Author Archives: Chris Kenton

Content is Still King

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83I‘m participating in a Webinar this afternoon hosted by my long-time friends and partners at Clickability. The Webinar is all about storytelling in the age of social media, or to be more pithy, how content is still king. This is hallowed ground for me. I got my degree in Creative Writing as an aspiring starving poet, but then became a journalist when I didn’t enjoy starving. My first startup was in Web-based publishing, and as a marketer I’ve leveraged my passion for writing to better understand the power of positioning and messaging. Today, SocialRep is all about gathering and making sense of consumer stories.

My perspective on content today is shaped by what’s happening to the structure of media. I’ve been hammering this concept of the media bubble and how it’s bursting, and content is one of the main issues at play. Think about the media structure we’ve grown up with: a monolithic media edifice in which a cohesive story–whether news, PR or advertising–is researched, baked and transmitted like a surging tide over the accepting audience. All of our business infrastructure is built around this edifice, rather than the customers who buy our products. Advertising isn’t about relationships with customers, it’s about relationships with media buyers and media channels. PR is about relationships with analysts and reporters. To the extent that we incorporate customers into the story, it’s either petri-dish research into demographics and psychographics, or convenient case studies that exemplify our storyline.

All of that is changing, for reasons I won’t rehash, but you can read about in the media bubble post. The point for businesses today is twofold: 1) barriers to business are reduced by technology and increasing global competition, which means more competition for customer attention, 2) big media is faltering, which means the channels for telling the story the way we’re all used to are narrowing.

The simple fact is that companies can no longer rely on getting their story out to consumers effectively through the old media channels. Getting your story out through social media is rapidly growing alternative, but it doesn’t function the way businesses are organized to operate. You can’t just bake a story and hit “send” and expect that consumers will digest it. They’re more likely to challenge it, and call BS on every little point of convenient spin you’ve so carefully crafted. Instead, companies need to live their stories, and they need to take ownership of their own storytelling.

I won’t take the wind out of the Webinar. We’ll be talking about content in the context of social media, including marketing and selling processes and of course, technology. Robert Carroll, VP of Marketing  from Clickability is hosting, and I’ll be joined by Sandy Carter, VP from IBM, and Eloqua’s CTO, Steven Woods. You can find a link to the Webinar, including on-demand viewing after today, at Clickability’s site.

Photo Credit:goldsardine

Vado HD Pocket Video Camera

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Over the past couple of months, I’ve been heads down and out of sight–even off Twitter, gasp!–working on SocialRep and working for our customers. I’ve finally got a few moments to come up for air, and I want to write a few posts about some of the cool projects our customers are developing. You can take this as a disclaimer: I’m honored by the customers we’re working with and I’m excited about what they’re doing. I’m not wearing the hat of a reporter, but of a marketing exec, so take any comments I make about products and services in that light.

For today’s post, I want to highlight Creative Labs, one of the most prolifically innovative consumer electronic companies out there. In the early days of the desktop revolution, Creative developed the SoundBlaster, bringing high fidelity sound to what otherwise would be just computing machines with video. What’s multimedia without sound? Years later, before anyone heard of the iPod, Creative began developing MP3 players, like the Nomad and the Nomad Jukebox, which later evolved into the Zen that Creative still produces today. They have an incredibly broad product line of computer sound cards, headphones, MP3 players, pro audio equipment, video conferencing equipment, home audio devices to wirelessly join your computer and stereo, and the Vado line of pocket video cameras, the smallest HD cameras on the market. I’ve joked they should market themselves as the Willy Wonka of consumer electronics.

Creative is working incredibly hard to redefine the way they develop and market products, and I’ve had the great fortune of working them on some projects. One of the benefits, of course, is scoring some sample products, and I took home an armload of Creative products to play with. One product, which I’ve become addicted to is a high-end gaming headset with a noise canceling microphone. I can do Skype calls from the coffee roasters and no one can tell I’m not in my office. But the product I wanted to shamelessly shill today is their Vado HD, a tiny hi-def video camera that’s smaller than your wallet, but shoots an hour of high quality video. The uses for a blogger like me are obvious, promising the ability to shoot interviews and customer case studies with a device I can fit in a jacket pocket. (Now if only I could fit my production and editing partners in a pocket too…)

So I shot my first ready-for-YouTube video this weekend. Peter Byck, the CEO of Winery Exchange invited me up to his family’s ranch and winery at Paradise Ridge for his annual holiday campout. Up near the winery, they’ve partnered with local artists to provide a place to install large sculptures. There are some truly amazing pieces of art, many of which incorporate sound and interaction. One of those pieces I captured on hi-def video using the Vado HD.

