Why We Are Patriots

Boston is a tough little town – always has been.

We face down Mother Nature’s worst - blizzards, hurricanes, fire, and floods (both water and molasses).

And human nature’s worst - unjust rulers, criminals, bigots, and downright scoundrels. 

A decade ago, we faced the devil incarnate. 

Every time we walk through American Airlines Gate B32, we get a shiver up our spine knowing the bastard himself was right there at 7am on September 11, 2001.  Walking down the same jet way.  Breathing the same air.

Yesterday, we faced him again. 

Whose body he possessed this time - what color skin, what religion the poor fool followed, what country he lived in before the devil hopped on board – all that is irrelevant. 

People don’t do this.  Religions don’t do this.  Countries don’t do this. 

Evil does this. 

Only pure, unadulterated, evil. 

We Bostonians hate evil.  We hate it in errant kings, corrupt politicians, crime bosses, busing bigots, gang bangers, preying priests, marathon cheaters, and baby-shakers. 

Now we hate it in IED detonators, too.

Now, every time we walk through Copley Square (because we will, you bastard),

Every time we take our kids to skate on Frog Pond (because we will, you bastard),

Every time ride the elevator to the top of the Pru, take in a game at Fenway, or race in the Head of the Charles (BECAUSE WE WILL, YOU BASTARD),

   

We will get a shiver up our spine knowing you were here, on April 15, 2013, walking down the same sidewalk, breathing the same air.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a Patriot as a person actively opposing enemy forces occupying their country.  We are patriots.  Boston survives because we will not allow the enemy to occupy our town. 

While we are rallying, ranting, raving, and proclaiming today - let’s please, please remember that this time, just like every other time, the enemy is nothing more, and nothing less, than evil itself.

We send our hearts to the injured, our pride to those who ran forward, our hope to the future.

A storytelling masterwork

I'm really excited about the new focus on storytelling in marketing - Coke is doing amazing stuff - loved the race in the desert idea-and they're online storytelling presence is awesome.

We've been talking a lot lately as an industry about storytelling.  I am a big fan of stories as marketing tools.  It's so much more interesting and engaging experience a story rather than a pitch.  Yesterday we saw a dozen great storytelling adverts on the Super Bowl.

None more powerful emotionally than The Farmer

Everyone - including Gary Sinese loved it.  But I say, it's a lousy commercial, and a poor use of storytelling.  Why?  Quick, what product was it pushing?  A pickup truck, good.  Which one?  Chevy? Ford?  No wait...Ram Pickups? hmmm...doesn't Fiat own that brand now?

The commercial was well executed. Paul Harvey, great.  But the connection of the brand to the story?  Not so much.  Chrysler could have woven in all the great stuff they have done for farmers over the years...it must be more than trucks, right?  Well, a quick search doesn't show that much actually. Chrysler doesn't appear to have a farm equipment focus. In fact the only tractor related Chrysler connection was an old news story about Chrysler strong-arming a tiny mid-west tractor manufacturer into giving up its Plymouth Tractor brand.

Bottom line, great execution, but no brand hook other than repetition, equals lousy marketing storytelling.

Compare that to the NZ lottery story-ad here.  This is an unforgettable story-directly and unequivocally tied to the Lotto brand.  It tugs at your heart, makes you laugh, and provides a believable, yet completely unexpected plot twist that slams home the point and stabs the brand forever into your cerebellum - the lottery changes lives, it could change yours, and by god after watching this video, I bet a dollar to your donuts that you are going to go out and buy a ticket.

A true "storytelling as marketing" masterwork.

Looking forward to more, and better, marketing stories.  Off to pat the dog...you can never be too loyal!

One lousy touch point destroys the entire customer experience

One unsmiling attendant, one lonely French fry on the floor, one hair left in the hotel bathtub…one lousy little snag in an otherwise perfectly planned and carefully choreographed system is all it takes to collapse the entire enterprise into mediocrity.  Whether you are paying millions of dollars in advertising to attract frequent flyers, or staffing the cash register at your own boutique, the experience you provide customers is a layered house of cards.  One little puff of ill wind sends your entire creation crashing down on itself

99 and 1/2 Days

Alaskan crab fishing may well be the most dangerous job in the world, but being CMO is the most dangerous in the enterprise. The average tenure of a CMO is 40 months, or 1200 days.  You'd be nuts to give a CMO a mortgage.

