The World of Informed Marketers

I’m proud to announce our latest release – Appature Social Media Sentiment Analysis. This new technology allows Appature users to not only capture and analyze data from Twitter, YouTube, and industry blogs – but to also take action on that information immediately. This capability is an important step in our vision of providing a comprehensive, Surprisingly Simple solution that enables marketers to take truly meaningful action that delivers to the top line, and cuts on the bottom line. From a capability perspective, this vaults Appature forward: some in our strategy group have characterized this release as adding the “ears of marketing” to our existing “eyes” and “mouth”. What a pretty face

We’ve extended our investment in the space and beyond Chatterfly based on direct feedback from both our existing and prospective customers. While the “Is Twitter a fad?” debate remains lively, the trends in customer behavior cannot be disputed –customers are engaging with each other, and doing so with passion and in droves. As we look across the web to both Twitter and other social networks, forums, blogs, and the expanding content on YouTube, it’s clear that both physicians and patients continue to support one another through community sites and blogs, and provide useful information to one another using platforms like Twitter and YouTube. Furthermore, these are also increasingly becoming valid modes of communication for our customers, and our ability to help them measure effectiveness and adjust messages and communications immediately provides strong competitive advantage for them.

On the surface, some of the capabilities seem to mimic the legacy players in social media sentiment analysis technology – using our engine you can dial-in keywords of your brand, competitive brands, and industry terms. Our reporting engine provides rich and in-depth insight on the frequency these keywords appear, the sentiment in which they are used, and who authored the relevant comments. What’s brought this capability leaps and bounds over other offerings, however, is Appature’s ability to let marketers segment on this data in the context of all the other information that lives in the Appature system. For example, you can now search against criteria such as, “Show me all doctors that work in hospitals with more than 250 beds that have more than 5 dietitians on staff, that have a negative sentiment about sugar substitutes.” In this case, you may be selling a sugar substitute product like Splenda or Equal, and you can choose to adjust and search against any keywords as well as other information you may have in your Appature database about your customers and prospects. With this capability, Appature also automatically creates social profiles for people that may not be currently physicians or patients in your Appature database, and automatically builds on top of that profile so when that potential customer is engaged you have a tremendous amount of information that will help you send relevant communications and serve them effectively.

Lastly, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer a big congratulations to the team for making this happen, against many odds. This was truly a team effort – involving a cross functional group across business strategy teams, program management, and of course a massive effort by our world-class development organization. Most importantly, I’d like to thank our customers and partners who provided brilliant industry insight and feedback on how this capability will be used and leveraged inside of their best-in-class marketing organizations.

Our Social Media Sentiment Analysis technology represents one of the more robust offerings around sentiment analysis and social media monitoring in the marketing space. To learn more, please feel free to contact us directly at info@appatureinc.com or call 206-493-5428.

I’m proud to announce AppatureLabs – our sandbox for new and innovative ideas from the Appature team.  As the enterprise marketing space rapidly evolves, we felt the need to have a mechanism for members of our team to explore new areas without sacrificing the immediate needs of our customers.  This allows us to continue to serve short and medium term customer needs, while getting ahead of the curve in areas that could *potentially* become important for marketers very quickly.

One such need, is allowing marketers to leverage the fast-growing community on Twitter.  I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical of all the hype, but as I have learned more, the applicability for companies like @dell, @comcast, and even healthcare organizations like @childrensLA certainly has significant marketing and customer service value.  While it remains to be seen if Twitter will be a viable marketing “channel” long-term, developing an application for Twitter has allowed us to build a practice around quickly adding new communication channels to Appature Enterprise Marketing, as well as get solid ground in the broader social media space.

