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A few months ago I contributed to this crowd sourced effort by Mac McIntosh and Dianna Huff. The ebook is now complete and available for free download. In this ebook ten broad categories of mistakes were identified that B2B marketers commonly make. What do you think? Were the mistakes nailed?
Download Top10MarketingMistakes
Nuff said.
With Wikileaks, and the emergence of “Hacktivism” corporations everywhere are finally getting the message that they, and their customer’s data are only as secure as their weakest link. Notably this week we heard of McDonalds’ losing customers emails due to a hack at one of their marketing automation vendors networks. The loss of this information can be fed into phishing and spam systems and could potentially cause serious issues for these customers, not to mention the untold loss of brand equity and revenue for the business.
What is particularly disturbing is that this loss was brought on due to a hack into the networks of marketing automation vendor Silverpop. The FBI reports that data related to 105 customers of Silverpop may have been breached.
Customers of Silverpop such as deviantART, sent an email to their customers warning that their email addresses, user names and birth dates were exposed to suspected spammers. The company has since ceased all ties with Silverpop as noted in this statement “Silverpop Systems, Inc., a leading marketing company that sends email messages for its clients, told us that information was taken from its servers. Because we value the information that members give us, we have decided not to rely on the services of Silverpop in the future and their servers will no longer hold any data from us.”
The losses of data doesn't have to tie directly to a marketing automation vendor, but the risk could be 2nd tier. Walgreens noted last week that they had customer information breached that was then used for Phishing scams. The Register reports Walgreens uses Arc Worldwide as its promotional agency, and Arc is part of Leo Burnet, who by the way is McDonald’s agency of record. Both of these agencies use Silverpop.
As the steward of the brand, these recent events raise some interesting and distributing issues for marketing professionals. I don’t know of too many marketing colleagues who do not use any type of a marketing automation services provider whether it be Silverpop, Marketo, or Eloqua. The reality is that in order to use these services you in effect send your data base to the cloud. So what this really means is your data base is only as secure, as your marketing automation’s vendor security is.
This post is not a hit against Silverpop either, as I doubt that many marketing automation vendors have IT security at top of mid. The reason I say that is that other than Marketo, I didn’t really see any value prop from any vendor related to how secure they keep your data. The other thing you need to realize is that most of these companies do not manage their own security, and may in fact use a 3rd party managed security services provider (MSSP), and that can bring additional and inherent risk.
Have you asked any questions regarding your marketing automation vendor’s security processes? Do they outsource their IT network security management? How do they or their partner secure their network? Do they have a dedicated patching team? How do they audit their partner’s security practices and protocols? Do they guard against insider risk by encrypting their USB sticks, or do they just rely on the increasingly ineffective, and ubiquitous antivirus.
These are now important questions for marketing to ask of its marketing automation vendors. Just imagine yourself typing out an email to your customers notifying them of a loss of their sensitive information. What damage would that cause to your brand equity? What if you’re in the financial or healthcare industry? What additional compliance and litigious risk would an event like this bring to your business?
It’s clear that the IT security posture of your marketing automation vendor is now more related to your brand equity than ever before. Nuff said.
I came across a recent article in USA Today this week on how most of the major marketers who are advertising during Super Bowl XLV will unveil social media contests, as part of their campaign effort. The article noted that Mercedes and Audi will both unveil this week large scale social media contests, backed by hefty prizes for those that “tweet” or “like” the most.
The basic crux of all these social media efforts is to get people to post en-mass “likes” or “tweets” which to me sounds eerily similar to “awareness drives sales” used by many a Madmen in their day. So is ‘tweeting” and ‘Liking:” the new “awareness heroine" of the day?
Looks like it is to me. I had to laugh at the quote from Stephen Cannon, Mercedes Marketing Vice President “We're using the 2011 Super Bowl as our head-long plunge into committing to social media," at Mercedes-Benz. It's our strategic leap of faith.” W.T.F.?
Let me translate what “strategic leap of faith” really means. It means were doing this because everybody else is doing it, but we don’t have clue as to why we’re doing it, or what were going to get out of it, and oh by the way, we have more marketing budget than brains. Well that’s okay, as that same argument could probably be used against massive TV advertising budgets, applied to a 30 second spot, with no follow on support for the rest of year. Sound familiar?
Is it any wonder why then the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a remarkable 25% decline in peer/friend trust in the 2010 survey? Not really, especially when everyone is “friending” everyone else, and Big ‘M” marketers blindly throw cash to generating “likes” and “tweets”, while social media snake oil consultants continually tout social media as the next god send for lead generation. What the Edelman Trust Barometer really indicates is that people are basically saying that the value of a “like” or ‘tweet” or number of “followers” you have is becoming worth less and less everyday as marketers spend gobs of money in blindly building a mass of “likes” and “fans” artificially.
I also had to laugh when I heard that after the much ballyhooed announcement of Pepsi leaving traditional media by spurning the Super Bowl 09 in lieu of social media, recently announced their return to the Super Bowl with the purchase of 4 slots for their Pepsi Max brand. So I guess all them “Likes” and “Tweets” didn’t pay off for you huh? Here’s another classic “Big M” marketer quote “PepsiCo is "doubling down," says Rudy Wilson, marketing chief at Frito-Lay”. You bet you’re doubling down Rudy, because social media, as a one off tactic, or communication channel is not driving the revenue needle for you buddy. Welcome to real the world.
Here’s a basic tenant everybody needs to remember. Social media is worthless until someone is engaging with you by leaving a comment, question, or point of view that opens an opportunity for you to converse with them. Social media is not about the leads, sales, or monologue. It’s about dialogue. Social media shouldn’t be called out as some special type of marketing campaign; it should be part of everyday business, just as using the telephone is part of everyday business.
Social media is about you engaging with your ecosystem and building an opportunity for honest, and real conversation, debate, gripes, insight or innovation to be had. Don’t waste your money on building artificial “fans” and “likes”.
Pam Moore added a good point in the article where she adds that “ Tweets” and Facebook "likes" that Super Bowl marketers all are glomming onto today will seem archaic in just a few years” Amen to that. Nuff said.