Some Pogue-o-licious press coverage...

Figure 1: My hero (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/)

We just launched Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 yesterday with much fanfare. We also received some of the most favorable press coverage I have ever seen from David Pogue, the technology reporter for the New York Times. Along with a pretty nice review of Dragon, David posted the following video: http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=6c81e0a8b47c3f73abee2664971a8ec2ab306c8d

The video is nothing short of amazing. How do we pull off such a feat? I'd love to say it had something to do with my executive leadership. In fact, there were two key elements:

1) A fantastic product. Dragon really is a fantastic product. Mr. Pogue also happens to be a very satisfied, long-term user of Dragon. (By the way, so am I. In fact, I'm using Dragon to dictate this blog entry right now).

2) Great relationships. In this case, our PR manager, Erica Hill has developed a great relationship with David over the years. It's so great, that she is practically a costar in the video.

When I have more time, I'll write about how we almost screwed up this entire thing. ;-)

Stupid Keyboard Tricks

It's been way too long since I posted anything to my blog - I've been buried behind a big product launch. Speaking of that launch, we did some fun videos to promote the product and I just posted the first one as a teaser to our launch.

Great work by our internal design team (props to the voice talent-keyboard wranglers-writers-editors Jake Coonradt and Nick Priest).

Oscar (TM) Time is A Great Reminder for Marketers: Sometimes Award Winning Creative Doesn't Mean the Best Results

As a parent of three young children, I don't get out to see movies that often. This is mainly because it costs $20 for two movie tickets and $15 per hour for a babysitter (if I can actually find one), which means that a night out at the movies is about $75 without snacks and dinner (it is at least $200 if I add those items back in). Based on this grim reality, I don't get to see too many recently released movies (unless I see them on a plane).

When I read the news stories this morning about the Academy Award winning movies, I realized that not only didn't I see any of these movies, but I haven't even heard of some of these movies. (OK, I am exaggerating here - I did see Michael Clayton in the theatre with my wife - and I do think that woman did a nice job as the evil, but conflicted, corporate counsel).

That reminded me about the feeling that I have whenever I hear an ad agency tell me about their "award winning creative". While awards are nice, results are better. We often forget that awards are awarded by snooty creative types, not by the target audience for your campaign. A great example of this is the Scary Movie series. These movies will never win any awards, but they make money. They make money because they are cheap to produce and they speak to their target audience - men who love low brow, slapstick, crude humor, movies featuring actresses like Carmen Electra. (As far as I can tell, that's about 94% of all men between the age of 10 and 80).

How does this translate into a marketing discussion? The point is that if you focus on your target audience and business results, then you will apply the right level of creative to get the job done. A simple example is emails to a mobile professional audience. Should you invest in a really slick email template with lots of interactivity? Not to the Blackberry-toting audience - instead, you should focus on simple, tight, text-based email messages that don't cause a blister on your thumb while you try to read them.

OK, so the creative types will remind me that the email I just described is great creative - but that wasn't really the point of this post. The point is that awards are great for decorating your mantle-piece, but I'll take boring results all day long.

The CMO Talent Shortage: How Will You Find Your Next Marketing Executive?

It's amazing to me how many searches are going on right now for senior marketing executives in technology companies. There seems to be a never ending flow of requests from executive search consultants, venture partners and senior executives -- all looking for that elusive "perfect" top marketing executive.

It occurred to me recently that most of the searches rely on fishing within the same gene pool versus building the next great executive. Everyone seems to want that marketing executive with a strong track record of success, a broad range of experience across technology sectors and marketing disciplines and an up-to-date view of the ever-changing field of technology marketing.

Where do you find these mythical beasts? I think they are found in one of the following areas:

• The CEO's Office: Many of these "perfect" candidates have parlayed their success into the next step in the career ladder. For the top marketing executive, the next logical step for those in the cream of the crop is the chairman's office.
• The Golf Course: The ultimate proof of credentials for the top marketing executive is that they don't need their job anymore.
• The Funny Farm: I'm not sure how many of these marketing execs are actually institutionalized -- but I'm willing to bet that some of them who've been at this game for a long time might be better off in a place where they can "get some rest".

You may have also noticed the rapid growth in the number of CMO networking groups over the last year or two. Groups including The CMO Council, The CMO Club, Any Excuse..., and many others have been formed (among other things) to respond to the growing need for finding the right marketing leader for growing companies.

