If you are a technology vendor or CIO don’t panic.  Chief Marketing Officers still love you.  We continue to think about and are concerned with technology and data.  But I’m starting to spend more time with HR this year.  Yes, I’m concerned with whether or not marketing has the “right people on the bus.”  That’s a challenge that never ends, particularly when the business environment is constantly changing.  What I’m bringing attention to, and becoming more concerned with, is the individuals we don’t have room for on the bus.

The other night I told my wife that I might actually be a growth hacker.  She just looked at me and said, “You spend way too much time online.”

 

Sean Ellis, who is known for helping Dropbox grow in its early days, coined the term "growth hacker" in 2010.  In a blog post, he defined a growth hacker as "a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth."  In April 2012 the idea of growth hacking really took off when a blogger named Andrew Chen wrote a piece called “

Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOMM) today is both online and through face-to-face interaction.  At times we think of WOMM in terms ofmarketing buzz, the interaction of users of a product or service that amplifies the brand and in some cases goes viral.

 

In reality, regular old everyday “buzz” is not as glamorous as we marketers like to imagine.  Recommendations from friends and family don’t often come with viral like excitement, but from a place of more practical experience.

 

This perspective was driven home for me during a lecture with some senior business students during their capstone marketing course.

A trim balding man in khakis with a button down shirt, the CMO looks the part he has played for so many years – the affable, hardworking executive who gets the job done.  It’s the 2015 sales kickoff meeting and he is setting in the front row with the rest of the executive team getting ready to address the troops.  He could still remember a time when these meetings required full business attire, there was no PowerPoint, and there were no smart phones or facilitated hashtagged social conversations with the audience.

Is a man with a truck sexier than a man without a truck?  According to the folks from Chevrolet the answer is yes.  Take 30 seconds towatch the videobelow and listen to their focus group discuss the matter.  So, how much do trucks costs these days?  After all, I might need to haul something!  I also found a survey byInsure.comthat states that women say that attractive men tend to drive black Ford pickup trucks.  While men reported that attractive women drive red BMW sports cars.

I grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, a small town in the rural Midwest. It’s not exactly the place you would expect to find one of the most prolific scoring basketball teams in the nation. The “Grinnell System,” Grinnell College’s run-and-gun offense is considered unorthodox, even chaotic, but it is fun to watch.Grinnell teamshave led all playing levels in scoring for 19 of the past 21 seasons, while ranking first in the country in 3-point shooting for 17 of the past 21 years.  According to Head Coach David Arseneault’s book titled “

In September at the beginning of the season I posted a short article related toNFL teams Follow-to-Follower ratios on Twitter.  In short, NFL teams like most major brands do not follow back their fans or customers:

As you can see, the average NFL team was following back just 0.46% of their fans in September.  That ratio now stands at 0.40% which means the average follow back strategy didn't change much over the season.  Now that the Super Bowl is over I've taken the time to update these statistics to see how the league performed in other areas.

I’m where I am today because of the 1980’s oil crash.  If not for the oil crash I may not have gone on to get my MBA.  If not for the crash I probably would not have ventured into the technology industry, first with NCR Corporation and then other organizations.  For that matter I may not have moved to Ohio.

 

I was from Iowa, in the heart of the corn patch.  But after completing my BBA in 1981 from Abilene Christian University I could see that the West Texas oil patch was booming.

Are the targeted executives you are trying to get the attention of using social media to shop, or are they really looking for prospects themselves?  Perhaps both, with some education and networking mixed in; I don’t have any market research to state a firm conclusion.  However; I do believe that most executives are tuned-into station WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) just like the rest of us, and they are seeking to promote their company and causes too.  That’s why I find it interesting that so many meeting requests contain the following leading sentences:  

It was a lively face-to-face business networking event.  As you might guess, social media was a hot topic.  Of course business cards were exchanged as many of the attendees represented agencies that promise to be able to bring social magic to a brand.  But what I found most interesting happened later, when I visited several of their corporate social media pages.  What became clear was that many of the profiles had not posted content in several weeks, and in some cases, months.