Today in my 99^th day at Limelight.  I only have 1100 days left – to fix the marketing operations plumbing, fill the pipeline with a steady stream of opportunities, increase brand awareness, improve analyst relations, build a user community, build out international marketing, and develop ‘thought-leadership’ whatever the heck that means. 

Maybe I should just jump overboard now and get it over with…

Nah.  Having too much fun.  And, I don’t get seasick. Much.

We did land at least one whale in my first 100 days.  Today, we launch our new Digital Presence.  And, like hitting one good crab-pot in a string, this one is going to make me get up tomorrow morning and keep fishing. 

Check out http://www.limelight.com

Oh yes, it’s a radical departure.  Written in a fresh, jaunty style that represents a brand direction for Limelight – confident, approachable, down-to-earth, no BS, but with a sharp sense of humor – it’s good fresh digital bait. 

We hope you find our new online digital presence engaging, informative, and perhaps even enjoyable. We’re particularly pleased with the new corporate video – filmed with help from our Tempe employees just last week.  You will find it on the Limelight Video Player embedded in carousel frame #6 (Make It Stick.)

The new site tells a story – The Story of the Customer’s Story.  It’s about the challenges people face in getting their stories across in today’s digital marketplace, and the value we provide in delivering stories. Every Way. Every Where.

The medium itself stands as a testament to our message.  We didn’t just eat our own dog food on this project; we got shipfaced on our own champagne! 

Starting with a full-on Digital Presence Assessment in partnership with Limelight Global Services, we stared at our digital navel, and it was not a pretty site.  

Getting the story straight was no smooth sail, either.  We dumped plenty of fish guts over the whiteboard rails before limelight finally dawned on marketing’s marble head – it ain’t about us, Salty.  It’s about the customer, and the customer’s story.  We’re just digital bookbinders, Mate. 

Once we got that net untangled, the rest of the work was setting the pots.  We built the site on Limelight Video Player and Dynamic Site Platform – our SaaS based web content management system. As a long time user of crusty in-house CMS systems, let me tell you this is a thing of beauty to a wave-worn marketing geek like me.  I spent days in this CMS, all by my lonesome – editing, writing, posting, fixing – and believe you me, if I can do it…well, so can you.

We integrated social media and hosted the whole thing in our Agile storage cloud.  We bridged the site with virtually every one of our internal business systems - the new UCS system, Marketo, SFDC, Live Chat, our NASDAQ microsite, and our support systems. 

We did nothing – not one thing – special or difficult to get the site to run on any mobile device anywhere in the world.  Try it on yours.  Pure magic.

The new site uses, or will soon use, virtually every service and interface Limelight has to offer.  It is a holistic example of what we do for our customers. 

It is Orchestrate. 

We hope you enjoy this first step in Limelight’s digital presence transformation. 

For now, it’s back to cutting bait – only 1099 days left in this fishing season.

Wish me luck!

PS - We hid a few surprises around, just to keep things interesting.  Hope you get a smile or two when you trip over them.

Why Marketing is So Damn Hard Nowadays....

Talk about a Limelight bulb going off in your head...

Take a (close) look at this infograph compiled by our friend and colleague Daniel Webster:

Are You Awesome?

Well...not you yourself...of course, you are awesome...

But is your marketing awesome?  

Are you engaging your online audience with sizzling, relevant content?

Are you consistently presenting them with an awesome digital experience on every type of screen and device they want to use?

Are you leveraging video and multimedia to improve engagement, lengthen sessions, and tell more compelling stories?

Today - buyers are making 80% of their decisions before they ever talk to a salesperson.  And they keep searching, chatting, testing, and exploring at every stage of the buying cycle.  With a tablet or smartphone in hand,
your customers are constantly comparing you to every other option and competitor in the market - right up to signing a purchase order, clicking the buy button, or stepping up to a cashier - and then forever after. 

Yikes...

To win in today's markets, you must present an awesome digital presence on every
channel, on every screen, on every site - ALL THE TIME. 

And you can't control what others say, write, pod, vblog, or rate you on

Presenting a comprehensive, consistent, effective digital presence is hard...

So are you?  

Awesome, that is?

