Market-ing: Make it personal

We live in a time where communicating to broad audience alone one way has limited reach and stickiness. To make a message sticky and gain viral spread – you want to communicate through your audience. You want to foster a community of influencers who can help spread your message and communicate for you.

Ask someone who is running a business and they will more likely suggest that bigger risk they run is not getting adequate market recognition making sales cycle harder for them. Putting businesses in a position to not able to compete effectively in the market place. Unless you are doing some ground breaking invention – not many will cite they run technology/product risk as the primary reason to go out of business. Market risk usually trump over the product risk. Largely products adopts and evolves to follow customer/technology life cycle. At least until it meets a disruptive trend.

Several well known Marketing gurus have suggested how to effectively target marketing message to create the viral adoption taking “Marketing” from job function perspective to “market-ing ideas that spread” broadly. e.g. Seth Godin…around his thought process “Ideas that spread – wins” or Tribal management. or Forrester on its analysis around how to create Groundswell. Web is littered with such case studies and adoption stories – some more successful than others.

It is one of the reason - more businesses from the get go are increasingly embracing social media and encourage employees to rather share ideas broadly. Folks will invest from the start building community of developers/influencer/promoters needed to give business a market edge. Taking the discussion beyond Marketing department to engage every one involved in the endeavor to help promote your business; ideas; product; etc.

At the end of the day ask yourself – who best positioned to spread what you do best and all the creative ideas about your business than your own employees. So start the journey with your team and go get your ideas out…

How you feed your Ecosystem

All of us are potential teachers and learners – in a collaborative environment we are both.

Ecosystem has been a topic I have covered off and on here both in the context of enterprise communities as well as social communities. Social communities continue to grow with various popular examples popping up everyday ala Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Likewise, Enterprise Communities landscape continue to change and grow as well enabling collaborative and self learning Ecosystems. Few examples in the Higher Education space includes Sakai, Kuali and uPortal groups. In the Enterprise product space a good example is Act! from Sage and others that continue to make inroads. The paradigm shift include:-

	Old Paradigm	New Paradigm
Participants	Business Partners	Various (Partners, Customers, ISVs, Developers, System Integrators, VARs, etc.)
Purpose	Means to an end (Sales, Service and Support)	Way of life (Innovation, More Product, Reach and Scope, etc.)
Relationship	Business, Formal	Trusted, Collaborative
Communication	Mostly one way	Dialogue
Knowledge Sharing	Training	Peer Learning beside necessary Training
Problem solving	Mostly individual groups; limited sharing	Work with peers to solve the problem; and share learning with the world to follow suit
Process	Provide necessary steps to deal with the fiefdoms	Transparency
Technology	Phone, Email, Fax	Wiki, Blog, Forum, Bulletin Board, Youtube, etc. beside conventional means
Use of Web	Limited	Social. Can one live without it now?
World view	World is round	World is flat

For a software product company, regardless of the camp it lives - closed/traditional source software or open source software – the need to foster and harness collaborative, learning ecosystem help achieve sustainable growth as well as nurture innovation avenues.