If you don’t know Rebecca, you’ll have to take my word for what an amazing business person, marketer, mother (of our 3 children), and partner she is. And get out the vote

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…A great beginning to some of the worlds best narrative tales. The classic storytelling beginning. I’ve been struggling with how to begin this inagural post and what better way than to start at the beginning. And, discuss the impact storytelling has on us all.

I began my career as an account manager turned product marketer, turned eCommerce marketer, sprinkled with business development and consulting, and always with IT chops. For the past several years I’ve focused my energies on corporate marketing and brand marketing principles and have seen, first hand, the efficacy of what good brand marketing can do for a product and company. I’ve had the luxury of working for some of the top consumer and busines brands on the planet and have been able to make some significant impacts to businesses I’ve been a part of. I feel incredibly proud of accomplishments as well as the opportunities I’ve gained along the way. Though I’ve been fortunate enough to collect some great resume data, my largest professional accomplishment to date has been the connections and friendships I’ve garnered along the way. The ability to connect with other like-minded professionals people is what inspires growth and opportunity.

Yesterday, I spent the day with Shel Israel, along with a few key members of the Webtrends team where we spent the day discussing social media, enterprise technologies, data and storytelling. Yes, storytelling came up in our technology and marketing discussion.

We discussed how…In a world of communications dominated by email, Facebook, twitter, IM, and SMS there is a strange comfort in dehumanizing what is going on around us. We are simultaneously over-connected and not connected at all. I can share my successes professionally by talking about the number of twitter followers i have, the number of comments on my blog, the number of {fill in the blank}. But the numbers, by themselves, don’t mean anything. The reality is that just connecting into the technology opens us up to miss what is important; miss the meaning of the messages in the stream or worse, to ignore them.

Success and happiness professionally and personally will very rarely be driven by technology. They will be a product of the people you surround yourself with and the stories you tell and create together. Professionally, It’s pretty comfortable to fall back into a glaze and just connect into the technology. It’s easy to wake up every day and decide what needs to be done to to move the needle .005% one way or another. As a marketer however, we have to fight that warm and comfortable blanket that is technology and get back to telling great stories. Connecting with people. Learning. Being Agile.

Welcome to the new Marketing Iteration blog. This blog is the product of a vision to share and realized by an amazing friend and designer Benjamin Diggles.

From here on out i’ll be sharing my thoughts on how I see marketing evolving and people + process + enabling technologies that are allowing us to bring the human element, the storytelling, into what we do at a scale many of us could never have imagined.

Only two years ago Alex Yoder, and the Webtrends team, provided me  the opportunity to join this company at a monumental time of change and growth. And over the past two years we’ve had a phenomenal run at Webtrends. We’ve introduced groundbreaking upgrades to our core platform with Analytics 9, industry firsts with our Visitor Data Mart segments offering and Facebook analytics. Were joined by an amazing team via an acquisition of Widemile and we’ve thrown one of the best customer/industry conference I’ve ever attended. On a whole we’ve rebranded and relaunched Webtrends and we’ve increased the relevance of the Webtrends brand and our share of voice in the marketplace substantially.

I’m excited about the leadership position we’ve taken in the market of social analytics. Our work in this space has provided me with a wealth of information forever shaping the way I think about and manage marketing. The Iterative marketing model is the future and social media is affording us the ability to test and learn in ways many of us never imagined. It’s with this knowledge and passion for the social space that I’m announcing my departure from Webtrends at the end of this month.

I want to thank Webtrends for an amazing journey. In particular I want to thank my team, the marketing team, whom have been drivers and owners for a very aggressive and lofty vision we put in place. I have the deepest respect for my colleagues and while I will not be with Webtrends  l will always be an advocate. With my departure Webtrends is looking to find an amazing head of marketing; if you are that person or know that person please reach out.

I can say, definitively, that this lucky person will be joining one of the most amazing marketing teams I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

Thank you to Alex, my team, my colleagues in the industry, Voce Communications, Sandstrom Design, DK New Media, and Webtrends.

Jascha

P.s., I’ll be announcing more about what is next for me in the coming weeks and will be relaunching http://marketingiteration.com with that news.

