The CMO CLUB Weekly Poll Question: What best practices insights from 50 CMOs would be of most interest to you as CMO in the club?

104 CMOs were asked this question between Nov 10 and Nov 18, 2010. Here are there responses:

34.7% - Improving ROI on marketing spend
30.8% - Improving demand generation
25.0% - New customer engagement ideas
9.5% - Building credibility with you CFO


A few Quotes from CMOs in the club who responded:

“Always interested in learning how my peers are improving the return on the marketing investments.”

“I don’t need theories or sales pitches. I need proven techniques for moving prospect through the sales cycle from leads to deals. I’m especially interested in nurturing ideas and programs.”

“My boss is all about ROI, if I improve ROI I will improve my credibility with my CFO.”

“Engaging customers and new ways for servicing current customers through marketing is top of mind to me. I’m looking for proven approaches from my peers.”

CMO CLUB Participation Marketing Survey Results - CMOs Need Greater Engagement Internally and Through Social Networks for Their Brands to Thrive

More than four out of five (84 percent) chief marketing officers (CMOs) allocate less than ten percent of their budgets to experimenting through social media and non-traditional communications channels, with more than half (55 percent) allocating just five percent, according to a study by The CMO Club and Hill & Knowlton released today. By contrast, according to a recent study1, the number of adult Internet users who have profiles on social networks quadrupled to 35 percent in 2008, from eight percent in 2005.

Our research shows that seven out of ten CMOs say they have medium or high levels of comfort in dealing with non-traditional media, yet few are adopting these strategies for their own brands, missing out on learning from and contributing to the conversations that are taking place online.

“Marketing used to be a linear process, with a discussion flowing from the CMO to the target audience. In today’s digital age, communication has evolved into a new model that requires active listening and engaging in numerous conversations,” said Pete Krainik, CEO, The CMO Club. “CMOs are finding the additions to the job more challenging and the need to lead beyond the marketing department is critical for their success.”

Adopting social media policies
According to a survey of its members, three out of ten (29 percent) of CMOs report having a social media policy that is widely adhered to within their company and a further 31 percent are currently developing a policy. Implementing these policies is proving to be a challenge, with just over a quarter (26 percent) of CMOs stating they have a policy but it is not complied with within their companies.

"Bloggers are the new media trendsetters/reviewers for products and services, a trusted voice by those who follow their posts," said CMO Club member Ted Rubin, chief marketing officer, e.l.f. Cosmetics. "If you empower these consumers to evangelize your brand, establish yourself as a trusted source and give them the tools, they will run with it and lend you their credibility."

Added member Erin Hintz, vice president, worldwide consumer marketing, Symantec Corporation, "While the social media world is new territory for all companies, we already have some best practices with our Norton brand that many CMOs can glean from. Our company has striven to deliver transparency in this space and we work hard to ensure employees understand their role and responsibility."

Lack of integration
CMOs report a lack of managing or interacting closely with departments within their businesses and, more importantly, with those responsible for communicating with key stakeholders. Nearly half of all CMOs questioned (48 percent) said they have no formal interaction with the department responsible for NGOs. More than a third (39 percent) do not formally liaise with their investor relations departments, and just over a fifth (22 percent) do collaborate with those responsible for liaising with financial analysts.

“I have found that in the past several years, my job has required greater collaboration with colleagues running other departments to create a more unified brand message to all of our audiences, both external and internal,” said member Kent Huffman, chief marketing officer, BearCom Wireless. ”Today, brand and reputation go hand-in-hand, and no company can afford not to work seamlessly as a team.”

Gauging stakeholder sentiment
The majority of CMOs (95 percent) formally track the attitudes or opinions of their customers to their brands, falling to seven out of ten (69 percent) among potential customers. Other non-revenue generating stakeholders take second priority: four out of five CMOs (84 percent) do not gauge the opinions of NGOs; 59 percent do not gauge the general public, and less than a third (32 percent) do not formally gauge sentiment among their employees.

“The marketers’ job is increasingly challenging and many CMOs still are learning how to engage audiences beyond their customers. Everyone is an influencer in today’s marketplace,” said MaryLee Sachs, US chairman and worldwide director, marketing communications, Hill & Knowlton. “Building advocacy by engaging all audiences can lend a tremendous amount of credibility to any marketing program. A holistic approach helps forge new paths to customers, generating brand loyalty and building critical relationships.”

