Bateman Group has started off 2012 with a bang!  Today we kicked off our new partnership with a company called Adchemy based in Foster City, Calif. and led by CEO and Founder Murthy Nukala, a veteran leader of innovative, technology-driven businesses.

Adchemy’s mission is to help advertisers leverage consumer intent to create more effective digital advertising experiences. The company is backed by Accenture, August Capital, Mayfield Fund and Microsoft and in 2010 was listed by The Wall Street Journal as one of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S.

Adchemy is a wonderful new addition to our digital advertising and marketing technologies practice. The account will be run by a spectacular team consisting of practice lead and Senior Vice President Bill Bourdon, Vice President Lisa Melsted, Account Manager Shannon Hutto and Senior Associate Kathleen Stuart. I feel confident this will be a long and fruitful partnership for both our organizations. Please join me in welcoming them to the Bateman Group family.

This is the first in an ongoing series of Q&As with marketing executives and senior management at Bateman Group client companies. The series aims to spotlight the critical issues senior marketers are grappling with and offer practical advice about PR’s role within the broader marketing mix.

The following interview was conducted with Carlos Carvajal when he was vice president of Marketing at Baynote, a leading provider of software solutions for personalizing the online customer experience. Currently, Carlos is vice president of Product Management at Baynote.

Q: What do you view as the most important element of a successful B2B marketing program?

Having the right team in place is first and foremost critical to the success of any marketing organization. Beyond this, there are really three core pillars to running a successful B2B marketing program.

First, marketing needs to be in alignment with the overall corporate strategy which should guide all tactics and campaigns. This sounds simple but all too often is overlooked. Staying true to your strategy often means a slow and steady approach. But in my experience, this approach always wins the race.

Second, a marketing program cannot be successful in this day and age without a strong customer reference program. It’s become increasingly difficult for marketers to differentiate their messages from the competition. This means the real differentiation is best coming through a third party that’s viewed as credible to your target audience. Customers are the most credible source in the eyes of their peers, with industry analysts and media also playing an important role.

Finally, the third requirement is compelling content. There are too many cases where marketing content simply regurgitates a company’s positioning and product messages. Content needs to be useful. It needs to make people feel like you are trying to help them, instead of selling them because people are so desensitized to traditional marketing messages.

Q: In what ways has social media changed the way you approach marketing?

Social media has changed the dynamics of marketing in many different ways but from my vantage point at Baynote the most profound changes are around how we communicate thought leadership and interact with customers. For example, a successful corporate blog allows companies to show thought leadership in a way that conditions people to look for them on a regular basis. This phenomenon didn’t exist with traditional websites because the content wasn’t dynamic and marketers couldn’t truly engage their audience in a two-way conversation.

The important rule with social media is that slow and steady wins the race. You really have to invest and stick with it. It takes time to build a loyal following, but once you have established one it will truly pay dividends.

Q: PR is under a lot of pressure to improve the way it measures business outcomes yet it often lacks access to the KPIs used by marketing, such as data on lead flow, revenue growth and company valuation. What KPIs are you currently held accountable for at Baynote and which of these would you like to see better integrated into PR measurement?

Marketing lives to service sales. Our overarching performance metric for marketing is marketing sourced revenue. We also look at different marketing functions and those that mattered most. From an awareness standpoint, we look at traffic and bounce rates. Is there a steady uptake in traffic? This is far more important than the number of impressions.

With lead generation we look at two things: marketing sourced pipeline and marketing qualified leads. Finally, with product marketing, who’s main job is to enable sales to close leads, we track the opportunity to close ratio.

In terms of the measurement opportunity for PR, I’d like to see a system that tracks the effectiveness of the PR assets the sales team uses, like media coverage and blogs. Through better understanding what specific articles or blog posts played an active role in the different phases of the sales nurturing process, PR could play a more focused role in tangibly driving revenues.

Q: What technology company do you admire most for their marketing effectiveness and why?

It’s hard to pick just one. I really admire Apple for their brand which they’ve built around their relentless focus on staying true to their vision and core competency. Google has done the same thing. Everything with the Google brand and service offering is about simplicity and speed.