I still have a lot to learn about using such a small camera correctly. Ideally, you want to capture a short piece in one take with no need to edit. When you do, you can literally just plug the camera into a USB port, use the popup video browser to find your clip, press the YouTube button and fill out your video data, and the next step is watching your uploaded video on the Web. Check out the clip in HD if you have a good connection.

As I mentioned, Creative is doing a lot of work on redefiining their marketing approach. Keep an eye out for some of their new programs and campaigns. I’ll post more about what Ican, when I can.

Embracing the Tortoise

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bunnybonesI‘m doing a Webinar today on Surviving and Thriving in the Economic Downturn, along with Thor Muller from Get Satisfaction and Scott Wilder from Intuit, moderated by Bill Johnston from Forum One, who also manages the fantastic Online Community Unconference. Working on my thoughts around this topic has been a great opportunity to reflect on why SocialRep is still plugging along quite well, in the midst of all the economic doom and gloom.

There are a lot of factors at play. But when I stand back and think about the meta frame for why SocialRep is still tooling along instead of flaming out or getting pummeled, there’s a pattern that interests me. In Startup World, especially in the valley, the dominant imperative is speed. Organize quickly. Raise money. Get to market fast. Grow fast. Run, baby, run. But for us, the focus palpably shifted last August when we stopped chasing money to focus instead on customers and product quality. Sure, we’ve grown much slower, but today we have a much more solid product and a base of revenue, which is perfect for a slow economic environment.

In short, we’ve embraced the Tortoise. We’ve taken a long view of the market, and marshaled our resources to move deliberately and steadily, holding ourselves in check when hares seem to pop up and speed away in front of us. It’s nerve racking sometimes to see a new competitor jump up and sprint away, but by now we’ve seen a couple of those hares further down the road, flattened like roadkill.

What does it mean to Embrace the Tortoise? It means to find and focus on your vision, and find your own pace in the market by being true to your customers and your product. A long term vision is not just stringing short-term results together–if you’re always sprinting, you eventually run out of steam. You need a solid sense of direction you believe in enough to plod toward, without being driven to waste your energy every time a competitor makes a move. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

It also means to take a long-term view in understanding your market–and this is especially important in marketing and social media. If you want to make it further than the next turn in the road, you need some strategy to anticipate what’s beyond it. The best way to do that is to be a student of history, which is something in short supply in the marketing profession. I talk frequently about the historical context of the social media phenomenon and the bursting media bubble. If you want a synopsis, I wrote about here.

It’s been a busy few weeks, but I’m happy to say I’m finally circling back with Jonathan Knowles to continue the discussion on Social Media and Marketing ROI, and we’re launching a survey together to measure marketer’s experiences with social media metrics. If you’re a marketing professional, please join us and take the survey. We’ll provide the results to everyone who participates.

In a Recession, Tourism Goes Local

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A few weeks ago, my wife and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. We were lucky enough to get away for a few days prior to our anniversary, but I wanted to do something special on our actual wedding date, which was mid-week this year. All I had in mind was a nice dinner in San Francisco, until I met Michael Hraba at the first SF Social Media Breakfast. Michael is a marketing consultant to hotels, and he encouraged me to think about doing a marketing event at Cavallo Point, a brand new resort right next to the Golden Gate on the historic grounds of Fort Baker. That sparked the idea of taking my wife away just a few miles from home, and launched what I’m certain will be our new anniversary tradition.

Since we would only be gone overnight, I didn’t need to tell my wife anything until the last moment. I set up a sleepover for my son at a schoolmate’s, booked a room and dinner reservation, and casually told my wife to pack for an overnight on the morning of our anniversary. After work, I picked up my wife and we drove 10 minutes to Cavallo, checked in to a breathtaking suite under the Golden Gate, and opened a bottle of champagne before the 101 commute was even underway.

Cavallo Point

I love to travel, but I have to say, local tourism has a big attraction for me now. We had none of the stress of dealing with major packing, or airports, or house- and pet-sitting. Everything–including our son–was only minutes away in case of an emergency. Instead of spending the better part of a day making flights and connections, we checked in and checked out to the rest of the world. And for a fraction of the cost of leaving town, we enjoyed a spectacular resort and an amazing dinner. The next day, although it was bittersweet to stay only one night, we shared a nice breakfast and slipped right back into our lives without the huge re-entry price you typically have to pay for being away. The unexpected result was the sense of relaxation you usually only get on the third or fourth day of vacation.