With this in mind, I’d like to introduce you to Chatterfly – one of the first Twitter applications developed for marketers and brand managers.  For our customers that choose to try Chatterfly, it fully integrates with our enterprise marketing platform, adding relevant trending information to a customers profile and providing all the benefits that come with that.  Some specific capabilities include:

• See what’s trending on your “friends” stream. For marketers that have already created a Twitter identity for a specific company or brand, you will now be able to get quick market intelligence on what your brand stewards care about at this very moment.
• Search your friends stream. You may want to see if there are specific keywords that are being mentioned by those following your brand – for example things like “heart disease” or “exercise”.  This can provide intelligence on what programs to launch, which existing programs may resonate, and whom to target.
• Archive all tweets. As we evaluate the need of this technology, we’ll work to provide intelligence tools on top of archived tweets to provide trending and analysis against the timing of marketing programs allowing you to associate the launch of initiatives or programs and the reaction on social media sites, like Twitter.

Having Chatterfly integrated with Appature Enterprise Marketing will also enable a number of automated communication capabilities on top of action or behavior in the social media world.  Even if you are not an Appature customer, feel free to give Chatterfly a try and let us know what you think.  It’s free.  Try Chatterfly now @ chatterfly.appaturelabs.com

Lastly, I want to extend my congratulations to the Chatterfly team on a great launch.  This kind of innovation is critical for Appature as we will always be looking for new ways to help our customers and partners gather market intelligence and capitalize on new communication channels.  If you have any questions, comments, or ideas we’d love to hear from you – feel free to send me email: ceo [at] appatureinc [dot] com.

A colleague forwarded me an excellent piece from Forrester’s “Groundswell” blog on creating social applications in the life sciences/healthcare field.  This is the first articulation I’ve seen of some of the real issues faced in building such applications.  The value medical device, diagnostic, and drug companies can provide through this mechanism is tremendous - and we are  helping many of these organizations create web applications as value-added services to their customers.  However, the issue we always face is understanding the regulatory boundaries since there are not yet clear guidelines from the FDA, and as such many internal regulatory groups do not know how the application should be treated.

As a result, the [intangible] cost of creating these value-added services goes up considerably due to the need of moderation services, etc. - not to mention the number of iterations we go through figuring out which features or capabilities will make it through regulatory approval and which ones will not.  In fact, I was at a conference in Chicago just yesterday talking to senior executives from some large healthcare companies struggling with this very issue.

Framework for Application Audience

We had a great discussion about the incredible value social applications can provide to patients and in-turn back to the company (using the right CRM techniques of course), but both where to start and how to manage the regulatory environment are still open issues.  This framework from the Forrester piece (pictured right) provides an excellent starting point for at least the first issue in terms of where to start and how to think about where other disease states fit in.

As far as getting through the regulatory questions around this, I’m confident that technology is moving fast enough that we will soon see regulations catch up.  This will allow us to effectively innovate without worrying about creating an application that “will get you fired” as the title of the article so eloquently suggests.

Shar VonBoskirk over at the Forrester Blog has an interesting post today noting that “the down economy is actually the *right* time to catalyze marketing change.”  I couldn’t agree more, especially now when the technologies available to enable such change are so vast.  In fact, the ability to leverage web marketing, email, and social media (as is covered mostly in her post) make it both easy and cost effective to do so.  This is especially true in healthcare, given the fact that many of these techniques are still emerging.

As I noted in my earlier post, 9 ways to do more with less, something as simple as testing campaigns through electronic mediums first can prove to be an extremely valuable exercise in determining what kind of effectiveness you can expect when making a bigger investment in launching a broader electronic or print campaign.  While monitoring social media is certainly a great way to get a sense for what your target customer base is looking for, in healthcare we don’t necessarily have that as a tool in all cases.

That being said, the growth of both physician and patient use of the web has created opportunities to engage with your customer base that was not prevalant as recently as 18 months ago.  We are now starting to see the use of web and email in the space that drives enough traffic and use to capture a statistically significant sample size for getting this insight.  What’s even more exciting, is that those results will help indicate whether the entire initiative can move to an electronic format - dramatically reducing the total cost of execution and lowering the cost of customer acquisition in many cases.