Putting Digital First - A guest post from Jason Thibeault

Putting Digital First 

A Brilliant Guest Post by Jason Thibeault on August 10, 2012 in Business, Hypothesis, Philosophy

In my role at Limelight Networks as the Sr. Director of Marketing Strategy, I have been deeply involved recently in the company’s significant market pivot around digital presence management. As I participated in an internal assessment of our own digital presence (which I have been blogging about on the Limelight website) and had conversations with smart people, I came to realize what makes a successful digital presence.

And it might not be what you think.

As companies foray into the digital ecosystem, reaching new customers around the globe and, in general, helping to unite the world in a digital economy, they adopt tools and services that they think represent a fundamental change to their business. Facebook pages. Twitter feeds. Blogs. Digital marketing. “We are changing the way we do business,” they say. “Through our online store and social media efforts we will transform our company into a digital entity.” All that’s fine and dandy, but it’s really just a new paint job on an old car. In order for companies to be truly successful in the digital economy, to truly have an awesome digital presence, they must fundamentally transform. Digital must come first.

Who’s Side Are You On?

How does your customer service process approach a problem? 

On the side of the customer, or your company? 

If you start on the side of your customer, you seek to quickly understand and appreciate the concern, put yourselves in their shoes, empathize with the impact on your customer, and empower your employees to do what’s necessary to make things right.

If you start on the side of the company, you defend your processes, systems, and employees.  You attempt to convince the customer that they are wrong to be concerned. You try to push the problem customer aside. You attempt to baffle or frustrate them with complex rules of engagement. You blame the system. You tell them you are sorry, but there is nothing you can do.

As consumers, we love the first, and hate the second. And, even in our enlightened, customer centric world, both approaches still abound. Look no further than the airlines for vivid examples of both.

If your business isn’t all you want it to be, take a hard look at who’s side you are on when the chips are down.

Digital Presence?

Frankly, content delivery seems pretty far outside my wheelhouse.  

I am, after all, an infrastructure marketing guy.  Sure, I have created or helped to create my share of new market categories – managed storage services, continuous data protection, file virtualization, application delivery networking, and even multi-vendor storage itself, way back in the early days.  But, my forte’ has always been selling infrastructure to IT-heads.  What the heck do I know about content delivery?

Ah Ha!

As marketing leader, my job is to ensure my companies excel in two critical areas – demand generation and brand awareness. 

I know a hundred CMOs and VPMs who share similar objectives. 

In order to achieve those two objectives, I push my teams to ensure that our online presence – our website, mobile, social, community, email, every touch-point we have with the market – is the coolest. 

My marching orders are simple – “Make us cool, dammit!  I don’t care how, just make sure we have the coolest online presence of any company in our market.”

I know a hundred other CMOs and VPMs who’ve demanded the same.

To be fair, I don’t have a good KPI metric for coolness, but nonetheless, I demand it from all my marketing teams. 

And I am often disappointed. 

The website is never dynamic enough.  Social media always feels like a bolt-on.  Our use of video and other ‘cool’ interactive media seems sporadic at best.  We're still writing in white papers and hanging PDFs on our site, rather than writing for online readers. Our community site rocks, but it isn’t unified with the rest of our online presence, and always seems like a distant, albeit very cool, cousin. 

Frustrating.

But more than just frustrating, this lack of online cohesion, this lack of digital presence ‘cool’ is a critical business failure that might be a contributing factor to the high rate of turnover at the CMO level. 

Recent research tells us that B2B customers now accomplish 70% of the buying process without ever engaging a salesperson. Customers now vet technology, consider options, make choices, and even make purchase decisions with no direct interaction with a company other than the company’s online digital presence. 

So as a CMO, my first question has to be "How can I quickly create, deliver, and manage a monstrously cool online digital presence spanning all my company’s touch-points across web, mobile, social and living room channels?"  It's not a lack of skill or will on the team - the problem stems from a lack of tools, technology, and process to support the 'cool' objective.

I believe every organization that operates online must address this challenge of managing its Digital Presence, and making it 'cool'.  As consumers and other stakeholders demand their digital interactions move fluidly across those web, mobile, social and living room channels, organizations that want to survive online must project a unified, integrated digital experience.


Users demand performance and consistency in their digital interactions with vendors, suppliers, and other organizations, yet the realities of the market demand that this digital presence be delivered simply and cost-efficiently.