I suspect we’ll hear a lot more about local tourism as the recession grinds along. You’d be amazed how easy it is to get away for just a night during the week, and mid-week specials make it a steal, even for the best rooms. Not only is it a nice way to see home in a new light, the memory refreshes every time you drive past the places you visit as a “tourist”.

If you’re in the Bay Area, Cavallo is phenomenal–the food, the hospitality, the view–they’ve really made a magical place. It’s well worth such an easy trip.

Social Media Breakfast on ROI

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The second San Francisco Social Media breakfast was a great success, despite the competition with Web 2.0 down the street not to mention spring vacation for many people. Jonathan Knowles flew in from Toronto to join us in a discussion on Social Media Metrics, and as always he did not disappoint. Jonathan’s rare ability to bridge the gap between marketing and finance provided a lot of wit and wisdom for marketers struggling to justify an investment in social media. There were so many worthwhile takeaways, from insights into the mindset of the CFO to suggestions on how to frame marketing metrics for social media.

We’ll have video of the breakfast from MinerPro available shortly, and you can get some snippets of the discussion from the Twitter feed. We’ll be kicking off our book discussion of Jonathan’s Vulcans, Earthlings and Marketing ROI next week.

In the meantime, I’ll set the tone for the discussion by calling out one of the key insights from Jonathan’s talk. Jonathan pointed out the fact that ROI as a specific metric is a short-term measurement of efficiency. In the CFO’s mind, any time you discuss ROI, the financial assumption is that the expense and the resulting revenue occur in the same quarter. So when marketers use the term ROI in the context of social media, they’re explicitly limiting the frame of discussion to short-term revenue generation, taking off the table any longer benefits to brand equity, improvements in customer satisfaction, and long-term reduced costs of marketing.

As Jonathan pointed out, there are three domains in which CFOs measure value: Revenue, Growth and Risk (reduction). While there are some avenues to short-term revenue from social media campaigns, primarily in retail, for the vast majority of social media efforts today the real value will be seen in longer-term Growth and Risk Reduction. When, to a CFO’s ears, marketers clumsily speak about “ROI” as a catch-all phrase for poorly defined “value”, they’re missing a critical opportunity to communicate the value of social media and to set expectations for measuring success. That simply isn’t a mistake most marketers can afford in this economic climate.

Join us for the online book discussion to dig in more deeply into this topic.

Jonathan Knowles addresses the Social Media Metrics challenge.

Jonathan Knowles addresses the Social Media Metrics challenge.

An ROI story: The metrics were thiiiiiiiis big

An ROI story: The metrics were thiiiiiiiis big

Photos: Thanks Bill Johnston!

Social Media and the Cult of Marketing ROI

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Mr. Kool-AidOver the past few years, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to write about marketing finance and metrics. Like many marketers of my generation, my understanding of marketing performance metrics was transformed by the 2000 recession. At the time I was president of a marketing agency in San Francisco, and as the economy plunged, I watched as clients mercilously slashed marketing teams and budgets. When the economy bottomed out, Marketing ROI became an obligatory mantra recited in every new business meeting. Marketers got swept up in the cult of ROI, accepting an unassailable truth that dictated their behavior, without question or true belief. Few marketers had the training to put ROI in a real financial context–our business schools don’t like to worry creative minds with accounting requirements–so Marketing ROI was interpreted in myriad ways, which often meant little more than a vague definition of “success”.

With a vacuum of financial acumen among marketers and a rising imperative for accountability, CFOs gained ever greater dominion over marketing programs by holding tighter purse strings. Marketing gurus responded with all kinds of new marketing formulas featuring pseudo-financial concepts–Return on [Your Concept Here]–instead of promoting basic financial fundamentals so marketers could connect with the CFO on common ground. This only distanced marketers further from the boardroom, as I wrote a couple of years ago:

Marketing loses all credibility with the board room suite when it twists and bends financial metrics designed to measure value creation into concepts that skirt the issue of accountability for actually creating value.

