emergencemarketing.com

Marketing Sherpa came up (free for a few weeks) with three trends in IT marketing today (here):

• Fear-based messaging is a complete turn-off – replace it with a safety message…I buy that
• Fewer than 10% of IT pros are interested in reading blogs…I buy that fact, but not Marketing Sherpa’s conclusion (see below). Noteworthy is that 51% of reporters read blogs looking for stories…
• Companies should invest more $$ in lead loyalty programs – meaning investing in keeping warm those leads that come in but are not yet ready to buy…duh…if you have not been doing that so far you are wasting your time and money

Ok, back to the blogs for a second. The article posits that all IT people are early adopters and that it is therefore surprising that only so few people read blogs. The article further recommends companies to do the following:

“Our advice? Move your blog-marketing to the PR department. Write the ads and/or blogs themselves with an eye toward catching journalists’ attention, instead of the end-sales-prospect. Naturally, do the exact opposite with your press releases, which with search engine and portal distribution are more likely to be read by thousands more end-prospects than they will be read by journalists, who prefer to sniff out exclusives.”

Talk about a flawed assumption that leads to a bad recommendation! Not all IT people are early adopters. In fact, and just like in any other market, 2.5% of the IT buyers are “innovators”, 13.5% are early adopters and the rest are majority buyers and laggards – who buy primarily based on recommendations from people they know within their own industry. Whomever sold or marketed in the IT space will relate to that. And that is exactly where Blogs and Wikis are – somewhere between innovators and early adopters. That being said, I am convinced that this wave will cross the chasm, and when it does – it will do so faster than the web 1.0 wave. So you better be ready or you will lose out!

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