altimeter group

You are currently browsing articles tagged altimeter group.

Some of My Favorite Bloggers.

June 28, 2010 in Marketing | 0 Comments

I follow lots of people but a couple of my favorites are Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang, Peter Kim and Noah Brier. Charlene is just smart. She has morphed from a tech analyst to a social media expert to a management consultant, all within 3 years.  She’s a media darling who reinvents herself almost annually. Jeremiah Owyang, who works with Charlene at the Altimeter Group is also another schmarty pants.  He loves grids and quadrants, he loves to write, share and listen – and he loves to use technology.  Analytical with a capital A.

Peter Kim is cut from the same cloth as Charlene and Jeremiah (all three are Forrester Research alums) but landed at the Dachis Group – a company filled with doers.  Dachis will crack the code on bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise and make a banana boat of bucks doing so. Peter likes to mix it up a bit.  A proud man.  Then there’s Noah Brier — chief strategist at the Barbarian Group.  Like a racehorse in the paddock who you know will win the Derby someday, he’s exciting to watch.  The beauty about Noah is you just don’t know what’s next. He’s random, brilliant, a doer and he loves bounding about in that paddock.

I wish these four blogged every day.  If they would just give me a 100-150 words (no more Jeremiah), I’d be satisfied and so, so nourished. Please hit those keys.  Peace!

Possibly Related Posts:


Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Ascent of Marketing.

April 23, 2010 in Digital Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Monetizing social media, Social Media | 0 Comments

Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store.  The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI? 

Television

The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men. 

The Web

Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

Social Media

Enter social media.  And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales.  I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.”  That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

Possibly Related Posts:


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Entertainment in advertising.

March 18, 2010 in Marketing | 0 Comments

“Here we are now, entertain us” is a lyric from the Nirvana song Smells Like Teen Spirit.  A classic.  The need to be entertained is a very human trait. Generally, when you go to the movies or turn on the TV you are seeking entertainment — news shows aside. Is Facebook about entertainment?  And if so, what percentage?  Forrester or the Altimeter Group should do a research study to find out what people are actually doing on Facebook. It might help with their monetization model. 

 When people use search engines, what percent of their queries are about entertainment?  People read books for entertainment, but many only read nonfiction. Is that entertainment?  Humans are complex animals and require different levels of entertainment but one area where we overdo it is in advertising. Just look at the ads on the Super Bowl.  Advertising isn’t supposed to make you warm and happy so that when the selling proposition is delivered you are smiling, ads are supposed to make you feel something, then do something.  

 Ad agents, be they traditional or digital, need to dial down the entertainment factor and dial up the selling factor. Entertainment is easy, especially poor entertainment. Selling and persuading are hard. Consumers need reasons to buy.   Peace!

Possibly Related Posts:


Tags: , , , , , , ,

RFPs Tweet Tweet.

November 19, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

rfp

Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group posted last night about Salesforce.com’s intent to integrate Chatter into its platform. Salesforce.com is an enterprise application that helps organizations collaborate, schedule, organize and track workflow. The addition of Chatter, allows for social networking behind the firewall which is very smart. I’ve used free competitors of Salesforce.com in this CRM space and they have a ways to go.

Ms. Li makes a couple of thought-provoking points in her post:

“This is more than merely integrating Twitter-like functionality into CRM and creating ‘social CRM.’  This is a rethink and elevation of how information flows around an organization, and where it lives. The elevation of deals to be on the same level as people is significant — in every other social platform, people reign supreme and the world pivots around them.”

“It’s one thing to use Twitter for customer support. It’s quite another to integrate it into the workflow of the organization.”

Charlene’s talk about deals and Twitter helped me mash-up this idea, related to the heinous business practice called “the RFP.” Imagine issuing an RFP along with a hashtag twitter follow subject (e.g., #widgetRFP1) that allows all RFP participants (and others) to chat in real time about the RFP. Yeahhhhhh. Think about it. Good info. Misinfo. Misdirection. Redirection.  Potential business partners. Quick answers from the RFP issuer. As my kids used to say “I yike it.”

Possibly Related Posts:


Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Curing Cancer on the Weekends.

September 16, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

lab equipment

I attended a free webinar sponsored by the Altimeter Group (thank you Charlene Li and crew) and Ray Wang said something that really stuck. He said all the innovation in technology over the last couple of years , certainly on the Web, has come on the consumer or user side – not from the enterprise. With the exception of Apple, this is pretty dead on. I’m no Faith Popcorn, but in my view this is due to something I call the webertarian ethos – the need for people and in this case developers, to be free of corporate chains when they create.

I’ve written before that I think the Dachis Corporation and its Social Business Design concept will accelerate the cure for cancer. When we get a world of scientists and physicians working together on a project we are likely to get some serious innovation, logic disruption, and progress. Even if they work together only on weekends. Social Business Design products and their free cousins will provide a webertarian-like platform over which meaningful global change will happen. And on that happy note, I bid you… Peace!

Possibly Related Posts:


Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Consulting Faceoff.

August 28, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

Here’s a faceoff. Holding one hockey stick is the Altimeter Group and holding the other the Dachis Group. Who wins?

 

Here are their Is-Does statements:

 

Dachis Group (Dachis Corporation, Inc.) was created to unlock the value of social technologies for large corporate enterprises through its Social Business Design global advisory practice, and technology implementation program.

 

Altimeter: A consulting firm focused on helping businesses integrate emerging technologies into their strategies.

 

Similar at first pass, but also different if you look deeper.

 

Altimeter is a consulting company and will make its money in fees. Dachis, also a consulting company, appears to want to sell technology which had mondo revenue upside if the software/service is replicable.

 

My guess is Alitmeter will win the faceoff. Their value prop and marketing seem pretty tight. Dachis Corp. on the other hand will skate around for a while, keep practicing, passing and tightening their game plan. When ready, they should score quickly and often.

Possibly Related Posts:


Tags: , , , , ,