Brand alignment
Currently, only one out of ten CMOs utilize a digital dashboard to disseminate branding or customer data internally through a “real-time” delivery method, while 44 percent of CMOs report using and sharing this data formally on a quarterly or semi-annual basis.

“As we experience this business transformation, CMOs are seeing that they need to focus on three key areas in order to maintain relevancy with their customers and consumers,” said Krainik. “First, expanding internal collaboration is essential; second, timeliness of monitoring and sharing customer data is critical – they must move quicker; and finally broadening their perspectives and formally engaging new external stakeholders is imperative.

These results initiated conversations at last week’s CMO Club summit on new ways to lead brands beyond the marketing department with internal colleagues and external audiences,” added Krainik.

About the Survey
The survey was conducted online with 124 chief marketing officers in the Club responding between September 15, 2009, and October 15, 2009.


Click Here for Survey Results Release

The CMO CLUB Thought Leadership Summit, Nov 2009

Here's a summary of all the coverage from this year's CMO Club Summit in San Francisco. Thanks to all the CMOs that attended and engaged in the conversation. Already working on April 20-21, 2010 Summit in NYC

• Success of UGC videos: Users want to hear from users


• Photos from The CMO Club Summit San Francisco 2009


• Marketing 2.0: Harnessing the Cloud to Build a Sustainable Brand


• First step for CMOs, harness the power of the real-time web


• Engaging customers to create customer generated content for your company


• Best in class social media ideas for CMOs


• New customer engagement platforms


• CMOs as leaders for the company's growth agenda


• David Scott of MarketFish on lead generation


• Filmmaker Jon Landau on film bloggers


• 'Tune into your innovation team'


• Advantages of virtual events


• Social content marketing: The real stories of ROI


• On becoming customer centric


• How to make a virtual booth successful


• Amy Grant on maintaining her public persona over time


• Amy Grant builds houses with her "House of Love" tour


• Guy Kawasaki's Twitter tips for businesses


• Amy Grant on turning down a sponsorship offer from Cheerios


• Keynote: Guy Kawasaki "How to kick ass on Twitter"


• Virgin America on company wide customer engagement


• Moving from Physical to Virtual Events: Lessons Learned


• What are the challenges CMOs are wrestling with?


• Leveraging advanced technology to redefine marketing

Thanks to David Spark and Scott Plamondon of Spark Media Solutions for all their coverage of the event.

Leveraging advanced technology to redefine marketing

The last panel of The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco was a panel discussion about how marketers are harnessing advanced technology to enhance their marketing efforts. In particular, the discussion was about the product Autonomy and how their clients are using their product to find trends and patterns in their respective markets.

• Moderator: Nicole Egan, CMO of Autonomy
• David Churbuck, VP Global Digital Marketing for Lenovo
• Michael Glovia, VP Marketing at VMS
• Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of Blinkx

Here's a summary of some of the ideas and thoughts that came up in the discussion:

• Patterns are leading indicators of change rather than lagging signs of performance.
• Patterns allow businesses to uncover the unknown, spot trends, and identify opportunities
• Patterns is about finding new opportunities in areas you didn't expect.
• Uncover the philosophy of inexactness. Get away from the "exact match" mold.
• Seeing a rapid shift to imprecise analysis, even though there's still value in traditional analysis.
• Most companies start social monitoring looking for negativity. Among the negativity they saw the detection of desire. They slid into a conversation by offering coupons to try to close deals. And according to Lenovo, they were close to 100% successful with that tactic.
• Look at the more humane side of marketing metrics. Not all items that can be counted have value.
• Google has proven that effective advertising is targeted. Blinkx's CEO argues that its product can offer a combination of traditional commercial advertising and targeted Google ads.

Success of UGC videos: Users want to hear from users

At The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, I spoke with Ted Rubin, CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics. Rubin said e.l.f. has had enormous success with users generating videos about their product. No matter how hard his team tries, they can never create videos that garner as much attention as the community. Rubin said that has everything to do with users wanting to hear from users.

First step for CMOs, harness the power of the real-time web

At the end of The CMO Club Summit, David Spark spoke with Matt Elders, VP Sales for Zuberance and Erin Hintz, VP, Worldwide Consumer Marketing for Symantec. Spark asked them what they got out of the conference and they pointed to Guy Kawasaki's presentation on Twitter and the need to harness the real-time web.