Even before the new financial crisis hit, I could see the ROI shackles hobbling marketing organization’s and their ability to innovate. It wasn’t the concept of measuring peformance that was the problem, but the inability of marketers to effectively argue a compelling business case that challenged whatever rigid ROI framework they felt imposed on them by the CFO. As social media surged, I sat in many dozens of new business meetings where marketing executives stalled out in their enthusiasm for innovation when it came to justifying any new program without a proven ROI. The irony was stunning: on the one hand, businesses and board rooms were buzzing with the new wisdom of Innovation, and yet they couldn’t execute anything innovative because there was no appetite for risk–and this was when times were good:

I don’t want to be flippant about this, but I think marketers need to bring a little balance to the justifiable demand for performance accountability. We do need to be accountable, and we do need to show that we’ve thoroughly vetted the investments we’re making. But when you’re in a competitive market that demands innovation, you have to get in the trenches to help innovation along, instead of just throwing up knee-jerk stop signs to every project that doesn’t come with a business case tied up in a neat bow. It makes me think of a prehistoric fish in a receding inland sea saying to an amphibian “so, what’s the business case for legs?”

With the new economic crisis deepening, this is going to be a critical test for marketers. A steep recession drives a natural imperative for immediate returns. But we’re not just in a recession. We’re at the apex of a global cycle of creative destruction. GM, CitiGroup, New York Times–representative samples of the titan industries of manufacturing, finance and media–are all on the edge of bankruptcy. The businesses that survive this destruction–and the marketers that support them–have to find new ways to drive returns, and those new methods are not going to come gift wrapped in a mature ROI model. In fact, ROI may be entirely the wrong financial metric. But marketers with no grounding in finance, and with no common ground to share with the CFO, won’t be in a position to make those arguments, or to critically challenge the happy case studies offered by vendors.

Fortunately, there are some ports in this storm. There are a few marketing thought-leaders that can not only bridge the gap between CMOs and CFOs, but they have the talent to make marketing finance accessible to mere mortals. One of my favorite lights in this small pantheon is Jonathan Knowles, a banker by training and a brand consultant by trade. Jonathan has written extensively about marketing finance, including an entertaining book on Marketing ROI. I interviewed Jonathan for BusinessWeek back in 2005 and we’ve maintained a friendship ever since. Jonathan has opened my eyes to a number of financial concepts that illuminate marketing trends, including the critical rise of intangible assets as we’ve shifted away from a manufacturing economy.

I’ll be writing a string of posts in conversation with Jonathan over the next few weeks on marketing finance and social media, focusing on the fundamentals marketers need to understand to escape the Cult of Marketing ROI and develop a strong partnership with their CFO. We’re jointly fielding a survey on Social Media Metrics, and Jonathan will be my guest this Friday at the San Francisco Social Media Breakfast. There are a few seats left for the breakftast, which you can pick up online.

Photo credit: allspice1

Hacking Firefox to Improve Motivation, Productivity… and Sanity?

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I’ve been truly slammed for the past few weeks, with a new SocialRep product release in the works, new customers, and the San Francisco Social Media Breakfast coming up next week. But as they say, if you want something done, give it to someone who’s busy. And this week, I finally found a resolution to a problem that’s been bugging me for months.

If you’ve joined this crazy productivity revolution, where you can run a couple of companies, half a dozen blogs, and a string of online personas, then, like me, you’ve probably reached a point of virtual schizophrenia. I’ve been working for months on finding a strong thread of singularity and simplification in the things I do, without losing the rich variety of channels to connect and create value. I’ve noticed that just the fragmentation of logging in to various separate blogs, social networks and websites has created a very real psychological resistance. I forget which bookmark to follow, which site I’m posting on, which idea was supposed to go where, which means that instead of managing these things on autopilot, I have to actively think about the most mundane tasks continually. Which sucks.

So after searching for more complex ways to simplify–like multi-tenant blog networks, and complex syndication routines–I finally came across a less perfect, but vastly simpler solution. Instead of trying to centralize everything, what if I could create connection “pods” that would segment and automate many of the connection tasks? And I’ve figured out how to do it with Firefox.

Here’s the skinny, and a disclaimer. I’m describing a conceptual routine that I’ve successfully implemented on my computer. I’m not offering a service or technical support. Proceed at your own risk. 🙂

The premise of this concept is simple.

  1. I want to segment various common web connections and routines: Blogging, Networking, Business, Finance.
  2. I want to be able to click on one icon, and have all the related connections opened in browser tabs, ready to go.
  3. I want to customize each browser for each segment so that the working environment is visually distinct.
  4. I must be able to have multiple segments open simultaneously.
  5. Sorry, bookmarks won’t cut it. Not even close.