He brings up some thought provoking topics and generally a challenge to use data to drive your decisions:

And the analytics that we’ve all grown used to depend on an open, standard Web. Analytic tools are developing for these new platforms, but they’re not nearly as mature as what we’ve got for Web pages.

My message here is not to avoid the new platforms–in fact, they may be the most exciting evolution of the online environment since the Web came into existence. But realize that as you embrace these shiny objects, you can’t take the same old online tools for granted. Everything will be a little more painstaking and you’ll have to invent a lot more as you go along. It’s worth it, as long as you take into account the extra effort the Splinternet requires.

I agree with Josh, the Splinternet is here to stay, for good. I also believe that standardization will come. The catch? That it will not come in the traditional sense (i.e., Web Standards, etc.), it will come in the form of data and business processes. However, I don’t agree with Josh’s assertion that traditional analytics tools are not mature enough in the Splinternet (compared to Web Pages).

Marketing is empowered with data; Marketing is burdened with data.

Our opportunity and challenge is to unlearn the often obtuse and action-less data that we have been trained to look at on web pages to create the business process standards of the future. In all sincerity, it’s the same

Pick your data pipe in the Splinternet

challenge and opportunity in the Splinternet or not. We have more data than we know what to do with and every new channel (Facebook, iPhone, Android, etc.) means more data is becoming available to us. We have to take action with it.

Iterative Marketing Takes Hold

What comes of the Splinternet? I predict the only standardization we get as marketers moving forward is on our data and how we use it in our businesses. The notion of Iterative Marketing is beginning to take hold. We will use our data, no matter what channel or new shiny thing we collect it from to try more, fail faster, and not repeat our mistakes twice.

It’s the use of data that puts us in the unique position to take advantage of the ‘shiny new thing’ but always keep us grounded to our business.

Data+Iteration+Splinternet=Marketing.

How will you use your data?

A little history on how Ignite began
Ignite got its start in Seattle in December, 2006, as a personal project of O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. They dreamed up an event where people could share their ideas over beer, and sent word out through their network. On December 7, two hundred Seattle geeks looking for “a fun night of geekery and networking” squeezed into a bar on Capitol Hill. They found beer, but so much more. First up, a friendly but intense competition to build the sturdiest popsicle-stick bridge. Then 25 intrepid locals took a turn on the stage for their five-minute Ignite talks. The consensus was that it was a blast. Word got out, and other communities wanted Ignite in their cities. Brady and Bre turned the event over to O’Reilly, and nearly 200 Ignites have been held, about half of them in the past year. As Ignite enters its fourth year, O’Reilly is launching Global Ignite Week to celebrate, amplify, and share the Ignite phenomenon.

The video below is from an Ignite in Seattle and it’s one of my favorite examples of what Ignite’s are all about.

I’ve been very fortunate to have had many opportunities to speak publicly and I’ve attended no less than a couple hundred conferences during my professional career. As both a speaker and an attendee I’ve struggled with the traditional conference setup that is more often than not highlighted by a 45 minute keynote. When was the last time you didn’t start fidgeting when you listened to 45 minutes of anyone talking at you?

“Be brillant, but make it quick” is Ignite’s tagline and make no mistake Ignite was never and probably will never be billed as a a corporate event still, there is something special about the format that inspires. As I experienced my first Ignite in Portland I couldn’t help but think there was and should be a translation to the tired conference format we’ve all come to know.

On our cab ride back to the office Justin, Michele and I brainstormed about what we could do to innovate on the format of our customer conference Engage. We decided then we’d use Ignite as our muse and try to turn our conference on it’s head…in a good way of course.

If you’ve ever ridden on a rollercoaster there is a point, right before it drops into the first (and usually biggest) drop. It’s quiet with anticipation and all you hear is the ‘click…click…click…click’ of the chain pulling the cars to the launch pad. Right when you look over the edge there is a moment of anticipation, some would even say fear, that make the first drop amazingly satisfying. Last week, myself and the team were pulling our way to the launch pad and the anticipation was palpable.

Here we are 11 months later and a week after our Engage conference in New Orleans, where we introduced the concept of a ‘sprint’ a 5 or 10 minutes opportunity for marketing leaders to be brilliant and we invited some of the best minds in marketing and customer intelligence.