While many of these groups may be a great source of marketing talent, we really need to start looking at that next level of talent in the organization. Ironically, many of the CMO organizations discourage participation from "Junior" marketing professionals including some of the most likely next CMOs who are currently serving as directors or vice presidents of demand generation, product marketing, product management or other similar roles.

When I started thinking about this particular blog, I decided that putting the term "CMO" in the title of the blog was a good idea to signal the kind of senior audience that I was attracting. No offense if you're "one of those", but the real people I want to have a dialogue with about these topics are those people were bringing new ideas to the table -- and they are most likely not bringing them from the corner office.

Come on in -- everyone's welcome.

Bad PR? Social Media to the Rescue!

OK, this is turning into a really bad trend. Just a couple posts ago, I wrote about a technique I used for a marketing screw-up. Now, just a couple months later, I have the opportunity to tell you about another great way to cover up my most recent flash of incompetence.

We had a great opportunity to meet with the Boston Globe's Scott Kirsner. Scott writes a very popular column on innovation in the business section of the Globe. I met with Scott and planned to show him a number of cool demos before we had him spend a few minutes with our CEO.

As usual, I was pretty careful about picking the demos. I showed him some of our latest voice search technology for mobile phones (always a cool demo) and then I brought out the demo that always impresses - the TomTom 920. This TomTom device is a fantastic product - I use this device myself because I love the interface. My company provides the technology that allows you to enter the address with your voice instead of using the touch-screen.

As you might expect, I hand-picked the addresses that I planned to use in the demo from a short list of addresses that I use all the time. It worked (as predicted) very well. But when Scott asked me to enter in a different address, I was confident that it wouldn't be a problem because it never is. Scott asked me to enter the address for the Boston Globe - and I encountered a problem.

You can see from the video below what happened (Ugh. I hate to even show this to you - it isn't pretty...)



Pretty bad demo, eh? It also really colored Scott's view of the state of the market - so I needed to do some damage control. To try to get out in front of it, I figured out what happened and shot the following video, put it up on YouTube and sent the link to Scott.

You will see that there was an issue with the address in the attached video (you should note that I was careful not to say "see, it isn't our fault!" because ultimately the user of the device might encounter the same problem).



So how did it work? Scott was really great about it. In fact, he posted my response video on his own personal blog to explain what happened. It also started a great dialog with Scott that we hope to continue over the coming months.

I seem to be developing a theme here with my mistakes: acknowledge them right away in a creative way, and it will go a long way with your audience.

I'm now collecting demo horror stories, so please feel free to share your own.

PR Stunt + YouTube = Media Coverage

During our last 3 user conferences, we have been hosting a "media event" as part of the conference - and we do it without any media present. Instead of relying on reporters to come to our user conference, we create a video of the event and put it on YouTube. As soon as the conference is complete, we start pitching the story to the media and use the YouTube video as pitch material.

The first event that we ran was in October of 2006 at our user conference in Orlando. We created an event we called "The Amazing Race" where we pitted our speech recognition technology for mobile phones against the world champion in text messaging. I blogged about our success at the time, but assumed it was a one hit wonder. While we haven't quite matched the viral success of the first event, all three of our events have been quite successful.

The second event was held at our European conference in Cannes, France in April of 2007. This time, we decided to take on distracted driving and we held two events - one texting contest and a race against a well known - but retired - race car driver.

We're now a month after our third attempt and I think I can officially call it a success. While it didn't have the viral success that the first race did, it accomplished our mission: getting media coverage for our company. Our first video has been viewed over 123,000 times on YouTube - compared to the 3,400 views from our latest event.

This third race was designed to address the growing concern about distracted driving - so we created a side-by-side driving experience on our stage where we had our speech technology race against members of our conference audience who competed for a chance to race during the week. The concept went over very well with our audience and it made for a good video experience. Most importantly, it supported the key media theme that we were trying to leverage. We've generated a reasonable amount of print and online coverage from the event, but we are most excited about the broadcast coverage that we were able to score. You can see from this clip from the Boston ABC affiliate and this clip from the Washington DC CBS affiliate that we were able to score some great coverage. These clips were played many times during their first week on the air and were teased relentlessly prior to their airing.