Marketing 2.0: Harnessing the Cloud to Build a Sustainable Brand

Michael Mendenhall, CMO of HP gave the closing keynote presentation at The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco. He talked about the need to think globally with his presentation, "Marketing 2.0: Harnessing the Cloud to Build a Sustainable Brand."
Here's a summary of the points and statistics he brought up in the presentation.

Macro, Secular Forces

• By 2025 the worldwide population will grow 20% from 6.6 to 7.6 billion.
• In India, the number of people between 20 and 50 will grow 60%.
  
• The same time, the number of people under 40 will decrease about 28%.

The aging populations are going to need more services and support.

• Worldwide urban population is predicted to grow by 1 billion 2020.
• Cities are expanding by 60 million people annually. That's the equivalent of growing a Beijing every other month.
• Globalization has brought more people into the International economy especially in the middle class.

• About 20% of the world's 6.6 billion people are online.
• There are 4 billion wireless handheld devices in the world.
• Information doubles every 4 years. But digital content doubles every 18 months. Information or data that's not controlled is noise. If it's controlled, it's knowledge.

The greatest resource is innovation Effective delivery of innovation at the right time.

Marketing in the Cloud

• Personal: Customized engagement on a global scale
• Efficient: Accessible, sustainable services
• Social: The power of one to one, one to many, many to one, and many to many communications.

Examples at HP

You and You Contest: Invited people to create videos of how technology is playing a part in their life. They reached a global audience in a very personal way.

• 5 million video views
• 2/3rd between the ages 13-24
• 1/3rd outside of the U.S.
• 4,000 video submissions.

MagCloud: Efficient, democratized print publishing

• Print on demand = no waste
• Eliminates entire pieces of the supply chain
• Highly targeted advertising
• Recent partnerships with The Atlantic and Wikia

Cost is only 20 cents per page plus shipping. Can make orders as small as just one magazine.

DonorsChoose.org: Social media for social investment

• HP sponsored contest where bloggers and twitters are giving to their favorite schools.
  
• Accelerated participation through social networks and shareable widgets.
• 4,000 donors have raised $500K that will reach 100K students.

If you're looking to create a sustainable brand, social engagement allows you to be very personal. Sustainable brands help create sustainable societies.

For marketers, the cloud is the key to transforming challenges into opportunities.

Engaging customers to create customer generated content for your company

At The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, I spoke with Joe Ennen who is currently the SVP of Consumer Brands for Safeway. Prior to that role Ennen worked at Frito Lay and on the Doritos brand. He talked about how powerful user generated content has been and that they've used these cheap (less than $100 often to produce) videos on the Superbowl. The UGC Superbowl Doritos videos have ranked in the top five alongside or beating videos produced for millions by Madison Avenue.

I asked Ennen what kind of environment you can create so people want to create videos for your brand.

Best in class social media ideas for CMOs

Every session at the CMO Club Summit in San Francisco had at bare minimum, a touch of discussion on social media. Some sessions had far more. This one was one of them. A panel discussion for CMOs who have succesfully pull

• Ted Rubin, CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics
• Seth Rosenblatt, VP of Marketing for Jive Software
• Mike Terpin, CEO of SocialRadius
• Bill Muller, CMO of iProspect

Here are some of the recommendations and thoughts that came out of the discussion:

• Understand that it's just one giant conversation. Make social media a company-wide strategy. It's beyond just getting a Twitter account.
• You're going to be involved in social media whether you choose to be involved with it proactively or not. Do you want to catch up and participate with it?
• Transparency is about trust with audience.
• Build relationships with bloggers and it will pay off when you need their support. e.l.f. has relationships with 300 bloggers. Because of that work of building relationships, when they do put out a promotion, the bloggers spread the word for them.
• If you think you're number one in your industry, check Google first. If you appear on Google for a general search in your category then you are tops. Those who appear top in their category often have blogs.
• Go to the video bloggers first with your product announcement. Completely avoid the traditional media. The traditional media will see the videobloggers' content.
• Don't astroturf: Your whole brand will be irreparably damaged. Especially if you ignore the community reaction to your astroturfing.
• Customer service via social media (complain about something publicly) works faster than going through a company's traditional customer service outlets (e.g. 800 number and email us).
  
• Blogger enthusiasts will work with you and link to whatever page you want to link to. Create a page that converts people to buyers and give that link to the blogger enthusiast.
• Keep in mind that earned and paid media can't live without each other.
  