I also think Marketo and Hubspot have done an exceptional job establishing thought leadership around the problems they are solving for their customers. They both excel at content marketing.

Q: What piece of advice do you have for PR teams on how they can work more effectively with senior-level marketers?

First, I think it’s important that we look for better ways to share ideas beyond email. This is not limited to PR/Marketing. Businesses simply need more effective collaboration systems that foster better ideas and encourage ways to track progress. At Baynote, we have been experimenting with Box.net to improve collaboration and communication around critical marketing projects and campaigns.

Because marketing is so busy, PR can also help by creating “cookie cutter” emails around company news or competitive moves that can be easily shared with the entire company. This concept of helping senior marketers communicate big wins internally is really simple, and equally as important.

To say that 2011 was a big year for the media, technology and PR industries would be a huge understatement. We saw LinkedIn’s IPO, the firing of Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, the firing of Carol Bartz from Yahoo!, the launch of Google+, the unfortunate passing of Steve Jobs and much, much more.

Here are some predictions from several Bateman Group staffers, including yours truly, on the biggest trends and events we believe will unfold in the coming year.

Tyler Perry, Vice President

The Continuation of Page-Driven Journalism — Media properties are fighting for eyeballs, so we will continue to see ridiculous headlines and extensive coverage of the same five brands.

A Backlash on Daily Deals/Group Buying — Many brands are using this as a marketing tactic, but the increasing deal fatigue will make this less of an effective strategy. The incentive must be attached with other value.

More Companies “Doing Well by Doing Good” — Using the digital medium or gaming techniques to help people live better and help solve some of the global issues we are facing, but paralyzed to solve from a government leadership standpoint.

The Mobilization of Business Will Change the World of Journalism — It has already shifted the game with advertising, marketing, e-commerce and collaboration. Now that people are consuming more and more content on smartphones and tablets, will journalism shrink its content accordingly?

 

Lisa Melsted, Vice President

Corporate social media responsibilities will continue to fall on PR…but not forever — Social media responsibilities are increasingly being placed on PR firms and outside teams.  As companies try to figure out what their roles should be regarding social media and struggle with internal bandwidth for implementing these programs, those responsibilities will increasingly fall to their PR teams. This trend will likely be short lived however.  Much like the website building capabilities that fell onto PR and advertising firms with the advent of corporate websites in the late 90s and early 2000s, these responsibilities will likely be pulled back in-house over the next 3-5 years as more people build up expertise in social media and the responsibilities for corporate blogging, Tweeting, etc., become full-time jobs (much like website management). PR and ad firms will lead the way for now and should take advantage of this climate for the time being, but should not count on these programs (and revenue from them) to be within the purview of the outside firms forever.

Siri Will Disrupt the Way We Communicate — Apple’s voice recognition/search technology will begin with a slow build and then skyrocket and totally change the way we interact with our phones once again.

 

Rod McLeod, Senior Associate

TechCrunch takes a status hit, becomes a better publication — TechCrunch and ValleyWag were probably the first two tech blogs that I read when I began working in the tech industry. I always found TechCrunch offered a pretty high level of quality and kept me up to date with trends I found interesting. And after a month of reading ValleyWag, I lost interest after I read a few too many articles that were written in poor taste.

I’m sure everyone has been keeping track of the recent CrunchFund debacle and the exodus of top brass like Michael Arrington, Paul Carr, MG Siegler and now Sarah Lacy, but I think that this will usher in a new era at TechCrunch. I never worked with any of the previous editors, but I’ve certainly heard stories of the rage of Michael Arrington from other PR colleagues (see the comment section on a previous Bateman Banter post for yourself), as well as first-hand stories from friends who work at top-tier startups. However, I have worked with a few of the younger writers in TechCrunch’s stable, and I only have positive things to say about them.