We have learned some important tidbits about making these efforts successful, including:

• Find a relevant theme. Our first year hit on the popularity of texting and speed-texting contests and our second year hit on distracted driving. We wouldn't have achieved anywhere near the success if we didn't organize the event around a theme of interest.
• Leveage YouTube. YouTube is a great vehicle to package a media pitch - especially for visual concepts. It's also really fast to get the material to the reporter so they can get excited quickly.
• Be quick about it. We created an edited video of the event within 24 hours of the actual event. We found that some reporters didn't think it was news if the event was too far in the past.
• Make it visually interesting. Especially if you are interested in broadcast - it's important to make sure that you have enough eye candy to attract your audience.
• Go with the flow. We found that while our story was a great hook, we needed to adapt our pitch to the media outlet. Sometimes it was just enough to get a discussion and the actual story was not directly connected to our event.
• Categorize correctly in YouTube. We have tried a few different approaches to categorizing the videos on YouTube - and we got varied success. Our latest one is in the Automotive Channel vs. the technology channel - so it gets less viewers. We did get some votes as most popular for a while - but that was like being a big fish in a small pond.

Bottom line? This approach works and we are already thinking about the Amazing Race IV.

What to Do When You Hire a Bad Speaker for a Conference

I've attended conferences with bad speakers, but this last week was the first time I actually ran a conference with a bad speaker. Ugh, it was awful. I'm sure this guy is capable, he has been speaking at conferences for many years. But this particular performance was a train wreck. (Note: I'm not going to tell you his name - I don't think adds anything to this posting and he may do just fine for others).

The theme of our conference was "What's Next" - so we decided to hire a technology futurist for the opening keynote just after our CEO's opening address. I was really excited for this talk - I thought it was a great idea to set the theme for the conference - and the speaker's demo clips seemed good (even though they were short). His references also checked out - including some of our partners who had used him in years past.

Then he started. A couple minutes in, I realized he was saying a lot of words - really fast - but they didn't mean anything. I looked (tentatively) over to my CEO to see what he was doing - expecting to see his glare staring back at me. He looked a little puzzled - and then quickly turned to his Blackberry.

The speech continued and it got worse. The "futurist" used slides that looked like they were developed in the 1980's. His examples included some far-out stuff, but also included things that people in the audience actually offered today! I though to myself, "this guy seems more like a pasturist than a futurist". Then I thought, "why don't they call historians pasturists?" Then I looked back up - he was still rambling on and people were beginning to shift in their seats.

I looked toward the back of the room. We started with 1,000 people in the audience, and I think we were down to about 800 within 15 minutes of the beginning of the speech.

It would get worse before it ended. He showed a video clip (without much explanation) that was bordering on pornographic. I was getting really uncomfortable. Finally, mercifully, it ended. the CEO went up and briefly thanked him. A couple people stayed to ask him questions (far fewer than I had ever seen for a keynote like that) - but I just had to leave. The buzz outside the room was awful. The speech seemed to suck the energy from the conference.

So what to do? I found my CEO right away and apologized. He took it pretty well - he gave me one of those "stuff happens..." answer. I realized that I had to do something. I had to acknowledge this travesty to the audience.

I quickly developed a Letterman-style Top Ten list called "The Top Ten Signs You Hired the Wrong Futurist". I decided that I needed to turn some lemons into lemonade.

Here's the list I developed:

The Top Ten Signs You Hired the Wrong Futurist

10. He insists on being paid in advance
9. He brings his presentation on a slide carousel
8. His technical requirements include “access to the Internets”
7. Three words: pornographic Japanese commercials
6. His references: Wang, Enron and Pets.com
5. He is represented by “Al’s Discount Speaker’s Bureau and Burrito Shack”
4. His big prediction: someday, you will be able to access the Internets on your mobile phone
3. He presents with a crystal ball and maharajah hat
2. His slides are dated 1974
1. He predicted that Cleveland would win the ALCS (note: the Red Sox just won the ALCS the night before)

I wasn't sure how the audience would react, but they loved it. After the session, I was approached by lots of people thanking me for acknowledging the issue. They were really cool with it.

What did I learn from this experience?

First, never hire someone like that unless you have seen them personally. For the conference the year before, we hired a fantastic speaker named Jeffrey Rayport. He spoke about the value of developing a strong customer experience. I also saw him present live a couple times before, so I knew exactly what to expect.

Second, if you do have a problem like that - acknowledge it immediately. The audience really appreciates it.

By the way, we had another external speaker the week before at our sales kickoff - and he was great too. His name is Jamie Clark. He is a Canadian Everest explorer. He was one of the best speakers of that ilk that I have ever seen. He was funny, entertaining and amazingly likable. In fact, he joined us that evening at the bar and hung out with the sales reps.