New customer engagement platforms

Trying to get people better engaged with your business? Offering some real world experiences, the following experts told their stories at The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco.

• James Lonsdale-Hands, CMO of Active Network
• Jeff Rohrs, VP Marketing of Exact Target
• Paul McNulty, CMO of Unica
• Garry McGuire, CEO of RMG Networks

Here's a summary of the case studies presented and discussions that came out of the discussion

• SNS Bank, a customer of Unica, created a video to show the value of inbound marketing and Unica solutions for measuring customer behavior, especially in real time.
• For one client, Active Events (part of Active Networks) expanded the reach and ROI of an event by going hybrid between both a physical and virtual event. Extend the live event by using a virtual event. But they didn't want to sacrifice physical attendance of the physical event. They pulled it off. Attendance was the same as last year for physical (10,000) and they got 1500-2000 people to attend and pay for the virtual event.
  
• The inbox is a different environment than it was ten years ago especially in the face of social media. It's evolving to become a more unified messaging space to include all social networks and communications.
• Exact Target's client Scott's lawncare was concerned with why their mailing list dropped from 1 million to 800,000. It was a case of churn where they were moving up into a higher engagement platform, a closed loop social network. In all, they have about 2.4 million people connected via email or a social network. They know they won't get a huge number of people in its social network, but those people they do reach in those social networks will be key to forwarding their message through work of mouth marketing.
• Identify your low hanging fruit. Create personas of your existing customers and map them to new subscribers.
  

CMOs as leaders for the company's growth agenda

The last day of The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco kicked off with a discussion of how CMOs can lead their organization's business growth. On the panel were:

• Joseph Ennen, SVP Consumer Brands for Safeway
• Randall Beard, Global EVP/GM Consumer Packaged Goods Nielsen IAG
• Scott Thurm, Senior Editor for The Wall Street Journal

Here are some of the thoughts that came out of the panel discussion:

• The best CMO is a CEO that believes in marketing. The growth agenda requires needs alignment between those two roles.
• CMOs are too quick to delegate the strategy of the company's growth agenda. Growth requires vision and courage and that's the principle job of the CMO. Don't let that bubble up through PowerPoint presentations. Lack of system innovation downstream can ruin business growth.
• CMO has to think more broadly than just marketing if he/she is going to lead growth. For example, at Zappos customer service equals marketing. Shift focus from thinking a "marketing agenda" to "growth agenda."
  
• Don't confuse "prolific" with being "successful." Success requires downstream wiring and upstream alignment.
  
• Don't be surprised when customers have irrational responses. That's normal. Companies often only prepare for rational responses.
• Connect the unmet needs of consumers with the assets that exist over the enterprise. This requires cross-business organizations to work together.
  
• Marketing as a function will move into a real-time model. You'll be measured on advertising and media effectiveness on a daily and weekly basis. You'll start reading it in real time and making adjustments accordingly.
  
• Tech often comes from this attitude of "When we're done with this product, everyone will want it." They don't consider marketing as a function. Yet the Valley is filled with examples of the best product not winning because they had a poor "go to market" strategy.
  

David Scott of MarketFish on lead generation

At the CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, David Spark interviews David Scott, CEO and Founder of MarketFish, a lead generation service. Scott talks about how the genesis for his company came from a suggestion at The CMO Club Summit less than two years ago. In addition, we talked about his lead generation business and the value blogging has brought to his business.

See where it all began. Here's my first interview with David Scott more than a year and a half ago at The CMO Club Summit in NYC.

Filmmaker Jon Landau on film bloggers

At The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, David Spark talks with film producer Jon Landau (Titanic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Avatar) about keeping film bloggers, like "Ain't It Cool News" Harry Knowles, in the loop even when you're in the middle of production.

Photos from The CMO Club Summit San Francisco 2009

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

'Tune into your innovation team'

Carol Godfrey, Southwire VP of Marketing, explains that the most important part of her week is tuning into her innovation team to avoid getting stuck in the details.

How to make a virtual booth successful

Loglogic EVP of Marketing and Strategy Dominique Levin explains what made her company's virtual event booth "surprisingly sucessful."

On becoming customer centric

At the CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, Scott Plamondon spoke with Manish Mehta, President and CEO of Tangence, about how his company became more customer-centric in 2009.