Here is an example of one of my favorite sprints by Steve Woods of Eloqua:

Suffice to say I was thrilled with the outcome.

It was a great pleasure for the Webtrends staff and myself to host our customers, partners, and media at Engage 2010 in New Orleans. Many thanks to our speakers and sponsors for making this event the most fun and informative event we’ve ever held.

We’re already thinking of ways to change the game again next year in San Francisco!

While this one is fresh in everyone’s mind, we’d like to ask for your feedback on how the conference was for you.

How was the space?
The speakers?
Was the food good?
Did the wifi hold up well?
Anything you thought was missing?
What was your favorite part?
What should we try next year?

Please let me know by commenting on this blog or on our conference network or hit us on twitter.

Thanks.

Jascha

Our business as marketers has changed. We can attribute this change to data. Once a competitive advantage, data is now table stakes. It fuels our businesses. To be successful, it is a requirement to use this data to iterate, to continually adjust and improve. What has been traditionally referred to as the “IT stack” has made its way into marketing vernacular. Just as the IT stack enables an assortment of applications and software to work in concert to perform tasks, consider the ‘marketing stack’ as a combination of those same services and technologies needed to empower an effective iterative marketer and create game-changing marketing programs and campaigns.

A scalable, flexible marketing stack that enables iteration has three key components:

• Business Process (sales, marketing alignment, accountability, efficiency, etc.)
• Campaign Management (social listening, optimization, campaign efficiency, take rates, opens, etc.)
• Data Architecture (customer intelligence, CRM, etc.)

This is an oversimplified view for the purposes of this discussion, but it offers a framework within which to work. Here’s what we do at Webtrends….

Business Process:

Iterative marketing thrives when we recognize that the goals of Sales and Marketing can and should exist harmoniously. Ultimately, this means that Sales and Marketing agree to co-own the sales funnel and accountability on how that will be executed against. Further, iterative marketing accepts the fact that failure is a way to learn and will be celebrated.

At Webtrends, we have built an organizational structure and operate against values that support the iterative model. We support the idea of the noble failure and celebrate both successes and failures equally. We’ve also recently rolled out a new model for accountability with the sales department, including a worldwide sales and marketing funnel defining suspects, leads, qualified leads, through to closed business.

Campaign & Asset Management:

We’ve adopted iterative marketing as an operational methodology. Test, Learn, Improve, Repeat across all campaigns and assets.

• The team meets for daily scrums to check in on progress against priorities
• We’ve added new members qualified to handle the rapid pace.
• We’ve moved more communications to a collaboration portal for faster and better communications (less synthesis required, improved version control, less organization of local files, etc.)
• We take advantage of technologies like Webtrends Optimize, Ad Director, and Social Measurement to facilitate this process in an automated fashion where available.

Data Architecture:

Your marketing stack must enable iterative marketing, not hinder it. This sounds simple but it’s something I’ve run into again and again when trying to execute. Some of the principles to consider:
• Include Social Media: Your customers interact with your brand and products off your site, and utilizing a tool like Webtrends Social Measurement that will integrate with your Webtrends Analytics 9 data is hugely important. The technology, along with supporting business processes, can make substantive and positive impacts on your business in groups broader than just marketing.
• Marketing automation is a must: Understand how your marketing campaigns align with your digital asset investments and further align to your sales funnel. We use Eloqua at Webtrends.
• Business process change powers your experimentation platform: One of the most important learned lessons with an experimentation platform is that you have to enable your Creative Director to be successful. Utilizing a service and platform that can help get your team up and running with the new business processes and then running it on your own is a great tactic to get value faster. We use Webtrends Optimize because we not only get the most advanced platform on the market but we have access to an amazing team of experts.
• Analytics are the mothership: We use Webtrends Analytics 9 and Marketing Warehouse at Webtrends. Possibly this goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway. Analytics are the mothership for  your Marketing stack and you have to have unfettered access to all your visitor level data. Webtrends is the only provider who can do that for you and we certainly take advantage of what Webtrends has to offer.
• Integrating online and offline data should be a goal if it’s applicable for your business: Solid analytics and customer intelligence tools that enable you to look at the data together and take action are hugely important for business that operate in multiple channels. There is a great webinar taking place on Dec 2 that you should check out if you want to learn more about this.