My solution is based on an aspect of FireFox that Web developers rely on–the ability to run multiple instances of the browser, under different user profiles, at the same time. If you have a home computer you share with your family, you might already have separate profiles for logging in to FireFox so that your bookmarks and history are yours alone. But if you take this concept up a notch, you can turn it into the solution I’m running now. The idea is to create a separate profile for each segment you want to manage (e.g. blogging), but then to use an obscure FF parameter to allow that profile to run simultaneously with other profiles. Each profile saves its own preferences, including bookmarks, themes, and session data, so you can customize a work environment for each group.

The result is a set of distinct icons on my task bar. When I click the “blogging” icon, an independent instance of Firefox with a slick Aero Theme opens, and automatically pulls up the admin pages of all my blogs in separate tabs. I use a password manager that assures that all I have to do is click “login”, and I’m ready to post on any blog in seconds. I’ve also customized the admin screens of each blog so they look like their respective blogs. When I click on Finance, a completely separate instance of Firefox opens, in a conservative theme, with my banking and accounting sites automatically opened in separate tabs. It’s awesome. I feel ten pounds lighter.

Here’s how to do it in Windows XP. Other systems may vary, but the concept is the same.

  1. Click on Start, Run, and type in “firefox.exe -ProfileManager”
  2. This brings up the Profile Manager. Create the Profiles you want. (Not sure how scalable this is, so be prudent.)profile
  3. Unless you want to be forced to select a profile every time you run FF, check the box “Don’t Ask at Startup”
  4. Now go to your desktop, right click on the desktop and choose “New > Shortcut”. This will be your launch icon.
  5. Right click on your new shortcut, and choose “Properties”properties
  6. For your “target” you need to enter the path to your “firefox.exe” file, probably in your Program Files, Firefox directory.
  7. In the same text field after the path to “firefox.exe”, type “-P Name” (replace “name” with the name of your profile, e.g. Blogging), followed by ” -no-remote”. The “no remote” part allows you to run simultaneous independent instances of Firefox.
  8. For clarity, you should “Change Icon…” in order to easily distinguish your launch icons. You can find lots of free icons on the web.
  9. Drag the icon to your task bar.task
  10. Customize each instance of Firefox to suit your segment. I’ve made sure each theme is a different color, so I know immediately where I am.

Once you have your instance of Firefox up and running for different profiles, use the Firefox preferences tab to establish the pages you want to load when you launch Firefox. If you want to simplify things, just open each of the pages you want in a separate tab, and each time  you reopen Firefox, choose to renew your old session, and all of those pages will reload. You can use Firefox password manager to remember logins to simplify it even further.

I’ve also added some Tab add-ons from Firefox to color and organize tabs, but that’s a whole playground unto itself. The bottom line for me is that I now have a set of buttons to launch dedicated working environments in a way that clarifies and automates many of the mind-numbing tasks that I shouldn’t be wasting RAM on. I hope you find the same result.

Here’s my dedicated blogging instance of FF, with the slick Aero Theme, with all my blog admin sites ready to go in separate tabs.

blogging

Sales 2.0: Opening the Dialog

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At our first Social Media Breakfast in San Francisco, we spent time talking with Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0. One of our objectives with the SMB in San Francisco is to meet business authors, get to know a bit about their background experience and perspectives, and then extend the conversation online to discuss their ideas and their work. So we’re going to kick this off with Anneke Seley and Sales 2.0.

If you missed the Social Media Breakfast, you can catch some of the outtakes in the video below, filmed by my partners at MinerPro. John did a great job boiling over an hour of dialog down to less than 10 minutes of outtakes to capture some of the depth of conversation.

To kick the discussion off, I want to start by addressing the concept of what “Sales 2.0” actually means. We’re hearing “2.0” applied to all manor of things (Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, CRM 2.0, PR 2.0), and many people assume the moniker is synonymous with the social media technology that enables Web 2.0. But it runs a bit deeper than that. For some, this may be a penetrating glimpse into the obvious, but “2.0” signifies a fundamental advance in an underlying system–a “major revision” in software terms, which is where the concept comes from.