Social content marketing: The real stories of ROI

At the CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, Sam Decker, CMO of BazaarVoice, a company that powers sites with user generated content, spoke about finding ROI in social media.

Two big questions Decker keeps hearing are "What is the ROI for social media?" and "Where do I start?"

State of "Social"

• 28% increase in the average search string (from 2008 to 2009)
• 81% of holiday shoppers search for reviews online before they buy
• 89% of CMOs are being pressured for more measurability.

Measuring social media remains a challenge. Most companies don't know what all their social media efforts are doing to their bottom line.

Two biggest social media mistakes companies make

• Collect "fans" and then they call it a day
• Lack of advocacy around the product or purchase barriers.

Bring social to commerce.

• Collect customer-content on the product.
• Amplify near the product...where customers are looking to buy.

You need to focus on goals of increasing revenue, improving operations, building loyalty/engagement, and increasing brand awareness.

Decker advises that you can increase revenue with social content.

More reviews equals more sales

• Products with at least four reviews saw a 30.7% increase in conversion.
• Products with a rating of at least 4.3 saw a 33.1% increase in conversion.

Don't just stop there with the content. Keep pushing. For example, HP put the reviews in their search advertising. The attitude was "don't listen to us, listen to what others are saying about our products." Huge increase in conversion.

Increased customer engagement online will reduce calls. The more answers for questions that were posted online, the less calls Canadian Tire received.

Bring customer oxygen into the company
Use the social content to improve your company. Don't run the business the company in silos and stay focused with internal metrics. With Oriental Trading company they read the product reviews. They responded and either improved the product or dumped the products all together.

With Best Buy, Samsung creates a Q&A section to build engagement, insights

• 96% increase in product views
• 100% more question submissions
• 91% of questions not addressed through marketing copy
• Answers are 66% more helpful vs. the community

User-generated content scales itself and fuels existing marketing programs.

Advantages of virtual events

At the CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, Scott Plamondon spoke with RIM VP of Marketing Mike Hicks about what worries from physical events you can forget about when putting on a virtual event.

Guy Kawasaki's Twitter tips for businesses

After a great presentation at The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco on how to kick ass on Twitter, David Spark of Spark Media Solutions interviewed Guy Kawasaki on tips for businesses that want to get engaged on Twitter. He boils it all down to three must do tips for tweeting.

Amy Grant builds houses with her "House of Love" tour

At The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, singer Amy Grant and her manager discuss how they worked with Target and Habitat for Humanity to build a house in every city she played during her "House of Love" tour.

Amy Grant on maintaining her public persona over time

At the CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, singer Amy Grant talked about the difficulty of having a public persona and a brand she has to protect, especially as she's getting older.

Virgin America on company wide customer engagement

At the CMO Club Summit in San Francisco, Porter Gale, CMO of Virgin America, spoke about how her airline is engaging customers instead of just just doing traditional marketing.
Looking at air travel - How can we get consumers more engaged?
They realized it's not just a destination, it's an experience. Here's what Virgin America's airlines did to improve the flying experience. They looked at every aspect of the flying experience and thought how they could get people more engaged with the experience.

• Took them four years to get the right to fly. Launched a site called LetVAfly to try to get people to support them. They got support from Kevin and Alex from Diggnation. This grassroots program helped them get approval more quickly.
• No need to wait for the cart - You can order from your seat. You can order mixed drinks.
• Created a safety video that's entertaining content. Turning an old situation that was quite boring into something that was memorable. They admit it took them six months to get approval from the FAA on that safety video.
• First airline to offer in-flight wi-fi.

It's important to connect with your audience. Don't market to them.
Tweeting and partnerships lead to seat sales. They focus on that.

• With YouTube, they brought a bunch of key influencers and video bloggers on a flight and asked them to make videos.
• Made a partnership with the HBO show "Entourage." The show spends a lot of time in LA and Las Vegas (two destinations for Virgin America). They wrapped a plane with the "Entourage" logo, flew people to Vegas and showed the 5th season premiere episode on the plane.
• People are so passionate about the Virgin America brand that they send in videos of their experience on Virgin America.
• Activate a community by asking them to get friends to buy tickets. If ten friends buy a ticket they get a free ticket.
  

Virgin America's social media efforts They have a 15 person marketing team. They have 3/4th of a person dedicated to social media.

