Category Archives: Miscellaneous

A Great Guide to Enterprise Influence(rs)

Over on the Enterprise Irregulars, Paul Greenberg recently published part 1 of a 4-part series on how to deal with and think about influencers and the basics around building an influencer/analyst program that is a must read for any Marketer or PR Pro looking to get the attention of one or more influencers to cover their product or service. The post is great because it contains a number of key takeaways, including this key point that most non-PR Pro’s miss: Do Your Homework: understand who they are, not just what they are. That means learn something about them as actual human beings.

It’s amazing how many PR / Media Relations people don’t understand why they should do this. They think that if they just spam the same bullsh!t press release to three thousand e-mails, they will get results. I can tell you that, like the influencers named in the post, every day I get dozens of spam press releases that just get dumped to a spam folder that gets emptied, unread, once a month. Why? Well, not only do I not have time to read them all, and not only do I have no interest in hyped up carbon copy that doesn’t bother to tell me how the product or service will benefit my readers, but I have no interest in wading through paragraphs of hype to figure out if the product or service being hyped is even related to Supply Management. (Now that SI gets about 125,000 visits a month, it gets on spam lists for political and religious products too, for example.) But more importantly, the doctor not only dislikes vendor press releases, but despises requests to blog about or post a press release. SI is about solutions, not about hyperbole. And, if the PR / Media Relations person had taken 5 minutes to actually visit the site and read a few paragraphs of the FAQ, they’d know that. (Unlike many blogs or sites, just about everything a PR / Media person would want to know is in the FAQ!) Furthermore, while multiple press releases typically gets a sender on a spam blacklist, a request for demo is usually answered in an hour with “here’s how much notice I need and, in this timeframe some days I could fit you in”. But I digress.

The point is influencers are people … insanely busy people. While I typically don’t get the 30-50 requests for demos, interviews, and story pitches that Paul gets in a week, I can tell you that I typically get 20 – 25 requests for interviews or stories, with typically 20-24 of the form “Would you like to talk to X / Would you please cover Y quoted/referenced in the Press Release before”, and, these days, ignore all of them. On the other hand, the one that says “we have just released Product X that does A, B, and C for Purchasing/Procurement/Logistics/Supply professionals that we believe would be of benefit for your readers because you cover Z, would you like a demo/discussion” gets a response within 24 hours. Unless, of course, this sentence is expanded into two pages that compares the product to the holy grail, in which case I assume that the company, like the author, has way too much ego and, like Paul, shake my head in disbelief and relegate it to the bottom of the queue.

Now, I might not be front page WSJ (but, in our space, who is?), but if you are building Supply Management technology, can you really afford to kiss-off a niche site known for its coverage of supply chain technology that gets 1,500,000 visits a year? (To put this in perspective, based on a recent post, the Spend Matters family of blogs gets about 3,600,000 visits a year — or 900,000 visits per blog on average, with SpendMatters and MetalMiner getting the majority of visits.) Maybe you can, but since you don’t know where your next lead is going to come from, why should you? (Especially since a demo and subsequent coverage costs you nothing! And this holds true for many influencers in the space.)

Plus, as Paul points out, an influencer can impact

  • the purchasing decision of a prospect
  • the thinking of an entire industry
  • the mindshare that a company will have
    which indirectly influences the purchasing decisions of a prospect
  • institutional and individual investors

and can often do so with much more credibility than you can acting on behalf of your organization.

So where do you start?

  1. Figure out what kind of influencer is right for you — be it an institutional, boutique, independent, established, newly emerged, vendor, media, or influencer influencer. It will depend on the specifics of your product/service and the market you want to reach, and you should definitely read Paul’s post for insight on how to make the call, and, depending on what type of influencer is right for you, who some starting influencers are.
  2. Then, as we stated in the beginning, do your homework.
  3. Remember it’s the person, not the organization, that you are reaching out to.
  4. Say the right thing.
  5. And read Paul’s 4-part series for the details.

The Three Things You Really Need to Know About Big Data Right Now!

A recent post over on the World Future Society on “The Three Things You Need to Know About Big Data, Right Now” annoyed me because the first thing I saw was that the data experts are organizing and they want a revolution. So what? First of all, we’re few and far between, and, more importantly:

  1. For Business, Big is, as it has always been, meaningless
    Like I said in my recent post on how There’s No Such Thing as BIG Data in Business, we’re not doing protein folding, climate modelling, nuclear simulations, supercollider data interpolation, cosmological computations, or even trying to beat Deep Blue at Chess. We’re looking for answers to everyday business problems, which comes from analyzing heterogeneous and related data, possibly through federation, and not from throwing everything into a number cruncher to see what comes out. Although you may have 100 Million transactions in your ERP, you don’t need to analyze them all at once. Analyzing all of your spend at once is akin to comparing your DVD Player to the kitchen sink to an apple. We don’t need a revolution. An evolution will do just fine.
  2. They Don’t Need Your Data
    Yes, every advertiser and his dog is going to want your data to better target you with advertisements you are more likely to look at, but you don’t have to give it. Remember, they only care about statistics anyway, and, depending on the data being collected, a sample as small as 30 can have some statistical relevance. And while economists, population researchers, and medical researchers may have a valid need for certain data items about you, you don’t have to share all your private details and can most likely keep most of your unique identifying details anonymous without impacting the accuracy of their study.
  3. The Correlations will be Uncanny but Many Won’t Matter Anyway
    While some stuff you can predict is amazing, some is not, and while it’s always frustrating to not be able to predict some behaviours and outcomes, we not only accept that as a fact of business and of life, but wouldn’t have it any other way. (There’d be no stock market if we could predict everything.) For example, it’s not unexpected that web-savvy people will be searching for “unemployment” information as soon as they get laid off. But it is unexpected that a subset of Indian Politicians and a subset of Drug Dealers would have much in common (as per this recent Freakonomics Blog Entry. And neither of these facts really helps us with anything.
    Plus, the predictions will never be perfect. Like weather and stock market models, when you try to model large-scale behaviour like consumer activity over the long term, every now and again the model will fall flat on its face.

To summarize, Big Data is like Big Cloud — full of too much hot air.