Cool Viral Marketing Campaign Leveraging a Celebrity Spokesperson

This is a great example of one of the most overlooked principles in marketing: "if it works, do it again."

A former colleague of mine, Jeff Weiner, had some great success in the past with a viral marketing campaign that he did for LiveVault (since acquired by Iron Mountain). Jeff created a campaign for LiveVault called "The Institute of Backup Trauma" starring John Cleese. The campaign was really successful because of its viral nature. It took off for a bunch of reasons, including:

1) It was funny
2) It was designed to be passed along
3) It featured a much-admired celebrity

and perhaps most important...

4) It spoke to the audience.

The whole schtick was about a kind of rehab center for IT professionals who didn't have a good backup solution. It spoke to a clear and acute pain of the audience.

So what did Jeff do to follow up? He leveraged his success from the past and did another campaign that featured John Cleese. This time, he created "John Cleese's Friendly Advice Machine" for Iron Mountain (the parent of LiveVault). This "machine" dispenses advice from Mr. Cleese on subjects like "What is Rule 26?" (which means something to an IT security and storage crowd) and "Can I visit the Iron Mountain?" (The answer is No).

I don't know if this campaign will be as successful, but it looks like it has all the ingredients.

If you want to reach Jeff, you visit his website. When you are there, you will realize that Jeff spends most of his time with his customers, not his website ;-)

The Only Product You Will Ever Need to Produce Beautiful, Insightful Marketing Dashboards And Answer Every CEO Question About Marketing Performance

I have found the solution to all my marketing dashboard woes.

You know the drill, the CEO would like to know the ROI of every campaign, from AdWords to print advertising. He also needs to know which prospects are most likely to close as they enter the pipeline, the total cost to acquire a customer by segment, the total lifetime value of a customer and on and on...

The good news is that your magic CRM system just spits that stuff out with the push of a button - right?

So what's my solution? It's what I call the Mark-O-Matic 5000. OK, so it's actually a guy named Mark (I won't tell you his last name because I don't want any of you to try to hire him...) Mark is part of the marketing team and a guy who knows his way around all of our systems - and is adept at using Excel.

The point is that no matter what the systems are, you still need to use a lot of human intervention to get this stuff to work.

As an example, I've attached a simplified diagram of our marketing systems architecture. We use some great tools, including Salesforce.com and Eloqua to manage campaigns across multiple channels - but we still need Mark to help pull it all together in the end. Mark (and some contractor help) does everything from cleaning data, appending data from other sources, creating report views that don't exist within our current tools, etc.

While the tools of the tech marketing trade have improved a great deal, I'm still unwilling to live without my Mark-O-Matic 5000.

CMO Clubbing

After writing the title of this post, it sounds like what a CEO does when the CMO doesn't meet his high expectations. In fact, the title refers to a group of CMO's organized by a guy named Pete Krainik. Pete started an organization called the CMO Club in 2006 to get CMO's together in New York to talk about issues that keep CMO's up at night.

Pete's organization has grown to more than 300 marketing executives around the country who regularly meet in major cities to discuss topics of interest to CMO's.

This evening, The CMO Club met at a local restaurant in the Boston area to discuss marketing issues related to social media. The discussion was started with a nice presentation from Jim Nail, CMO of Cymphony. Cymphony is in the business of analytics for social media, so they have a vested interest in discussing the topic. Jim was a former Forrester analyst, so he does a good job presenting material objectively.

Jim's main message was that social media and influence networks have a significant impact on consumers. He cited some interesting statistics from Jupiter Research about the number of shoppers who were influenced by product reviews. He also cited some research from Compete that one of the attendees questioned as a source (tough crowd!)

Jim also gave us all an interesting reminder about how long social media has been around - since the dark ages of the mid 1990's with user groups on Prodigy (and much earlier than that if you include some of the pre-WWW user groups).

Jim also made some practical recommendations about leveraging social media including developing a list of bloggers who are important influencers in your space.

There was a good discussion among the group about who should be responsible for this kind of media within an organization. Adam Berrey from Brightcove talked about how CEO's can take a personal role in blogs - but it was noted (by me) that he has somewhat of a celebrity CEO in the Web developer community.

Jim also put together a nice set of resources for blogs that looked pretty interesting. Ketan Patel from GoldBamboo mentioned a cool AdWord tool called HitTail that he used to lift the performance of his keywords by 30%

This was a very useful forum. I have seen significant traction recently in the CMO community when it comes to networking. I always learn from groups like this when I get together with them - and when I do, I will try to post what I learned right here!