• They've amplified press with social media.
• Richard Branson announced he wanted to fight Stephen Colbert. Colbert talked about it on the show and it went viral. Virgin America calculated that the exposure was worth $379K in advertising media.
• People tweeting each other on planes and buying each other drinks.
• Built a relationship with Hammer on a plane and then he shot a portion of an episode of his reality show on a plane.

Dealing with negative social media press If someone is publicly talking negatively about you, get them off the public social web to a private conversation. You don't want this playing out publicly.

It's very hard to say what the ROI is on their social media. But the customer relations has been fantastic. They've had situations where the community closes sales for them. For example, people will tweet out that they're thinking about flying Virgin America and other tweeters will reassure them.

Keynote: Guy Kawasaki "How to kick ass on Twitter"

Marketing guru and author Guy Kawasaki gave the keynote address at the CMO Club Thought Leadership Summit in San Francisco today.

Kawasaki, the author of nine books including "How to Drive Your Competition Crazy" gave tips on how CMOs can best use Twitter in their marketing efforts.

Came late to Twitter

Kawasaki says that he came late to Twitter. "I found Twitter, or should I say Twitter found me in 2007," he said. "My first reaction was that Twitter was the dumbest thing I ever saw."

But, he quickly realized the huge potential for marketing.

Kawasaki's advice for CMOs on how to use Twitter

Search for yourself or your company
This will let you see what people are saying about you, for good and bad, all day long. Not all of it is positive, but you learn as much from the negative as you do from the positive. And watch your competition too!

Note: As a marketer you must realize that when someone slams your product 99% of the time they have not tried your product. Just send them a free sample to turn them into a fan.

New theory of marketing

Old marketing used the theory of influencers. There are 20 people you need to suck up to. If you're in tech, a good example would be Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal.

Today Kawasaki believes in a new theory: "The nobodies are the new somebodies." Once you turn an average Twitter critic into a fan they will Tweet to many, many more followers.

Don't just focus on the top influencers with the most followers. "Rather than suck up, you should suck across or suck down," said Kawasaki, "Twitter allows you to do that."

Twitter lets you dump inventory

If you've got excess inventory, give it away on Twitter as "deals." People will follow you just to see the deals you place on Twitter. It's a great way to move inventory quickly.

Support

Every company should set up Twitter support groups. You need to follow them closely and follow up. As an example, Frank from @Comcastcares is tracking the phrase "I am switching to DirecTV" on Twitter. He'll respond to anyone who says that.

Prospecting: How to get followers

Kawasaki said he only uses Twitter is a marketing platform. "I am not trying to be social or make friends," he said. "As a marketer I want to get followers."

1. Inform. Don't me-form. Me-form is "my cat just rolled over." Inform is to provide content that your followers will find interesting and valuable. The goal is to have interesting links so people will retweet you.


2. Create a constant stream of great content by putting an RSS feed into your Twitter feed. But only do this for content sites you truly trust and value.

Other best practices

1. Always be linking to great content.
2. Anytime someone mentions you, respond.
3. Your ultimate goal is to be retweeted.

Twitter marketing myths you can ignore

1. Twitter for social networking. Don't just tweet personal stuff. You should be inform, not me form.
2. You shouldn't repeat tweets. Not true. You can repeat by simply changing the wording of your tweets.
3. You should not automatic feed. If it's valuable, it's worth it.
   
4. You should not use ghost tweeters. Highly debatable. Kawasaki uses them and thinks they're OK. But if you're representing yourself, then you need to tweet it out.
5. You cannot make everyone happy. If 10 are mad, there are probably 10,000 who love you. They are the silent majority. Do not let a tiny percent of people, angry, to affect your marketing. You need to ignore them.

Kawasaki said Twitter today is what the Internet was 20 years ago. I think Twitter will be around for a long time. It's a mistake to say Twitter will not be useful for B2B. It's such a trivial thing to sign up, why not? In three years, you will say why didn't I get started earlier.

Moving from Physical to Virtual Events: Lessons Learned

While we were all attending a physical event, the growth of virtual events has been taking off. They've grown into their own this year. According to Mike Hicks of Research in Motion, in 2009, virtual events have grown by 30 percent while face-to-face events have shrunk by 37 percent.

Looking to produce a successful virtual event? To learn what works and what doesn't work with virtual events, we got some expert advice from:

• Mike Hicks, VP Marketing for Research in Motion
• Tom Wieser, VP Marketing for CGS
• Yannick Claereboudt Moderator for The CMO Club

What is a virtual event?

