The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Minty-Fresh™.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,700 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there was 1 new post, growing the total archive of this blog to 51 posts.

The busiest day of the year was March 16th with 26 views. The most popular post that day was Marketing 2.0.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, bigextracash.com, brandwizard.com, olafmolenaar.com, and marketinggovernance.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for performance dashboard examples, mrm magic quadrant, media planning presentation, gartner mrm magic quadrant, and gartner magic quadrant mrm.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Marketing 2.0 March 2009
1 comment

Good Example of Performance Dashboard August 2009

Journey 2003 to 2009: MRM Magic Quadrant February 2009
1 comment

Good presentation on Social Media Planning August 2009

New Challenges for MOM/MRM/EMM Vendors June 2009
3 comments

http://onlineemailmarketingtool.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/best-practices-for-email-deliverability/

Couple of highlights from their website

1. Orbis completed significant implementations with Telefonica O2 in the UK and Telstra in Australia. Both of these projects were very large in user numbers and complexity, involving rapid deployments and integrations with other key business systems.
2. Royal Dutch Shell expanded its Orbis deployment in Retail Marketing, adding a Marketing Financials Management solution across 50 countries, enabling real-time management and visibility across all activities related to its global retail marketing spend.

For More Read

http://www.orbisglobal.com/Content_Common/ns-OrbisRevealsGlobalSuccessFY08/09.seo

http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/dashboard

Surprisingly this is not link to any Marketing or Campaign Dashboard tool but link to US Government spending dashboard.  Marketing Automation vendors can really take example from this. Great to have such tools for Marketers which will help them check out various analytical data with such ease.

1. How Media Planning have changed over the period?
2. How ineffective mechanism are being used by marketers to solve new challenges?

As the post correctly highlight that focus today is more on efficient campaign execution using narrow means of media channel instead of broadcasting channel such TV, Radio, Newspaper etcetra. Today marketers are spending more on channels which targets to the customer directly in an individual manner then on mass manner.

But the post highlight the most important aspect that even though the challenges surfaced in the twenty first century for marketers are far from conventional but the approach taken by the marketers remind of Nineteenth century Industrial revolution. The following are the issue

1. Inefficient Marketing process or no process.
2. Ignorance towards technology.

The solution to above mentioned issue is MOM/MRM. MOM not only introduces efficient and effective process but also ways to measure the effectiveness of the process. It provides a framework/infrastructure to set up efficient processes to streamline various marketing activities.

“As MRM or EMM becomes more comprehensive and the feature set becomes more complex, there is increasing pressure from the customers to make it easy to use. Its a huge challenge for vendors to provide this comprehensive, complex feature in an easy to use manner.“

This is a sign of maturity within the MRM/EMM segment.  Its been more than decade when this domain came into existense and as the time passed away the domain as a whole have become more mature and moving towards commoditization. Now the focus is not merely on the functionality but also on other aspects of functionality which is culmination of technology and other factors.

Today MRM/EMM solution are expected to

1. Scalable for SaaS model.
2. Intuitive to use.
3. Comprehensive in Functionality.
4. Inter Operable with any Enterprise Systems.

Apart from these challenges the major challenges the vendors are facing is increased pressure from IT department of the customer who are adding different dimension to the entire deployment or solution. Some of the challenges are

1. Integration with existing Identity management.
2. In house deployment for customer.
3. Strict SLA requirements.

Organisation are looking MRM/EMM more as comprehensive solution to provide insight not only into their marketing resource but also resource related to marketing which has now brought things such as procurement management, agency governance and others into the bigger picture of MRM/EMM. The challenge lies not to implement these as part of the solution but how to leverage the existing resources for such additional areas for a deloyment.

One of the areas where I found the MRM/EMM segment to be weak is reluctance of vendors to come at a platform to make standards. There should be more co-operation among the vendors to bring more value to segment keeping aside their corporate rivalry. Currently the segment is define more by the analyst then by the vendors who are implementing the solution. Unless the vendors come together on a common platform it will be hard to find the change in wind.

One of the other areas that need some attention from the vendors is investment on the research & development for the solution. Thought this year Gartner report does mention some of the vendors investing for the same. But more need to done. Thanks to Frans Riemersma for introducing the first book on the MRM. We need more such effort for commoditization of the entire MRM from being a niche solutions.

It’s now time to move on and start the next generation for Marketing Automation. It’s Marketing 2.0 or Marketing 2G or let me use my creativity to depict it as

Last decade have defined the basic framework for marketing automation. The framework is rock solid and reached a level of maturity that now we can build the next generation to enhance & improve overall marketing and bring a paradigm shift in the way Marketers work now.

The key to next generation of marketing will be how marketers get adapted to the new rules of technology and leverage these as new channels. The alchemy will also be how marketers become more cost effective and instead of cost center to an organization become more as a business unit with focused and more result oriented approach.

Days are gone about spending lavishly and not getting accounted for that, in this age where economic meltdown happens more frequently then the President taking re-oath, it is those marketers who adapts to the new rule will be the SlumDog Millionaire and sing Jai Ho (Oscar winner).

Let me take one of the new things that have hit the world in recent past. One of thing that has happen due to Web 2.0 is more options for media channels have surfaced for marketers. And one of those medium is the increase of VIDEO as a prominent media channel.

Increase popularity of YouTube was the beginning. In one of the recent survey done by online magazine most of marketers would like to increase investment in video as a channel. Let me just list down how video can be leveraged by marketers

a.       Product Launch Video. Campaign such as Mr. Fong by IBM recently.

b.      Email campaigns using video email instead of conventional text based mail.

c.       Blogs using Video or Vlogs.

d.      Promotion of product launches on social media networking such as YouTube using video.

e.      Online Video Magazines or VZines.

Already many of the visionaries in the market have already started adapting to this new mode of media channel. One of the problem that marketers may face is

a.       Whether current technologies such MRM/MOM/EMM/COM support such infrastructure or planning to support.

b.      Define the methodology to measure the effectiveness of new media.

c.       Whether the core infrastructure apart from North America supports high bandwidth to reach out beyond the continent?

Though at present Video is the major channel that I see which will play major role in next couple of years apart from the mobile. The early adopters will initially may struggle to justify the expense but on a longer period it will be worth investment.