I think that TechCrunch will begin to take a more journalistic approach in 2012 and beyond. I’m talking embargos, no more blackmail or “revenge” and FULL disclosure – yes, I said the “D” word. While this won’t reverse the site’s horrid redesign, it will improve the quality of an already highly-regarded publication, and also make it easier to develop and foster real relationships with TechCrunch writers.

 

Amy Ziari, Senior Associate

Competition will increase over “Celebrity” reporters — Jolie O’Dell goes to VentureBeat. Josh Constine and Sarah Perez to TechCrunch. Robert McMillan to WIRED. Ashlee Vance (an author of one of my favorite books about Silicon Valley) to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Blogs and news outlets are in a feverish race to add reporters that come with their own loyal audience – and personal panache – into their fold. Expect to see more of this in 2012 as competition heats up among the top technology, business and venture news outlets to acquire the same “celebrity” writing talent. It’s not just about the words anymore.

Bill Bourdon, Senior Vice President

Creating a Google+ Business Strategy Will Not Be a Top Priority — Google recently launched Google+ brand pages, which generated a good amount of fanfare and positive reviews in true Google fashion. But here’s the rub: investing time and resources in Google+ will not be a big priority for businesses in 2012.  At least it shouldn’t be. It doesn’t matter if Google+ is better or even if the SEO value of Google+ brand pages is superior to Facebook. It ultimately boils down to market share, and Google was just too late to the consumer social media game to engage a critical mass of users, let alone the early adopters. I don’t think Google+ will be shut down next year – there’s too much at stake. But the service will definitely need to reinvent itself to become viable. Robert Scoble and others are predicting Google will extend its social software to enterprises that can use it to network and collaborate internally, akin to Yammer and Salesforce Chatter. Seems like a reasonable move to capitalize on their investment to me.

 

Elissa Ehrlich, Director

As Social Media Matures and Shakes Off Some of the Hype, PR Will Get Back to Basics — With the explosion of web content and social media engagement, PR has been increasingly viewed as the more valuable and strategic marketing function when compared to advertising. Indeed, PR is owning more and more the content companies push out to their audiences. Why? I feel its because we’re already engaged in a conversation with these constituencies and can communicate more authentically than our friends on the advertising side. The PR industry has been forced to reinvent itself in recent years and I think we’re almost done with the transformation. I do know this - PR pros are once again in high demand. We can’t find people fast enough and we’re turning down great new business leads due to lack of staff!  This is proof that the approach that many agencies are taking is working, and companies are finding value in the work that we do.

Social Media Fatigue Sets In – Already, it’s the same people on your Facebook news stream posting mundane updates, and no one cares all that much about Google+.  While social media will continue to be important for many brands, perhaps in 2012, we’ll get back to the basics and return our attention to securing quality media coverage in highly credibly publications, establishing our clients as true thought leaders in their industry sectors, and other “old fashioned” PR programs like placing keynote speaking engagements and pursuing awards.

Fred Bateman, CEO and Founder

Facebook will be bigger than Google — Facebook will go public and eclipse Google in market capitalization — perhaps permanently

Silicon Valley Will Be the Next Madison Avenue — Just as technology talent is finding its way to New York City, the reverse will also happen.  As Facebook and Twitter start generating more revenue, advertising and marketing talent will start heading West to cash in.

Cloud Computing Will Continue to Reinvigorate the Software Market — Business applications and data are moving to the cloud at a rapid pace and it’s not going to stop there. The day will come when companies outsource not only their software, but network infrastructure as well. The main beneficiaries will be the SaaS companies with the foresight and agility to go where the market is heading, not where it is today. Just as we’ve seen Salesforce, SuccessFactors, Qualys, Zuora, Taleo, NetSuite, Box and Workday grow into successful companies seemingly overnight, I predict there will be others to emerge to join this group, benefiting all of us who make our living from the tech sector, either directly or indirectly.

Consumerization of IT Will Continue to Impact All Corners of Technology — Soon, it will be standard across the software industry for all vendors, regardless of sector, to offer freemium or very low-end products as a point of entry for individuals or small businesses, including mobility, security and virtualization.

