2011 ProductCamp Demographics

Where does your role fall in here? If you’re not registered, there is still time. Do it today!

Jamie had some interesting insight regarding social media.  He advised that potential clients should step back and think about their ultimate goal.  Depending on your budget and intentions you may find that paid search will yield a greater result.  (For more on that, check out this post with Trada’s VP of Marketing, Bill Quinn.)

After establishing that social media is really the way to go, Jamie advises starting with Facebook.  Even if you are a B2B product or company, with over 700 million users on Facebook, this is where you will find your customers.

You will want to get your ‘liker‘ numbers into the 3K – 10K+ range.  Less than that your are not talking to anyone.  As you increase beyond 3K you’ll stand a greater chance of interacting with your community.

The important point to remember with social media is that the conversations are happening.  They may or may not be occurring on your Facebook/Twitter environment.  By taking a proactive approach you can interact with your customer base.  In the instance of customer negativity you can address the complaint early and possibly convert them into an advocate.

Don’t take the 3-monkey approach.

Jamie has proposed a session at Rocky Mountain ProductCamp on Social Media.  If you found this interesting register today and join us on October 29th. Maybe this topic will be discussed more.

Some key take aways include:

• [2:30] “In order to market effectively, you have to measure everything.  The awesome thing about marketing these days is that you can measure everything.”
• [3:10] Discussion of the funnel dynamics and how to make the funnel pay off
• [10:30] Trada’s looking for a Digital Marketing Manager. Interested? Catch Bill or someone else from Trada at Rocky Mountain ProductCamp.
• [11:00] Bill’s RMPCamp topic proposal and that “ProductCamp is all about learning from one another”

Care to share your funnel experiences or best ways to measure your marketing ROI, add a comment or join us on October 29th and share with the group.

Q: Why do we do it this __________ way?
A: Because.  Because that is how we’ve always done it.

If you stop at because and you don’t keep on drilling into that then you won’t realize the innovation.

Due to time limitations on YouTube, I had to split this into two sections.  Total time = 22 minutes.  Total presentation time was close to an hour.  Second part is below.  I encourage you watch it as well.

The big take-away from the second video was a quote from Jeff Bezo’s on having a product fail.

On the day you decide to give up on it [project], what happens?  Your operating margins go up because you stop investing in something that wasn’t working.  Is that really such a bad day?” [04:30]

In the end, Ryan did a great job of tying it all together.  In summary for the talk [10:15]:

• Think outside the box
• Take passion and reward people trying and giving it their best

Are you making a point to remember this in your daily activities?  When was the last time you questioned the status quo?

1. Marketing – January is the slowest month for wine sales at BCW. This brings their best customers into the winery, keeps BCW top of mind during that dead period between the holidays and Valentines Day.
2. Stickiness – Creates a feeling of investment, contribution, and loyalty by their customers. If you have a hand in creating a wine wouldn’t you want to serve it and the story of how you helped create it to potential guests?
3. Sales – As Mike indicates in the video, nearly 20% this wine is sold before it even goes in the bottle.
4. Exceptional Quality – Listening to their customers, BCW is sure to select the best according to their customers tastes, literally.
5. Finally, reading between the lines, BCW is not asking its customers to create the final blend. They are asked to rate the best ingredients. BCW then creates a couple different blends from them and again asks them to rate them. The customer is in the position to indicate to BCW what it likes. BCW is in the business of providing a product that offers exceptional value and flavor according to their customer’s tastes.

9) If your company is planning for growth, this is THE place to find those new employees.

8 ) Your budgets will not be touched. The event is free and is located in downtown Denver at the Auraria Campus.

7) The CU Buffs and CSU Rams are out of town, so you won’t miss a live football game.

6) This is a chance to share your experience by presenting to your peers. The shared learning is how we all grow from each other.

5) You can rub elbows with folks from all types of brands and industries based in Colorado.

4) You know that feeling of “no one in my company understands what we do in product management and/or product marketing ?” When you’re in a room of 300+ peers, you won’t feel so alone. We all have been there and understand you.

3) The organizing team has put in a LOT of time and effort to make this a great day for us and our peers. But you don’t want to leave us there alone, feeling like we don’t have any friends or peers in the product management and product marketing world that care… do you?

2) This will be the second product management and product marketing event of its kind dedicated to, organized by, and supported by the Rocky Mountain community.

1) A free day of product management and product marketing learning, in your backyard. Did I mention free?

This event is unique. If you find a glimmer of truth in any of these statements, join me and register today at http://www.rmpcamp.org/registration/

Rocky Mountain ProductCamp is coming around again – October 29th. Since the last one we’ve  spoken to a lot of product people about the concept and its benefits.  Some of those people grasp the concept immediately. Others need more information. So  using a couple of recent headlines and articles maybe we can lay down some dots for you to connect:

Four key product managers at Twitter are getting the ax. From “Twitter fires the product team” by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry.

Speaking about corporate training in 2010 – “Training budgets (which dropped 21 percent between 2007 and 2009) began to stabilize and many L&D organizations initiated hiring during the year.” “Overall, companies spent two percent more on training in 2010 than in 2009, with average spending of $682 per learner.”  The Corporate Learning Fact Book 2011 by Karen O’Leonard

Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers. From the “Start-Up of You” by Thomas L. Friedman

The length of time a worker remains with the same employer increases with the age at which the worker began the job. Of the jobs that workers began when they were 18 to 22 years of age, 72 percent of those jobs ended in less than a year and 94 percent ended in fewer than 5 years. Among jobs started by 39- to 44-year-olds, 33 percent ended in less than a year and 68 percent ended in fewer than 5 years. From Bureau of Labor and Statistics, US Dept. of Labor, September 10, 2010 release.

Now, step back and now ask yourself “what business are you really in?”  Are you in the business of Company X-Y-Z Inc or ABC Startup or are you in the business of product marketing or product management and providing a service to those earlier companies?

Assuming it is the latter, when was the last time you did something to increase your business’ value?  How have you increased its efficiency? How are you finding ways to create value for your personalbusiness?  This is where Rocky Mountain ProductCamp comes in.

RMPcamp offers the venue to broadcast your value and share your content.  It enables you to consume others unique knowledge in order to find new efficiencies.  Your participation makes you part of a larger network of product people.  Adding your voice strengthens that community; which in-turn benefits your business.

The need for product people is not going away.  The demands placed upon them is evolving.  Make the investment now so that you can keep pace with change.  We hope to see you on October 29th at Rocky Mountain ProductCamp.