Jake Sorofman
Research Director
1 years at Gartner
16 years IT industry
A former CMO, Jake Sorofman analyzes digital marketing strategy, trends and practices, with an emphasis on mobile, social and content marketing. ...Read Full Bio
by Jake Sorofman | June 19, 2013 | Submit a Comment
It seems like every time I get together with digital marketers these days they break the ice with a persistent question of utmost importance: Omnichannel or multichannel?
Tomayto or tomahto, right? Maybe, but maybe not.
Word nerds and industry analysts tend to unite around semantic debates. But I’d suggest that there’s something more fundamental in this distinction—something beyond the correctness of language.
Both sides of this debate probably agree with the premise that customer touch points are growing like kudzu. This adds to the challenge of orchestrating consistent, compelling—indeed, coherent—offers and experiences across online and offline, paid, earned and owned media.
Standards like HTML5 and techniques like mobile-first and responsive design help unify digital experiences; and data-driven techniques help us target and personalize offers and experiences to the market of one. But it doesn’t stop at bits on a screen. We also need to align offline experiences and operational details like incentive systems that create channel conflicts which can reveal themselves like ugly welding seams in the customer experience.
Getting this right is good for both customer and brand: better engagement and conversion makes marketers smile, while greater contextual relevance makes customers feel, well, something between less annoyance and utter delight.
This, I think, we can more or less agree upon.
But let’s get back to the tyranny of words—where the disagreement persists.
As my colleague Jennifer Beck correctly points out in her armchair etymology, omni is a prefix that stands for “every” or “all.” Thus, while I recognize the risk of parsing this argument too finely, omnichannel implies the activation of every channel for every offer and experience. Omni suggests all channels all the time.
Does that make sense? I think not.
Before you dismiss this as pedantic pseudo-punditry, consider what this means for digital marketers. Omnichannel asks the digital marketer to boil the ocean, to submit to the “matrix of hell” in mapping every offer and experience to every channel based on the glib conclusion that all channels must be engaged in the age of Omni.
This is a classic inside-out perspective that places methodology over customer intimacy. The better approach is to enrich your understanding of your audiences through data-driven and ethnographic techniques to model and map experiences across channels. Here, the customer is at the center of the discussion and their patterns and preferences drive channel selection. As Jennifer Beck says, “Multichannel is a complementary set of channels, based on the objective being served and the audience being targeted.”
In a sense, it’s less about omni or multi than it’s about the right channels. It’s about enabling customers to experience the equivalent of “MyChannel” personalization.
Postscript: Want to learn more about multichannel marketing? Gartner recently published its Magic Quadrant on Multichannel Campaign Management (subscription required). Also, register for the free public Gartner webinar on the topic here.
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | June 11, 2013 | 3 Comments
Of all the questions I hear on the topic of content marketing (and I hear plenty; content bigger than Elvis* these days), the one I hear most frequently can be approximated as follows:
How, in the name of all that is good and pure, do we produce engaging, share-worthy content every single day? I mean, we’re a [insert vertical industry] company, not a publisher.
I generally respond by suggesting that the “Three Cs” of content marketing—creation, curation and cultivation—should be your best friend. Sometimes your brand’s best content is actually created by someone else.
Then I offer the reminder that content marketing, like any other strategic commitment, requires discipline and consistency. Just as the sun rises, you shall tell your story.
This is around the time I get the look—a smirk-grimace-eye-roll that says, “Easier said than done, my friend.”
Then I concede that a full-blown content marketing program may well be beyond the reach of your internal skills and capacity, which is a fact that has given rise to the content marketing agency—both as a boutique entity and as a booming practice area within many communications and digital agencies. You needn’t go it alone.
But whether or not you go it alone, it’s useful to understand what it takes to be a great content marketer, not only during those fleeting moments of inspiration when the spirit moves, but each and every day, even when it doesn’t. The best content marketers think like manufacturers.
No, really; stay with me here.
Manufacturing is actually an instructive example for what it takes to scale and sustain a content marketing program. Why? Because content marketing requires a replenishing pipeline of engaging content—a content supply chain—that helps feed the beast every day.