In Part 1, we learned about the takeaways one could derive from working at a café, a summer camp, a haughty swim club and a Ryder Inc. rental center. Part 2 will focus on the men of the Bateman Group – Christmas calendar coming soon.

This is Part 2 of 3 profiling the most interesting summer jobs of the Bateman Group inspired by the AdAge article “Guess Which Adman Used to Be the Kool-Aid Man.”

The ever stylish Fred

Fred Bateman

CEO and Founder

Job: Wendy’s Food Server

Lesson Learned: Get the support of your peers

I worked for about three months at a Wendy’s very close to where I grew up in Revere, Massachusetts, a city located just five miles from Downtown Boston and adjacent to Logan Airport. Revere does not enjoy the best reputation and never has. Its inhabitants are best known for being working class, of Italian-American descent (with a smattering of Irish, like my family) and for having very strong Boston accents. Emotions in Revere tend to run high about, well, just about everything.

Revere could be a scary place to grow up – especially if you failed to recognize who sat atop the social hierarchy. It wasn’t the monosyllabic, steroid-filled meatheads who had abs in the third grade and could barely squeeze their enormous frames in their new Chevy IROC Camaros. Not even close. In Revere, it was the girls everyone feared.

Against this colorful backdrop, my summer job at Wendy’s began on a good note. Once the manager realized I could do rudimentary math in my head and could speak to customers in full sentences, I was quickly moved off the food assembly line and on to the cash register full time. This move by the manager; however, did not make me popular with my co-workers, which included four of the toughest, most notoriously violent girls in town – Stacy, Heidi, Kim and her sister Antoinette.

Just how tough were they?  Well, one time Heidi and Kim had a falling out over a guy. Kim “flipped the bird” to Heidi while driving by the restaurant in the passenger seat of the guy’s new IROC Camaro convertible. Heidi, never one to tolerate such a show of disrespect, exacted her revenge by dragging her now former friend Kim into Wendy’s the following night (literally by her hair) and breaking her middle finger in front of all of us. Snap! It was the first and only time I’ve heard the sound of breaking bone.

So, needless to say, it was critical I repair my relationship with these girls and fast. The manager wasn’t helping matters as he continued to give me special treatment, including more flexible shifts. To keep in the girls’ good graces, I would often volunteer to take the trash out even when it wasn’t my turn as well as cover shifts for the girls when emergencies arose – which was frequent. I can’t say we become close friends, but I learned that while it’s important to impress the boss, you also need the support of your peers to actually get the job done and be successful. That, and having all ten digits in working order at the end of the day is an added bonus.

Young William

Bill Bourdon

Senior Vice President

Job: Painter

Lesson Learned: It’s all in the prep work

The summer after I graduated from college, several friends and I started a house painting business to save up enough money to move out of our parents’ houses and venture off into the real world. While I gained a lot of valuable lessons from the business side of this experience – like managing teams, budget forecasting and client service – my biggest take away came from a cardinal rule of the manual labor. It all comes down to the quality of your prep work.

In house painting, prep work is the less glamorous part of the job, including scraping, sanding, priming and caulking. It’s everything you do before the painting begins, and if you want your paint job to stick for many years over – the prep needs to be flawless. Taking shortcuts on prep means a quicker path to seeing that shiny newly painted house. Unfortunately, it also means the paint will prematurely peal off within a year or two. Quality prep and planning is the foundation of any successful communications program. If the message isn’t well crafted or targeted to the most appropriate audience, then the results will always suffer.

I didn't always have long, luxurious hair

Rod McLeod

Senior Associate

Job: Painter

Lesson Learned: Missed details can detract from a stellar job

Bill and I actually listed the same job, the same lesson learned and basically the same narrative, so here’s a different take on the thrilling life of a painter. During the summer after my sophomore year of high school, one of my crew coaches offered me a job to work with him as a painter. He was willing to pay me $9 an hour (San Francisco minimum wage was around $5.75 at the time), and the work was consistent. I thought why not, painting can’t be that hard.