Companies that use these tools (email, social media, web) are creating an opportunity for themselves to engage customers in a way that will determine how they do business in the future, both in terms of the medium, the message, and the metrics that can be captured.  And as Shar points out, exploring these techniques is even less risky than just doing the “same ol” and can drive innovation during a time where many marketing orgs can benefit.

This evening, I had the pleasure of being invited to the first meeting of the “Digital Leadership Council” for the American Cancer Society (ACS).  It’s exciting to have an opportunity to contribute my time to such a great cause.  What I didn’t realize, however, was that I would also be given an opportunity to think about and work with something I have devoted my whole career to - information.

The board is charged with looking to advance the ACS’s mission of saving lives, but using as a technology as a means to do so.  As people went around the table and shared stories of how cancer has affected their lives, it became clear that a significant issue for patients, caregivers, and family members was access to information.  I was amazed to hear stories of how mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, completely shut down after being diagnosed with the disease and the struggle for families to figure out everything from treatment options to dietary needs.  Like many of this generation, before tonight I thought about cancer as a disease that needed to be treated with advances in medicine and ultimately a “pill you could pop.”  It soon became evident, however, that this disease ultimately may not be cured with just a purple pill - but rather the power of information and how it can be used to drive a movement.  By arming so many passionate people with information, everyone who is touched by this disease has the opportunity to help patients and ultimately through that exchange of support and knowledge a holistic cure can emerge.

What makes this a real possibility is that with one of the largest fund raising machines in the country, over 3 million volunteers, and nearly 7500 staff, the ACS has a wealth of information and resources that can be extremely useful for everyone touched by the disease.  The challenge now is how to make sure that information they have, and the information created by so many patients, survivors, and even pharma and biotech companies, can be used to elevate the dialogue, support research, and ultimately create a movement that will use the power of a community of people and organizations working even closer to create a cure.

Fortunately, the [online] technological advancements of the past decade can help make this happen.  The ACS is, perhaps unknowingly, joining a dialogue that we see even in healthcare marketing - personalization.  Tonight we discussed how social networks, blogs, and many other tools can help to identify and create a more personal experience that will better engage all of us to support patients of cancer and help “get in front of the disease”.  At the end of the day, it’s that personal experience that drives participation and encourages people to take the call to action. I was astonished and excited by how similar these needs are to those our company tries to solve every day: put the patient in the middle and reach them at the right time, with the right message, using the right medium.

I’m excited to continue participating in this group and coming up with new and interesting ways to help what I like to think about as “saving lives with information”.  Because ultimately information is only useful if it’s consumed

If you have any ideas on this initative, what would be useful for cancer patients, or where they are going soon after being diagnosed with the disease, I would love to hear more about this.  Emails or comments about any of this here on the  blog much appreciated.  More updates to come.

In these challenging economic times, we’re finding that many marketing organizations are asked to deliver the same top line revenue number (or more) with fewer resources across the board.  The paradox this creates is obvious – in a market where overall spending is on the decline, how can you deliver greater top line and stay competitive without making even more investment in marketing?

In an ideal world, those investments would be viable – but a world where the Dow drops 25% within the first 60 days of the year is far from ideal.

SO – what can YOU do about it?  Here’s a list of 9 things we might recommend:

1. Put the data that you already have, to work. Look internally, get your hands on the data, and put it to work.  Most of the companies we talk to already have a lot of great data.  Sure, we help add quite a bit to that, but it doesn’t mean that there cannot be some analysis done based on information that is already in the organization.  Try this exercise – go talk to 3 or 4 marketing managers that handle programs where customer data is collected.  Even if it’s in spreadsheets, look across 4-5 spreadsheets and see if you can compile one customer record.  This exercise will help you start to understand what your customers look like, and the accuracy of your company’s understanding of that customer.  This in turn can help you identify which are the really interesting campaigns and which ones you can do without for the time being.
2. Hammer on the campaigns that worked. One thing I’ve seen over the past few years, especially in what I might call “high performance” marketing organizations, are smaller projects that got great results but were not big enough to be meaningful in the grand scheme of things.  A more budget constrained environment could provide a good opportunity to take a look at what some of the results were, even on a small scale.  For example, look at very simple metrics like % of respondents to an email campaign, or # of registrations for a special offer in comparison to impressions or those targeted.  While not super useful in a small context, try repeating that same experiment 3 or 4 more times and see if you can produce the same results as the program did initially.  The program that was “insignificant in size” just became 4x larger, and 4x more successful.
3. Start small and TEST. Our product team has worked extremely hard to be obsessive about putting in features like this, because a.) its really difficult to test and b.) there are not many tools available that make it easy.  But if you can, force yourself and your organization to take a few extra days to test.  If you happen to have a big campaign launching, see if you can even randomly carve out 1% - 3% of targets and launch a limited campaign.  The results you find may be surprising – but will ensure that the end result will drive results and not be a waste of precious marketing dollars.
4. Ask your customers critical questions. Shrinking budgets certainly have a trickle down, trickle over, and trickle up effect.  Use that as an opportunity to share your challenges with customers, and ask them very directly what theirs are.  There are many ways to do this – including leveraging online market research tools, or asking your sales force to poll customers with 2-3 quick questions about how your products and services can continue to serve them well.
5. Use email. Seems obvious, but many of you might still be paying a pretty penny to get email campaigns out the door.  Try any combination of the following: 1.) Broaden the audience to which email is blasted, and measure the delta in response rates, click-throughs, etc.  2.) Send more frequent emails to those who have been responding well (but don’t get too trigger happy) 3.) instead of investing in a beautiful HTML designed email, think about just a banner at the top and run the rest in text.  Could save you thousands in creative and other fees.
6. Look for ways to supplant existing budgets. This is absolutely a time to start thinking about a better mouse trap.  Take a look at how much is being spent on things like email communication, customer insight, and analytics and see where there are cheaper, or even free tools that can start to replace other more manual solutions – or at least get you in that direction.
7. Understand what’s happening in the field. Pick up the phone and call 10 reps in the field.  Ask them the same set of questions that might help you get an understanding of what people are saying – what products they are interested in and where they are being squeezed on budget.  This might help you understand where to focus in the upcoming quarter and where to expect decline.  Awareness of this is the first step to knowing how much slack there is to pick up.
8. Personalize the customer experience. Try and find a really specific set of customers and focus a few messages directly to their pain points.  Even if it represents only 1% or 2% of your customer base, the exercise of creating very personal messages that are targeted to a specific audience or patient base will help guide how you want to talk to personalized segments.  More importantly, the results will be even more telling.  In most cases, especially with “ePharma Consumers” or patients looking to manage a particular disease, they will not only appreciate the personal messages more it will encourage behavior that will result in truly better management of their condition.
9. Create your conversion funnel. This is an exercise I love going through with customers: think about characteristics of your “advocates” – the people that will not only be shepherds of your product, but will at a minimum be very engaged with your communications and messages.  Next, give yourself 4 opportunities to get to a slice of approx 5,000 consumers (or whatever number is relevant to you).  The 4 opportunities can be any combination of email, web, direct mail, webinars, etc.  The key is to link them.  For example your first email directs consumers to a website, etc.  By thinking about how to move people through the customer journey and ultimately become advocates, you can get even more deliberate about how your different offers and messages link together which in turn provides the opportunity for better measurement, which, you got it, gives you the data to spend most effectively.