Think of it this way:
- Demand planning is how manufacturers align supply and demand. For content marketers, it’s driven by market and social signals and your overall corporate strategy.
- Master production schedules are used by both manufacturers and content marketers to keep the trains running on time. Think of it as the editorial calendar and project plan rolled into one.
- Blueprints are visual diagrams and specifications that manufacturers use to ensure what’s produced matches what’s designed and to understand the interdependencies between the piece parts. For content marketers, blueprints describe how content elements map to content assets map to distribution channels. Blueprints ensure orderly, efficient and leveraged content marketing efforts that, like the best manufacturers, take advantage of reuse opportunities in everything you produce.
- Bills of material are the detailed parts lists that travel alongside a blueprint. For content marketers, these are the lists of content elements and artifacts and their various formats and renditions for publishing across channels.
- Production in manufacturing is the factory process that turns raw materials into finished goods. For content marketers, it’s sourcing, approval and distribution of content assets across paid, earned and owned channels.
Of course, you shouldn’t allow the process to get in the way of the practice. You also need to leave room for agility, allowing some creation and engagement to happen off to the side, in the moment. But, keep in mind that too much flexibility leads to chaos, and too much control leads to stasis. Combine the two and you get precisely what it takes to be a great content marketer: Agility.
(*) I was tempted to say that “content is king,” which it most certainly is. But the phrase is a tired cliché, worn thin by generations of breathless headlines and tradeshow presentations. So, here, it’s relegated to the footnotes, where it belongs, and replaced by a symbolic substitute. 
Category: digital marketing Tags: content marketing, digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | June 5, 2013 | 1 Comment
In his second act as one of the most successful venture capitalists working today, Web wunderkind Marc Andreessen often talks about the theme that informs his investment decisions:
“Software eats the world.”
By this he means new ventures that utilize software and Internet technologies to disrupt and transform business models and entire industries—perhaps the way Amazon did with books, then retail, then IT infrastructure; and Netflix did with movie rentals and now seeks to do with original programming.
This got me thinking about big content, and the fact that—along with its endearingly nerdy cousin, big data—content is eating marketing as we know it.
Why? Because compelling, authentic content is what makes social engagement happen. It’s what makes your brand come to life as, not a member of the marketing industrial complex seeking to extract dollar bills from your customers’ wallets, but as a welcomed participant in their daily experience. Great content humanizes brands.
Great content is also the great equalizer. Dollar for dollar, earned outperforms paid.
And let’s also not forget that great content is also the secret to getting found—on the social web and by search engines. Increasingly, search algorithms look beyond keywords and inbound links to the social signals that speak to quality and relevance. What’s liked, what’s shared and what’s followed are strong indicators of what’s found. Think of it this way: search marketing used to be about optimizing content for machines. Now, mercifully, it’s about optimizing content for human beings.
That, dear reader, is progress.
But many marketers still don’t get what big content is all about. They’re too attached to their brand agenda, perhaps too impatient about delivering the pitch and making the sale.
Big content is different in volume, velocity and variety. As I’ve said before: It’s human. It’s neutral. It’s simple. It’s visual. It’s conversational. It’s organic.
Brands that get this are allowing big content to eat marketing—allowing it to overtake traditional ways of communicating and engaging with their audiences—and they’re benefiting disproportionately.
Those that don’t get big content? Someone’s bound to eat their lunch.
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | May 29, 2013 | 3 Comments
In the world of digital marketing, the distinction between agencies and vendors is blurring. Agencies and technology vendors, once such distinct animals, are now merging.
Like a hologram, their shape shifts depending on the angle of view.
Why? Because today’s marketers want solutions—not solutions of the tired, self-congratulatory variety so often trumpeted in marketing collateral. They want solutions in the more authentic sense—complete and comprehensive resolution of real business problems, from front to back, from top to bottom.
The word solution has become such a dirty word because it so often overpromises and under delivers. What I mean by solution in this context is “the whole product,” a concept first introduced by Regis McKenna and popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm.