And, I know from personal experience that the problem affects organizational functions well beyond IT, and it is now becoming a strategic top-level issue for the enterprise.

Further, I believe billions of dollars will be invested in the next few years to address this challenge. If fact, I am counting on it.

Digital Presence Management isn’t one function or process.  DPM is not content delivery, but content delivery is a critical component of DPM.   DPM is not video, or content management, or website platforms, or transcoding, or analytics, or acceleration either, but each of those is a critical component of DPM.  

I’ll will be sharing a lot more about what DPM is (and isn’t) over the next weeks and months, but for today, know this…Digital Presence Management is awesome-sauce cool, and it is here-to-stay in a market-making, earth-shaking, stick-a-fork-in-it BIG way.

(Meaning fluorescent green shirts and massive lime-green bouncy-balls can’t be far behind, right?)

Hey Wendy...I’m baaaack! 

Eight Arms and a Smile

“Spiderman, Spiderman, Does whatever a spider can.”

From day one, David, we described you as “Eight Arms and a Smile”, a whirling dervish of cheerful activity.  

And that’s certainly as true today as it was 18 years, 5 months, and 30 days ago when you made your first splash into our collective laps.

Literally…a splash.

In fact, Aquaman might have been a better Superhero meme for you if your bursting-forth-still-in-your-bag-of-water birth was any indication of your future.  

That was quite a show…even the Doctor laughed.

Adam Ezra - Get out of my head!

I just asked Pandora to set up an Adam Ezra Group station – the first song it played was by Rob Thomas, which made me smile in an ironic sort of way. I guess it works – similar vocal textures – but if Thomas is a star, and that fact is hard to argue -- then Ezra should have his own private constellation.

IT!! - Johnny Angel Wendell

Damn IT!! – Carmen's Right, Again.

Back in 6th grade, John Carmen taught me a hard lesson. Out on the playground of the Katherine Lee Bates School, John learned me some pain. No, he didn’t beat me up. I had 30 pounds on him, and stood a head taller. It wasn’t noses that got bloodied that bright cold September morning. The intended target of his punch was guts, hearts, maybe something deeper. The weapons weren’t fists or sticks.

Anatomy of a (successful) Marketing Campaign

Last fall, our marketing radar picked up signals of a powerful opportunity.

We began hearing from our field teams, product management/development, partners, and even from our own internal IT team about an impending market transition. The SSL keylength of the RSA public encryption key was doubling from 1024-bits to 2048-bits.

According to the experts at F5, SSL is a cryptographic protocol used to secure communications over the Internet. SSL ensures secure end-to-end transmission and every web browser and web site worth its salt uses it.

This doubling of the keylength was imperative, the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued an edict driving conversion by January 2011.

Any website wishing to provide digital signing– anyone doing credit card transactions, for instance – would have to support the 2048 keylength.

(Hey, I am the marketing guy, OK? Learn more on the mechanics and requirements here.

The impact is huge. There is a significant increase in processing power required when you go from 1024-bit to 2048-bit, and webs sites performance takes a hit when key sizes increase, regardless of the platform or vendor.

Our product/solution teams had a solution.

Offloading encryption to the special purpose processors in BIG-IP helps reduce the performance impact of the conversion, and centralizing encryption across many application servers reduces the number of certificates required and thus cost. For more on the solution click here 

So, we were facing a marketers panacea – transitioning market conditions, obvious and understood customer pain point, straightforward proven solution, solid value proposition and powerful cost drivers. What’s not to like about this story?

Maggie's Last Christmas

Maggie doesn't know about Jesus being God or about tomorrow being his birthday.

She thinks we're nuts for dragging a tree in the house, and she doesn't get the point of hanging lights outside.

She sees fine in the dark.

If Jesus came by the house tomorrow, she'd bite his butt. She does that. She's bitten the drum teacher, most of Lily's friends, a few of David's, my sister-in-law, brother-in-law, the Zoots guy, and probably a few dozen others.

So I'm pretty sure if a bearded guy, with long hair, and a robe came to the door, she'd take a little chomp of His butt, too.

She can't help it.

Maggie likes big butts...I cannot lie...

and thighs, and the occasional ankle.

