Running one of our campaigns is difficult for left brain folks used to doing everything by the numbers. The kind of marketing campaigning we practice is full of nuances, subtleties, rapid changes and demands a form of agility not found in most sales and marketing organizations. Which is why we developed our attack engine and why command and control becomes paramount so that the collective will is realized during highly chaotic periods.
One of the most important components of our attack engine is the calibration – typically a weekly eye-balls to eye-balls event where campaign team members spend a few hours evaluating campaign progress. During this meeting, many artful, subjective decisions are made. Decisions that only a human can make. Decisions that cannot be anticipated let alone automated.
Don’t assume these are the words of a technology luddite. They’re not. Where I’m heading here is the notion of how much technology is enough technology. Many of the marketing automation tools created over the past several years are too generic and lack basic features. Many of the enterprise wide end-to-end technology initiatives (wiring the front office to the back office) are too specific and difficult to change.
Technology is a powerful weapon in the battle for market share. It also creates significant vulnerabilities. Knowing how to utilize the right amount of technology is an art. And despite the best efforts of enterprise folks like SAP and Oracle and CRM vendors like Salesforce.com few are close to understand the righteous mix between technology and methodology. Salesforce.com with it’s recent introduction of AppExchange is probably the closest. Which brings me back to our weekly calibrations and a fascinating article in Wired Magazine.
We use a very basic set of technology tools to command and control a campaign including Excel spreadsheets for data analysis, PowerPoint for presentations, MS word for word processing, contact managers for target lists, intranet web sites for data sharing, laptop computers and cell phones for team communication. We keep hard-wired technology to a minimum and utilize only those tools we can pick up quickly, adapt exactly, and discard when we’re done. Also, we make generous use of "old-school" analog tools like butcher paper, black markers, white boards, wall maps, and large "war-rooms" where the team can meet and interact. We have yet to see a collaborative technology solution that comes close to delivering this functionality.
Far too many enterprises try to automate calibrations. They spend millions of dollars on expensive technology trying to automate data gathering and decision making processes, and with this automation, end up with dysfunctional systems that hobble enterprise competitiveness. My point is that a weekly calibration properly staged and conducted can save an enterprise $2 million of useless technology and greatly enhance their competitiveness. Which finally brings me to Wired Magazine’s article titled Island Wisdom.
The subject of the article is Charles Armstrong who was an
account manager for an internet marketing firm in London. Seems he observed that communication was dysfunctional in his firm and morale terrible. He decided to see if he could do better:
So in 1999 he set out to conduct an ethnographic study of how people
naturally communicate and organize when shorn of externalities like
e-mail and PowerPoint.
His quest took him to the tiny island of St.
Agnes, the smallest of the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles off the coast of
Britain. He lived there for a year, studying how the 80-or-so island
villagers interacted and functioned.Not surprisingly, life on the island contrasted powerfully with the
corporate culture of London business. "Looking at how people schedule
tasks and priorities, in most conventional organizations people make a
to-do list, then they will do the highest-priority things first," he
says. "On St. Agnes, somebody wakes up, has breakfast, walks out the
door and looks up at the sky…. If it looks like the right kind of
wind and tide to catch a kind of fish they like, they might just do
that first."
You should read the article. It’s available here. Mr. Armstrong has now applied his experience to a collaborative platform called Trampoline. I haven’t looked at it – but will be spending time to see if it gets closer to delivering the holy grail.
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