A virtual event is an integrated platform to deliver a live experience in a virtual environment. The goal is to create a personalized experience for branding and marketing and encourage two-way communications and interaction. For the company, the goal is to get leads and nurture them. It's also a great forum to launch new products.

The value proposition of running a virtual event:

1. Lead generation: In the physical world you really do not have a good sense of who is a good lead. In the virtual world you have lots more metrics. You can measure behaviors such as what the person downloads, what he says in surveys, and what he asks for. Put it all together and you get a picture.


2. Low cost: For you and for the people coming to the event. No travel costs.
   


3. Runs 24/7: In the physical world an event lasts just a few days and then shuts down usually around 5pm. Most attendees to virtual events come after work hours.


4. International reach: Production level stays the same wherever you are, and anyone can reach you.


5. Shorter time to market: A physical event takes 8 to 12 months to plan. Virtual events have a much shorter timeline.


6. Measurable results: A virtual event gives you precise measurements that lead to real strategic actions.

As an example, Hicks explained how BlackBerry moved from a city-to-city roadshow, with its logistical costs, to a more virtual roadshow. For the physical roadshow the cost per attendee was $250. But for the virtual roadshow that cost is just $45 per attendee. They frequently get 21,000 attendees across four virtual events and surpass lead geneation goals by 30 percent.

Tips on how to produce a virtual event

Hicks provides the following advice:

1. Segment by tracks, just like you would in a physical show. It gives virtual attendees the sense that there are sessions for them.


2. Use a very detailed registration process. If your sessions are informative, people will be willing to give far more information than you think.


3. At first focus on the stability of the platform.


4. Schedule a high-value keynote speaker, and promote that person in all of your materials.


5. Invite your partners to participate.


6. Schedule at least 90 days for planning.


7. Focus your content on the heavy users

A blended approach

Wiesner, for his part, recommended that companies blend physical events with virtual events. He also noted that in virtual events you need to touch customers for a longer time and in a more interactive fashion.

He further noted that sales teams want one thing: qualified leads. Virtual events can deliver, said Wiesner.

Content is king at virtual events

All panelists stressed that for a virtual event to succeed, you need to create content that customers care about. But be aware that people's attention spans are shorter in the virtual world. So content needs to be shorter and crisper.

Other lessons for virtual events

1. If done right, you will get higher quality attendees to virtual shows.


2. Prerecord sessions, but make subject matter experts available for questions.


3. Watch your registrations. If you see more registrations than you planned for, add resources so you can handle the overflow.

To close the session Yannick announced that the CMO Club has partnered with CGS to do a virtual CMO Summit. Details coming soon so watch the CMO Club website.

What are the challenges CMOs are wrestling with?

Peter Krainik, founder of The CMO Club, kicked off the 2009 CMO Thought Leadership Summit in San Francisco today. Krainik asked the group of 100+ to introduce themselves, their company, and one question they'd like to get answered at the summit.

Here are some of those questions:

• What is the real story about the economy for 2010? Are CMOs optimistic for the new year?
• How can my company refresh it's brand and build excitement?
• What opportunities can be found at the intersection between social media and customer relationship management?
• Social marketing: Can it be monetized or is it just a fad?
• Social media is the big trend these days, but what more traditional techniques still work?
• How can we build a house of brands with a limited budget?
• How can we turn a product into a lifestyle brand?
• How do we engage clients from a B2B perspective?
• How do we expect to get a huge bump in social media ROI?
• How do we market to different generations?
• What are different brands doing in social media? What's working and what's not?
• Rational marketing toward emotional marketing: What's the situation?
• Changing team dynamics: Ways to change culture on the people side.
• Get ideas on how to improve consumer marketing, PR, TV, and traditional media.
• How do we deliver ROI of the social space? That's what clients keep demanding.
• Moving to surrendering our marketing programs to the general public.
• Looking for better ways to measure offline marketing like we do with online.
• Looking for ideas and strategies for how to scale and grow a company.
• How do you keep your brand alive and exciting for your own people in this tough economic environment?
• How do we engage customers via social median in the B2B space?
• How do you take regional brands and bring them national?
• How do we generate demand and increase conversions?
• What works for linking marketing tightly with the sales side of the business?
• How do you engage and motivate employees to be brand champions?
• How can the music industry help in the social media space?
• How do you reach senior level executives?
• What are good forward looking tools for CMOs to use and understand?
• How do you scale and transition a team from what I have to what I need?
• Trying to gauge the mood. Is there optimism or pessimism for 2010?
• Sales enablement: How do we train and support the sales team for a growing sales package?
• How do we use storytelling for branding?