SSP Failure to Cloud Storage Success - What a Difference a Decade Makes

Storability 10 year Reunion

Years ago, a few buddies and I started one of the first cloud storage providers. Of course, we didn’t call it cloud storage back then, but we merry band of brithers (and sisters), we first generation Storage Service Providers (1gSSPs) were cloud storage way before the cloud was cool.

All the 1gSSPs – StorageNetworks, ScaleEight, StorageWay, Sanrise, and others – failed. The core problem was and still is that renting raw capacity over the network is a lousy business model.

• 1gSSPs couldn’t sustainably buy their storage cheaper than their retail customers (although over a beer I can share some great stories of how the early 1gSSP robber-barron’s ‘negotiated’ with the storage vendors during the boom).
• SSPs couldn’t sustainably offer broad enough management efficiencies to generate profits.
• SSPs couldn’t overcome a host of logistic and cultural issues (network performance/cost, stigma/liability of releasing core data, etc).

After the bust, and the 911 attacks, the entire business simply collapsed. Some of us – my company, Storability and others like Arsenal Digital - managed to flip over to providing managed storage services – running NOCs, and doing backups and restores for our customers. Wasn’t a great business, but we survived long enough to eventually be sold off.

For those interested in an unbiased history of the 1gSSP market, there is a thorough and thoughtful analysis from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) posted here.

Ten years later, things look different, and the same.

A whole host of storage service providers – nee’ cloud storage providers – has arisen, not so much from the ashes of the 1gSSPs, but certainly with their dust in the new CSP DNA. These folks have it a little easier than we did back then, and I think more than a few of them are going to make an honest living this time.

In addition to the obvious improvements in network connectivity, bandwidth, and reliability, I see three critical changes that I believe will mark the difference between the past failure of 1gSSPs and the future success of today’s Cloud Storage Providers – file systems, file virtualization, and file storage gateways.

A quick, non-traditional, note of thanksgiving

My wife comes from a huge family – this Thursday there will be 30 people in various states of consciousness standing around staring at the oven waiting for the female-in-laws to pull the turkey(s).

I grew up as the only kid in the house, so I get a kick out of hanging out with a gang of revelers on holidays. One of the best parts of the day is going around the table asking what everyone is thankful for this year – we get a lot of the usual; family members, school, friends, the dog, passing grades.

This year I am going to offer thanks for something a little non-traditional.

Sit down, shut up, and fly

I spend more time at 30K ft than 99% of the world.  More than they legally let Stews and Pilots.  I was reading the sign on the new X-ray scanners at BOS which tells you that the machine emits the equivalent radiation you'd receive from 2 mins at 39K ft.  My blood ran cold.  I need lead underwear.
.
Point is, I watch what the Stews go through - 4 times a day most of them.  Load 'em in - give them the 'please share overhead space, please step out of the aisle, please put smaller items under the seat' speech.  Last week I heard one frustrated stew muttering under her breath, "this is the worst 15 minutes of my day..."

I had an idea - why don't they make a video for everyone to watch before they load the plane.  Like when everyone is jockeying for position in front of the entrance gate.  Sorta like they do at some airports during the TSA line - but instead of 'take off your shoes, put liquids in the bin' this would be about how to get on an airplane quickly without pissing off everyone else in the process.

The Knothole Conundrum

In marketing – especially product marketing - we every now and again run into a conflict between what is and what should be when it comes to product releases.

Perhaps it happens when development slips the schedule on a specific feature, or perhaps Marketing wants to pull in the announcement to hit a specific date coinciding with a trade show or other event. Maybe you’ve just got wind of a competitor planning to pull the rug out from under you…whatever the cause, occasionally someone will say, “Well, we can still launch on time as long as we clearly document this ‘temporary’ constraint.”

I call this classic release challenge the Knothole Conundrum.

Jeffrey Taylor Wadsworth Graduation Speech

Thank you all for joining us here today to recognize Jeffrey’s achievements and to celebrate his graduation from Babson College. If you haven’t yet experienced a classic Kirby kid-speech, be forewarned. You may want to grab a napkin…this usually gets a little messy…

Angels over Arizona

She calls herself SkyAngel, btw, which is perfect don’t you think? She is what Seth Godin describes as a lynchpin. I see her as a model for what the word ‘work’ means. In a thoughtful New York Times write-up, Adam Cohen vamps on Studs Terkle’s reflections on Working, “Even for the lowliest laborers, Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, "for daily meaning as well as daily bread."