Here’s an analogy that I think can be helpful to illustrate the concept of marketing iteration in present-day organizations:

In most of Europe, it’s really easy to be energy-efficient because the societal infrastructure supports it. Everyone has low-flow showers and toilets, energy costs more so people make a tremendous effort to conserve it, mass transit is ubiquitous and awesome, pesticide and farming laws mean that food is more sustainably produced, etc. This entire supporting framework (a combination of laws and cultural norms that transcends individual behavior) makes it much easier for individuals to “do the right thing”, per se. America is, obviously, quite different. Even if you want to be more efficient as an individual, you’re constantly at odds with culture, laws and institutions that, in many cases, make it harder to live sustainably (our dependency on cars is one example). I think of iterative marketing the same way. You can have individuals in an organization who champion it or try to be iterative, but in order to really succeed across the organization, you need to have a company-wide culture, the right marketing stack and processes that support iterative marketing.

In summary, at Webtrends, our data architecture is comprised of social media data (via Webtrends Social Measurement) campaign performance data (via Eloqua), Multivariate experimentation data (via Webtrends Optimize) and visitor + trend data (via Webtrends Analytics & Marketing Warehouse) along with all the supporting cultural and business process changes that act as the glue between the components of the stack.

What is in your marketing stack?

If you have any comments or questions please leave them below.

The information revolution lead by Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft has made a limited number of sources king by defining social equity largely through the empowerment of ‘link juice’, aka SEO. When we want to find something we ‘Google it.’

Social networks have introduced a new source for social equity, and what is arising from that equity is social equality. They empower the middle classes to communicate with the masses, so to speak. Last week’s news of the paid inclusion of Twitter feeds on Google and Bing searches could change the effect of the kings of information on social relationships for good. Just as we now talk about the importance of link juice (and often complain about the tactics people use to pursue it), will we soon speak of “Tweet juice”?

Will this force us to question the authenticity of our social relationships? There is an organic quality to the growth of social networks, but the lure of Tweet juice injects an unprecedented level of self-interest into the social web. How will the nature of our online social interactions change when we must wonder whether someone is following us earnestly or whether they’re using us for our Tweet juice? Will Tweets become a commodity, with hash tags and handles bought and sold in the social media marketplace?

Will this, in other words, mark the rise of social capital?

"Analytics...form the connective tissue."

The ecosystem surrounding a business – developing IP, building a brand, motivating people, managing operations – often appears disjointed. We employ separate technologies, have separate (often competing) departments, separate sets of processes, even separate offices. Thus it’s easy to forget that business does indeed operate within an ecosystem, that all these seemingly separate entities must work together to make business flourish. Managing your business ecosystem is hard, but truly successful business – that is, to understand the problems we’re solving and take care of our customers:

1) They understand the business problem they are solving.
2) They take care of their customers.
3) They innovate.

All of our businesses have problems, whether they’re related to internal processes or those of our customers, and we face an ever-widening array of tools we can use to address them within the business ecosystem. Analytics are one of the most basic parts of that ecosystem. They form the connective tissue that intertwines with marketing automation, multivariate testing, business intelligence and a bevy of maturing technologies that make it easier for us to run a successful business that understands the problem they are solving and takes care of their customers.

Yet all too often there is an expectation that analytics are removed from your business. That they are a business within your business. That only from identifying separate processes and separate resources can analytics be successful. I’ve heard businesses say more times that I care to share in the last year that they need to “make analytics successful.” We’ve got it wrong.

Technology can’t be beneficial to your business if it operates in a vacuum of resources and expertise. Maybe your business can be stronger with the newer tools (or maybe the new tools get in your way), but they can’t replace a good recipe and a skilled cook.

Success happens because of people and process supported by technology, not technology in and of itself. Web Analytics is not hard, running your business is. I think you’ll agree, however, that when operating within the context of a well-run business ecosystem, analytics can help you solve your business problems better, take better care of your customers and support innovation. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be exploring how marketing plays a role in a successful business. How the practice of marketing iteration is practiced and how it is supported by a recipe of analytics, mvt, a myriad of emerging technologies and, most importantly, skilled cooks.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what makes your business hard, what challenges you are facing, and how you use process and technology (like analytics) to make your business better.