Posted by Christine on December 30, 2009 under Uncategorized | 
I’ve been invited to speak at the Northern California Business Marketing Association on how to drive PR conversations through social media. The format is breakfast roundtable and I’ll be using a couple of case studies, Egenera and Ariba, on how to drive truly strategic PR and then maximize the conversation through social media.
The event details are below. I hope you can attend and add your voice and experiences to the conversation. The event URL is http://norcalbma.org/programs/pr_html
Public Relations Roundtable
A Case Study in Steering the PR Conversation Through Social Media
Join us as marketing strategist and CMO, Christine Crandell, leads the conversation about how PR has evolved from a monologue to a dialogue – actually a polylogue. We will discuss how to steer and shape PR conversations through social media, traditional methods and digital technologies so that they are meaningful and help shape the right perception of the company, product, person or issue.
Christine will share her experience shaping perception of Egenera and the three strategies she utlizies. Effectively positioning the company’s long-established strength in the data center market, she triggered a long-running conversation that drew in bloggers, competitor and Cisco resellers, analysts and CIOs. The impact on brand awareness became evident through a three-fold increase in sales inquiries.
Date/Time:
Wednesday, January 13th
8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
Location:
Scott’s Seafood Restaurant and Grill
855 El Camino Real
Town and Country Shopping Center
(Embarcadero and El Camino)
Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 323-1555
Welcome Non-Members
Free to BMA Members, plus your own breakfast tab.
$15 for non-members (payable at the door)*, plus your own breakfast tab.
*CASH or CHECK only, please.
RSVP:To help the restaurant hostess plan appropriate seating, please RSVP to
Denise Rael (denisezj@hotmail.com) no later than 3:00pm, January 12, 2010.
Posted by Christine on December 26, 2009 under Uncategorized |
The holiday season is a wonderful time – family, good friends, great food and a time to rest and reflect on the year past and the one ahead. It also offers us a great time to read new and classic books. I call that food for the brain and catalysts for creativity. A friend called 2009 a ‘character building’ year. I think of it as ‘the year the transformation began’. Marketing is fundamentally transforming, sales & marketing alignment is on the C-suite’s agenda (finally), strategy formulation and operationalization is part of the CMO’s charter, and businesses around the world are embarking on a new cycle of innovation and growth. If we’re fortunate, we could be entering a renaissance.
I’d like to share with you what I’m reading. You might find one or two that become food for your brain and fuels your 2010 renaissance. Amazon links are included.
- “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale” by Ardath Albee
- “Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology” by Steve W. Martin
- “The Mindful Leader” by Michael Carroll
- “Customer Experience Improvement Momentum” by Lynn Hunsaker (ebook)
- “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” by Robert Scoble (it’s a good re-read)
- “Inside of a Dog” by Alexandra Horowitz (because we’re adding to our ‘family’)
Enjoy and happy holidays.
Christine
Tags: 2010, albee, customer experience, marketing, marketing rules, marketing strategies, michael carroll, PR rules, reading list, sales, sales & marketing alignment, sales psychology, Scoble, strategy
Posted by Christine on December 9, 2009 under Uncategorized |
In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter introduced the economic concept of creative destruction. He theorized that radical innovation triggers transformation in economies as well as companies. Innovation is the force that sustains long term economic growth even as it destroys the value of established companies. This is an apt description of what is happening to marketing today. Social media, interactive marketing, revenue cycle optimization, and innovation management are radical innovations triggering the wholesale transformation of marketing.
Couple that with an expansion of marketing’s scope and a groundswell to resolve, for once and for all, the sales and marketing mis-alignment, marketing’s transformation offers tremendous opportunities and hardships, just as Schumpeter had popularized.
Marketing’s transformation is rooted in how the function is managed. Unpredictability is the rule which demands a constant stream of innovative activites, and results, executed with uber efficiency and flexibility. Navigating this requires that marketing be managed and measured differently. The CMO’s KPIs need to reflect the function’s new scope and measure what matters – revenue growth, quality of customer lifecycle relationship, reputation and effectiveness of strategy. And those KPIs need to cascade down the marketing organization and be aligned with sales’ KPIs.
This is a critical time for marketing. CMOs need to lead their company through this transformation with an inspired vision, gutsy and decisive leadership, fact-based decision making and a laser focus on how to drive constant revenue growth or marketing risks becoming a dirty word. I’ve had several recent conversations with top notch marketers who are banning the word ‘marketing’ and ‘rebranding’ their functions into revenue-related words. This trend threatens the real opportunity from the creative destruction. The real opportunity is to transform marketing into the company’s center point of constituent life cycle understanding by continuously creating meaningful value, however constituents define ‘value’.