I did everything from landscaping to carpentry to painting, and when it came to the actual painting, it really wasn’t that hard. But like Bill, I soon found out that meticulous prep work was the key to doing a good job, and to go one step further, it was the cleanup that ultimately determined client satisfaction. I could’ve painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but if I left specks of paint on the window and caulk on the floor the client would remember the lack of cleanup, as opposed to the amazing job that I did overall. Paying attention to details applies to every aspect of business, and I’m sure everyone can remember a time when a senior level executive walked away remembering a typo in an email that you sent, instead of the amazing results that your project yielded.

Side note: I would’ve done the gold leafing in Sharon Stone’s house if I didn’t have to quit for water polo pre-season. She has a pretty awesome pad in Sea Cliff.

Max lives a hard life

Max Bourdon

Gentleman of Leisure/Official Office Dog

Job: On-command Recycler

Lesson Learned: A life of leisure is good, but a life of purpose is great

This is my second summer spent as the Official Office Dog of the Bateman Group. In that time, I’ve made friends with the mailmen (except the one whose wedding ring I ate!), splayed my manly belly on every inch of the office and have tasted just about everyone’s used tissues, much to my Dad’s dismay.

But lately, I’ve really been applying myself. You see, the Bateman Group works with a great company called Recyclebank, and while it may be fun as hell to tear up paper and leave it splattered across the agency’s carpets, it’s neither nice nor sustainable! So this summer, I’ve been working on living greener and doing my part to make the world a better place.

But don’t just take my word for it, humanoids. Look at me in action!

Office Dog Max Recycles for Love from Bateman Group on Vimeo.

Kathy Cripps’ recent post for the Council of Public Relations Firms blog reminded us that the Bateman Group’s pro bono work not only feels good, it also has direct benefits to our business. Our current mix of cause-based clients, three of which are entirely pro bono, include:

• Little Kids Rock is a national nonprofit organization that transforms the lives of low-income children by restoring and revitalizing music education in U.S. public schools.
• Recyclebank helps create a more sustainable future by rewarding people for taking everyday green actions with discounts and deals from more than 3,000 local and national businesses.
• NatureBridge is the largest residential environmental education partner of the National Park Service. Its mission is to inspire personal connections to the natural world and responsible actions to sustain it.
• WeOwnTV is a collaborative media education project for disenfranchised youth and young adults living in Sierra Leone.
• Bay Area Rainbow Symphony is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer identified (LGBTQ) musicians and composers toward the goal of broad crossover appeal and excellence in the performing arts.

For an agency our size (12 people and growing), I am proud to be representing so many incredible causes. I’m also proud that we can offer all of our employees the opportunity to work with at least one of them. In addition to warm fuzzies and recruiting, Bateman Group as a business has also benefited immensely from these relationships.

For example, prior to signing on as Little Kids Rock’s pro bono agency in 2009, we exclusively serviced B2B technology clients. This experience with Little Kids Rock helped us build the credibility and media relationships to attract additional consumer clients such as RecycleBank. Our collective work with RecycleBank and Little Kids Rock in turn helped us to recently add NatureBridge to the client roster.

Our pro bono work has also been invaluable to the firm’s professional network. Through our involvement with WeOwnTV, I had the great fortune of meeting my friend Paula Cavagnaro, who in turn invited us in to pitch the business at Motista. Of course, we ultimately won based on the quality of our proposal and ideas; however, we probably would not have otherwise been presented this opportunity without the personal connection to Paula.

Most importantly, all of these accounts have been a big draw to helping us recruit and retain the top talent Bateman Group is known for. Bottom line: our work with pro bono and cause-driven organizations is easy to trace back to many tangible business outcomes. Here’s why I believe our approach has paid off:

1. Authentic intentions: At the risk of preaching to the choir, I will say it anyways — an agency’s philanthropic efforts need to be authentic and rooted in the right place in order to reap the rewards.
2. Long-term commitment: We’ve taken a long-term view with our pro bono investments, committing the time and human resources so our contributions have a sustained impact on furthering the different causes we support as well as advancing the careers of our employees.
3. Value-add: When evaluating a pro bono project or long-term engagement ask yourself if your team is well equipped to deliver real value. Not only will the client miss out by going in the wrong direction, but the experience will be unfulfilling and potentially discouraging for any employees involved.
4. Strategic intentions: While authentic intentions and an ability to deliver meaningful value come first, a corporate social responsibility program can also be designed so that benefits to your organization, either directly or indirectly. For example, ask yourself, will a pro bono client help broaden your skillset, be a draw to new recruits or potentially new business?

