I received this as a comment on one of my posts:
“Although every enterprise is definitely unique, they all share the common challenge of keeping up-to-date with the ever-increasing speed of business. Today, most companies must operate on tight budgets, improved efficiencies, and an ever-changing marketplace. An enterprise’s ability to compete is directly linked to its ability to respond. With the above in mind, Operational Intelligence is a new type of real-time, dynamic business analytics, delivering visibility and insight into business operations. Using an OI solution, enterprise’s can visualize the environment, analyze the information, and act in real-time on operational data originating from a wide variety of information sources.” [link to vendor]
I marked it as spam because it was a generic comment with no reference to the post, and was just trying to get another link to the vendor site that might raise up the list of Google searches (marking it as spam will have had the opposite effect).
But beyond that, it just annoyed me. In theory there’s nothing wrong with it – this is the sort of material that product marketing people around the world churn out on a daily basis.
But it just comes across as “marketing mush”. It’s not original. It’s not insightful. It’s not differentiating.
In a social media world, it’s very cheap to share your thoughts with the market – and so there’s a deluge of information available. The result is that the bar has risen on what people pay attention to.
Content that stands out will be copied and passed on to others. Marketing mush will vanish without a trace.
Marketing is NOT about throwing as many good-sounding adjectives at people in the hope that some stick – it’s about saying something INTERESTING.
Comments
5 responses to “Bad BI Marketing”
Hi Timo,
It’s great that you’re weeding out comments where people are blatantly peddling their wares and adding no value for your community.
A minor point though, I don’t think allowing the comment would have helped that vendor’s Google PageRank as the link would be tagged as “nofollow” (see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569) and so it would be ignored by Google’s search algorithm.
I have to say, I was both in agreement and frustrated by your ‘Bad BI Marketing’ post. As an IT marketeer, I may have been guilty of contributing to the ‘same old waffle’ in the past.
It’s very easy to read and digest scenario after scenario about collaboration platforms and BI solutions and how they have revolutionised companies and departments. It’s equally difficult to find real-life success stories that don’t have the vested interest of a large vendor promoting them.
For this reason marketeers have become caught up in a spiral of catch phrases and sound bites (increase business productivity, better business insights, data is a company’s biggest asset, blah blah……….. I could go on). These ditties have come from vendors peddling their wares through their sales channels and have filtered down through traditional marketing activities to below-the-line and social media channels.
It’s a real shame, but your post should be a reminder to us all to be more original with our communications and not to be afraid to be specific and pragmatic with the facts and benefits.
Food for thought – thanks
“Marketing is NOT about throwing as many good-sounding adjectives at people in the hope that some stick – it’s about saying something INTERESTING.”
Completely agree! There’s so much “fluff” thrown in that causes people to just lose interest. The more “good-sounding adjectives” they add, the worse it gets.
And I agree with Pieter too, your reputation is at stake with every Tweet, Facebook Message, LinkedIn Post, etc. that you post.
It’s like Scott Stratten from UnMarketing said
“Marketing is not a task. Marketing is not a department. Marketing is not a job. Marketing happens every time you engage (or not) with your past, present, and potential customers.”
Agree!
A reputation you’ve built on for years, can be teared down in hours through social media. “Bad marketing” like this which is shared through social media will stay and last forever since it is stored on god knows how many servers etc.
An inspiring example of this is the “Michael Dell” story which is described in the book “What would Google do?” by Jeff Jarvis. It has a great example about Dell ignoring online customer feedback and what the impact of social media on this can be. Dell noticed this in time and managed to (re)define a social media strategy with a focus on customer experience, not on mass marketing communication. I can highly recommend this book.
Information should be relevant and personal, copy pasting marketing phrases is not personal and often not relevant.
I share your allergy for this kind of non-information.
I guess I agree with you — and that this therefore isn’t really THAT bad, since it’s destined to disappear without a trace, rather than be a long-stored bad experience… Do marketers live by doctors’ maxim: “first, do no harm”?