear me use that arcane numbering system ever again. That’s a promise.

And so to summarize…diplomacy, patience, listening, and observing are the key to surviving as a consultant. Staying a step ahead in the dance, keeping your sword swift and sharp, and learning, ever learning. For the foreseeable future, you won’t slow down because as soon as you do, your world, your whole market can move right past you. No more playing catch up. It’s time to stay ahead of the curve.

May grace and elegance effuse from your next productive meeting. Until next time.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

Luckily, you don’t. But your company might.

It’s not a stomach acid inhibitor. It’s not going to cure your gout. And as far as I know today from my early clinical trials, it doesn’t have any negative, long-term side effects.

Besides being infectious.

Perceptint is more of a state of mind. It’s a growing understanding of what’s been going on for the past decade plus online. It’s knowledge gained from the trenches with the clients, with the builders, with the shakers and the quakers.

Moving through the continuum from website colors to conversions, with an ever expanding tool-set of techno-enabled touch points, it has no foreseeable end.

I started Perceptint to become the company I believe marketers need to help guide and challenge their thinking over the next decade plus. I’m an army of one at present, but my network rolls deep and I plan to call it in.

I want smart clients being advised by smart marketers who mutually understand the dynamic nature and required nimbleness to pull off successful, well-rounded marketing plans online. I want to help more agencies succeed.

Internet marketing is about engaging in the conversation that takes place in your markets online. Perceptint is about understanding and pushing the subtleties of that language, finding the critical mix of elements that tie it all together.

I hope you enjoy the ride, because it is definitely going to be one. I’m excited you’d come along with me and hope you’ll chime in along the way. Let’s build the connected world we want, and help each other through it. Because seriously, who else will?

If you or someone at your company wants to know more about Perceptint’s services, just leave a comment and I’ll get in touch.

© 2008 Keith Boswell