80 CMOs In SF Today for The CMO CLUB Thought Leadership Summit - Updates from The Summit Today and Tomorrow

Over 80 CMOs are in SF today for The CMO CLUB Thought Leadership Summit, two days of sharing ideas, building networks of peers, and helping each other be better CMOs. For those that can’t make the summit we will be providing updates, recaps and copies of CMO presentations from the summit starting late morning today, Nov. 12th (for paid members in the club). Check out all the session recaps and updates from the summit on the club site at www.thecmoclub.blogspot.com

Erin Hintz CMO and the Team from Symantec Receives Forrester 2009 Groundswell Award from Josh Bernoff at CMO CLUB Summit Opening Reception

60 CMOs were on hand last night at the opening reception for our Thought Leadership Summit in SF. Congrats to Erin Hintz, CMO at Symantec and her team for winning the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award for execellence in engaging customers through social media. Also congrats to the team at Zuberance for their help in providing the "Word of Mouth" platform and expertise for Symantec.

Weekly CMO CLUB Poll Results: As CMO what percentage of your compensation is tied to specific revenue delivery?

108 CMOs responded
35.2% - Over 25 percent
35.2% - 11-25 percent
18.5% - 0 percent
11.1% - 1-10 percent

A few Quotes from CMOs in the club who responded:
“Single biggest change to my comp package the last 2 years is the impact on my ability to deliver revenue in my paycheck.”

“We actually identified some key new businesses in 2009 and a good piece of my compensations is tied to the revenue success of these new ventures”.

“I found that one of the single biggest contributors to improved credibility for me with peers and my CEO is my volunteering to take on revenue targets for my compensation. Every CMO should do this tomorrow”.

“I have a blended compensation plan when it comes to revenue. A small piece tied to total company revenue and profitability and a larger piece tied to Specific new product launches that marketing is supporting in a big way”.

Oscar Winning Producer of Titanic, Jon Landau Agrees to Product 30 Second Video Ad for one CMO attending CMO CLUB Summit in SF Nov 12th

We have an absolutely unique opportunity for attendees of the CMO Club summit in San Francisco. Jon Landau, the Oscar winning producer of Titanic has offered to produce, with Mofilm, a new 30” video advertisement for one lucky attendee at no cost! All you have to do is fill out the attached 1/2 page brief before 6 pm est on November 11th and e-mail to me at pete.krainik@thecmoclub.com or hand deliver at the CMO Club summit opening reception on November 11th at 6 pm at The Marriott, Union Square, 480 Sutter Street in SF.

Jon Landau and Mofilm will select one brief for production that would be delivered to the brand by the end of January. The selected brand will be announced by Jon himself at the dinner.

It should be noted that Jon has never produced an ad before so this production should have enormous commercial and historical value!

CMO CLUB Summit Attendee Landau Ad with Mofilm brief

The CMO CLUB Weekly Poll Question: As CMO what new Marketing Technologies are you most interested in for your business?

90 CMOs responded
35.6% - Integrated Mkting Operations/Planning
22.2% - Search Optimization
15.6% - User Generated Content Platforms
13.2% - Social Community Platforms
6.7% - Online Advertising Optimization
6.7% - Mobile Applications

Better decision making, freeing up time to focus on customers, UGC platforms for listening vs. selling, and social network platform's ease of use were some of the key reasons behing CMOs priorities around new marketing technologies.

A few Quotes from CMOs in the club who responded:

“I have to do more with less and need planning, campaign development, and execution tools that link and help me make the best decisions. I am interested in tools that help with my decision making.”

“Integrated Marketing tools are a big piece of my strategy for effective global marketing management. Every hour spent messing with marketing operations work arounds is one less hour focused on our customers and customer engagement.”

“UGC platforms are important to us as we continue to think thru our engagement plans with our customers. Not just for selling but for listening.”

“As we look at Social networking platforms, it’s not about flash and bells and whistles, it’s all about ease of use and ease of sharing content across stakeholders. We are looking at platforms that do the best job of this.”