If you’d like to chat more about any of these, don’t hesitate to email me – ceo [at] appatureinc [dot] com.  I’d also love to hear about any other ideas or techniques that might have worked for you in reducing your spend and keeping stellar results.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately on how we came up with our tagline, so here goes:

I was fortunate to be part of the third cohort to graduate from a college at the University of Washington which I think laid the foundation for how I think about technology in many ways.  The Informatics program focused almost solely on how to design and build technology that makes sense to human beings (they even called the two strands of our program the technology track and human track).  Funny enough, I went through the curriculum without hearing the word “simple”.

Little did I realize that the passion that I developed in my years both in class and doing research at the UW would be so in sync with a passion that was brewing in someone I didn’t even know at the time.  As a technologist, Chris was passionate about getting rid of messy code and never creating products that would not work for the end user.  When the two of us first started talking about creating a company late in 2006, we got very excited about the possibility that we had everything we needed to create enterprise software that didn’t have to, for lack of a better term, suck.  We found this pain point to be especially true with customers we talked to in the Fortune 500, though marketing tools at companies of all sizes seemed to be especially true or non-existent.

Luckily we have an excellent agency partner that helped us realize our passion for usable software could be described in two words: surprisingly simple℠.

At the end of the day, making the technology simple is the only thing that matters when talking about meeting the needs of business users, especially those in marketing.  I want my marketing people thinking about strategy, the right hooks, new markets, gaining market share, positioning – not writing SQL statements or doing pivot tables in Excel.  It’s like asking Heidi Klum to make chocolate éclairs and Emeril to strut down the runway in a size 2 black cocktail dress at New York Fashion Week.  It just makes no sense, and the end result would be a disaster.

It’s a sad reality in many cases, and what’s worse, is that if it’s not simple people just won’t use it.  And in the case of our product, if marketers aren’t using it they are tying up other resources, spending more than is necessary, or worse forcing to take action and make decisions on limited information.

Those two words are more than a mantra or a tagline, they’ve become like a religion around here.  What’s funny is how incredibly difficult and complex it is to actually make something simple, especially streamlining sophisticated marketing needs or trying to answer the question “Who are my customers?” in a surprisingly simple℠ way.

This approach is in the DNA of our product group, and they spend countless hours and sleepless nights focused on doing everything humanly possible to make it all just work.  It’s truly a journey, and not a destination and our process and roadmap are reflective of that.  The level of usability and design these things go through is unbelievable - especially given the technical complexity that a lot of changes require before we ship a new feature.

What I love is that the passion is so strong, that is has extended to how we do business.  We want it to be surprisingly simple℠ to do business with us – from contract signing to on-going support.  We’ll let our customers be the judge of that.

Being that a lot of our customers are companies that sell products and services to patients/consumers, the idea of “behavior modification” tends to come up a lot.  I was in a meeting today where this very notion was discussed extensively.  While seemingly selfish (drive product sales), it’s interestingly altruistic.  At the end of the day, our customers are creating products that treat painful diseases or even prevent them from occurring.  The more we can help our customers drive patient behavior modification, the better patient’s diseases will be managed or treated.  I have to say, it feels great to be part of something that helps make that happen.

Because of the many “ancillary benefits” that come with driving behavior modification, we spend a lot of time thinking about how our products can make it easier for our customers to drive changes in behavior with their consumer base.

The irony here, is that we don’t spend as much time thinking about it in those terms, the way we really should.  At the end of the day, we’re trying to do the same thing they are – change behavior so it enhances the consumer experience and eventually the [company’s revenue] outcome.  In our case, we want to show marketers a new world where data is accessible on the desktop, easy to take action on, and instantaneously useful in garnering critical business insight.  It doesn’t seem that it’s something any of us (even non-marketers) are necessarily used to, so this is going to be a new kind of behavior modification from the get go.  Of course we’ve got to come up with the right behavior modification of our own – but continue to do so in a way that does not disrupt workflow or dramatically change the way things are done today.   Unless of course, it’s perfectly convenient.  By focusing on the user experience we are helping to drive behavior changes, but really the results of campaigns run through our system will have to speak for themselves.