One lousy touch point destroys the entire customer experience

One unsmiling flight 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

A fine stew...

It’s a lousy job.

Get ‘em on, get ‘em off. Hussle up the newbies and –in-frequent fliers. “Stow your gear, and get the heck out of the way, you dopes. Move it, we got schedules to meet, and you got a hundred people waitin’ on the jetway for you to step out of the aisle.” You know the poor things just want to scream by the time the doors close and the seatbelt/life vest demonstration starts.

It’s a really lousy job, getting worse by the day.

Tough hours, away from home half the time, crappy airport hotels, crappy airport restaurants. Company bustin’ your chops to cut costs and reduce service levels at every turn. Smaller, more crowded planes. Longer flights. Shorter turnarounds. Crankier customers. Now they even want them to help clean the airplane.

Coffee, Tea, or Me? Not hardly, no more. The days of Sinatra’s magical Starry Eyed, Rarified Air are long gone. Ya, maybe the Southwest crews try to inject some humor, but even they know the whole experience of air travel just plain stinks – for passengers, crews, everyone.

But in the midst of this lousy, grating, fingernails-on-a-chaulkboard, if-you-kick-my-seat-again-some-overhead-luggage-is-going-to-shift-unexpectedly-on-your-freaking-head, world...OCCASSIONALLY a light shines, a bright surprise burst on the vast gray mediocrity of air travel. OCCASIONALLY, someone actually still gives a hoot.

Test Me If You Can

Ever see a headline on a press release like this?

“According to the widely respected OhGosh Group, OUR Product Performs Better Than THEIR Product!”

or

“New Report from World-Renowned Acme Consulting Proves XYZ Technology’s New Stamflatz 10000 delivers More Gigaflux Capacity than ABC Technology’s Burgpultz 500!”

Or how about my personal favorite?

“Industry Leading Analyst Firm Ranks XYZ Technology’s New Stamflatz 10000 the Clear Leader in Customer Satisfaction!”

Oh, and the tweets are even worse:

“Great News! We absolutely blow away Burgpultz! But, don’t take our word for it.. check out HTTP.BS.B.LY”

You know the type – usually sounds all hyperventilated and squealy. Ugh.

My good friend and colleage, Lori MacVittie just wrote a blog on this subject, For Thirty Pieces of Silver My Product Can Beat Your Product, that got my 'marketing professional' dander dandying.