It’s fascinating that we’ve boiled the meme of “fundamental change” down to a simple suffix, because it suggests we’ve arrived at a need to more simply indicate major transformations in systems that are fundamental to our daily life. It says that change is accelerating in its sweep through our institutions, and it establishes a clear line between the old and the new. The “new” certainly includes social media technology, and in fact, social media technology has been the major catalyst that set much of this change in motion. But to pin the meaning of the change on technology alone misses a much deeper reality: that these changes in technology are driving a fundamental transformation in the way humans interact, and in the way organizations function.

You can adopt all the Web 2.0 technology you want for your sales team, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get Sales 2.0. It’s not the technology, it’s how that technology changes the way we interact that people need to understand in order to get Sales 2.0. And that’s the opening question for this discussion.

How do you see technology changing sales processes and organizations, and how does that define what you understand as Sales 2.0?

Sales 2.0 at the SF Social Media Breakfast

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SF Social Media BreakfastI can’t tell you how pleased I was with the launch to the San Francisco Social Media Breakfast. We sold out our tickets and had a great turnout of about 50 people–which is pretty remarkable for a 7:30am event in the city. But hey, the traffic and parking was a breeze. We moved the event a couple doors down from Cafe de la Presse to The Wine Bar, which was a much better venue both for networking, and for the presentation with Anneke Seley.

We kicked the event off with an hour of networking over coffee and breakfast, and I did a an interview with Anneke Seley, sort of in the style of Fresh Air, before opening up the conversation. We talked about Anneke’s background and depth of experience in Silicon Valley–she was employee #12 at Oracle and launched their highly successful inside sales group–and used that as the backdrop for talking about the industry trends that have led to Sales 2.0, and how that’s reshaping the way businesses build sales organizations.

SF Social Media Breakfast
SF Social Media Breakfast

We’ll be book talking Sales 2.0 in the next week or two, so I don’t want to steal the thunder from the discussion, but one concept really jumped out at me that I’ve been thinking a lot about the past few days. It builds from Anneke’s discription of the way the environment for selling in Silicon Valley has changed over the past decade, and how the change has impacted Web 2.0 adoption.

As Anneke tells it in Sales 2.0, back in the day when she joined Oracle, there was a major shift just getting underway in the valley. Traditionally, companies like Oracle sold only extremely expensive enterprise products and sales focused on developing large accounts. Sales people were at home in the field, wining and dining clients and racking up huge expense accounts. As Oracle started selling cheaper products that could load onto desktop PCs, smaller companies became viable prospects, meaning smaller accounts that couldn’t sustain the huge costs of an enterprise-focused sales force.

That trend has only accelerated. We now have companies of all sizes buying products online, and in the case of software, often for a monthly subscription fee with little or no switching costs. What this means is that the cost of selling has to be dramatically reduced. We need efficient ways to meet customers online, attract, inform, educate, and persuade them to buy our products, and the cost of that sale has to be well within the falling margins for product revenue. This is a business driver for social media that goes beyond the red herring of how trendy Web 2.0 may be, and whether or not it’s a passing fad.

If you want to follow the Twitter conversation from the event, you can pick up some good bits of dialog, not to mention some good follows. Also, Jeff Weinberger has a post up about an aha social media moment that happened during the breakfast–which is exactly what it’s all about.

Stay tuned for the book discussion. I passed out a half-dozen books to people who committed to reading it this week. We’ll check in on Friday and start the ball rolling.

San Francisco Social Media Marketing Breakfast

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This Friday I’m kicking off a new event for marketers in the San Francisco area, in conjunction with the national Social Media Breakfast group. The bi-monthly breakfast will provide a forum for enterprise and social media marketers to get together and talk about emerging trends and challenges. Yeah, I know, there are already plenty of meetups and forums around. The difference here is a focus on the integration of social media into enterprise marketing and sales programs, rather than a focus on the latest Web 2.0 technology.

anneke_seleyOur first breakfast, at Cafe De La Presse in San Francisco, will feature a conversation with Anneke Seley, author of the new book Sales 2.0, Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. Anneke was one of the first employees at Oracle, where she started what may be the best-performing and widely renowned inside sales forces in the software industry. Today, Anneke is founder and CEO of PhoneWorks, a group of the industry’s best sales consultants, where she helps companies achieve revenue acceleration from professional inside sales teams.

I’m hosting this event under the MotiveLab banner, with production and video support from my long-time partners at Miner Productions. Seats are limited and moving fast. Tickets are $20, and are available online. Join us if you’re a social media marketer in the San Francisco area. I guarantee the conversation will be well worth your while.