We’re interested in hearing from other PR and marketing agencies about their pro bono experiences and best practices for delivering mutually meaningful returns.

Follow Bill Bourdon on Twitter @bbourdon.

Now a little over a month since the launch of Google+ and the most buzzed about online service already has 25 million users, estimates ComScore. These stats mean Google+ is growing faster than Facebook and MySpace did in the early days. Further, according to a new survey from Bloomberg/YouGov, Google+ is on track to claim 22 percent of online U.S. adults in a year, which would place it second behind Facebook as the most-used social site – ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn.  Says the survey, Google+ has already snagged 13 percent of U.S. adults and will add 9 percent over the next year.

It’s no wonder why marketers are so excited about Google+, despite the fact that it’s not technically open to brands. Ford is among the shortlist of brands to test the platform, and understandably its audience is relatively small. At the time of this blog, 12,154 people had added Ford to their circles. This compares with 781,899 people following the brand on Facebook and 75,327 on Twitter.

As a marketer, I am personally a little nonplussed by all the hype around Google+. As a shareholder on the other hand, I love it.

I admit Google+ has some shiny new features that certainly hold promise for marketers once consumers sign onto the service en masse and actually stay on it. For example, Ford’s head of social media Scott Monty says the chat capability has potential for webinars, analyst calls, and even customer service uses for people to have a face-to-face experience with the brand. But it’s not clear whether Google+ brand profiles will support the same functionality for individual users. Just think about how powerful features like Circles could be in supporting audience segmentation and message customization. And potential integration with Google Analytics could give brands just the social ROI metrics they have been waiting for.

Like the Bloomberg/YouGov survey, I predict that adoption of Google+ will continue to grow if only because it has the advantage of being pretty seamlessly integrated into the overall Google ecosystem (search page, Google Docs, Chrome, etc.). This integration should conceivably increase the likelihood that Google search users will check in regularly on Google+. But what will it take for the masses to stay there?  Apparently 31 percent of users polled in the Bloomberg/YouGov survey said they have already abandoned their accounts or not written any posts yet on the site.

As a PR practitioner who spends a large part of the day searching for and reading news from my personalized iGoogle news page,  I check in more frequently on Google+ because the icon is an eye’s distance away, but still spend considerably more time on Facebook and Twitter. This is because the content and interactions I have on those sites are more valuable to me. Although truth be told, I use both Facebook and Twitter increasingly less and less. This brings me to the premise of this post.

Drumroll please.

Above all else, when developing their social media strategies, marketers must remember that the quality of the content will always trump the quality of the platform. This holds particularly true in an era of social media fatigue when consumers are growing tired of how brands are communicating to them via social channels. As Tom Fishburne poignantly said in his recent blog about social fatigue, “It’s not enough for communication to be good for the brand. It has to be good for the consumer.”

So, will social media fatigue kill Google+? Given its steady rise, innovative features, and strong base of early adopters who are charting purposeful best practices, the answer is probably not. However, a good platform with a strong following does not a successful social media program make. At Bateman Group we are admittedly still wrapping our heads around Google+ and formulating our ideas on where, if at all right now it should be used with clients. Given the service is still very much in early adoption mode, it’s currently better suited for most of our clients to communicate with and engage their respective industry influencers versus their direct buyers. Hangout, for example, offers a new twist on how we can engage with influencers but only time will tell if the feature poses too big of a cultural shift to become a mainstream anytime soon.

We’d love to hear from other PR and marketing professionals about how they have begun to incorporate Google+ into their mix of social media tools.

Follow Bill Bourdon on Twitter @bbourdon.