The whole product concept seeks to break marketers out of the habit of provincial thinking, forcing them to look beyond the traditional boundaries of their offerings. Customers, it turns out, rarely care that you provide a category-defining narrow slice of a whole product. They want you to become accountable to the solution itself.
In digital marketing, as we’ve come to know, these solutions are found at the intersection of people, process and technology. But unlike days past when sourcing, assemblage, execution and management of solutions came from diverse piece-parts of diverse provenance, today’s marketers are looking for partners to take on the whole whack.
I think we can all admit that business has no real appetite for technology these days. Sure, it depends on technology in profound and fundamental ways—and that’s not changing—but, with the rise of cloud-based alternatives, few business leaders are inspired to don the hip waders to amble around in the muck and mire of the bits and bytes.
It’s this dynamic that has led to the rise of public cloud services. Cloud is about the abstraction, automation and flexible consumption of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS—the full stack, full stop. But for marketing leaders it’s not a full stop. Since, despite the important role technology plays, digital marketing remains a creative, labor-intensive discipline. Digital marketing is also about people.
This is why the definition of agencies and vendors is blurring. The best ones are inspired to erase the seams between people, process and technology to deliver—not ideas and enabling technologies; not even campaigns. They’re inspired to deliver results. Business outcomes. Performance. And they’ve packaged their offerings in a way that bundles up technology, wraps it with people and ties it up neatly with a bow as a managed service that can deliver on and take accountability for business results.
So next time you talk to digital marketing agencies and vendors, ask yourself: Are they accountable to the solution? Have they shape-shifted to serve your needs more so than their own?
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | May 21, 2013 | Comments Off
For many marketing leaders, contemplating the range of digital marketing options can feel like gazing up at the stars. It’s awesome and infinite—at once inspiring and intimidating.
You hear this in the voice of so many digital marketers today. They’re fired up by big visions. But they often have more passion than conviction—because, let’s face it, this stuff isn’t exactly easy.
This observation inspired a thought: At its heart, great content is really the great equalizer. While doing content marketing well is by no means easy, it’s a challenge that’s somehow more familiar—more tractable—to a lot of marketers. It’s about storytelling. It’s about merchandizing moments of inspiration. It’s about taking some risk, having some fun and allowing a little soul and humanity to seep into our work. It’s about producing artifacts that challenge thinking, enlighten, enliven, entertain, engage.
Red Bull is a great example. For adrenaline junkies—or, more likely, voyeurs of adrenaline-producing experiences—their content is utterly irresistible. But, you may suggest, there’s nothing particularly equalizing about Red Bull’s content marketing efforts. They’ve become a publisher in their own right, producing extraordinary videos of extraordinary quality. They sponsored and staged a supersonic space jump, after all. No shortage of ambition there.
Fair enough. Red Bull is a category-defining example, a class unto itself. But I’d argue that the sort of earned visibility they’ve generated would have been prohibitive using paid media or other digital tactics.
And that’s the point I’m trying to make: Great content is the great equalizer because, compared to so many other digital strategies, it’s more cost effective at any scale. When it’s done right, content marketing amplifies reach, engagement and makes your brand soar.
You might even say it gives you wings.
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | May 15, 2013 | Comments Off
It may sound like some sort of high-minded existential question, but I’d argue that it’s the essence of everything you do as a modern marketer. The best marketers can answer it without flinching. They have a clear, unambiguous raison d’être that, as my colleagues Richard Fouts and Jennifer Beck say, resolves the ever-important and perhaps more visceral derivative of the same question: Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
To generate awareness, drive revenue, stock price or even to disrupt markets isn’t good enough. Why? Because you’re unlikely to do these things well without a clear understanding of what your brand stands for.
In today’s hypercompetitive markets, customers have a superabundance of choice—choice in how they allocate their time, attention, budgets and discretionary dollars. Brands that secure these scarce resources are the ones with empathy. They’re the opposite of egocentric. They’re intimately aware of whose lives they make better and in what specific ways. Their brands stand for ideals that resonate with audiences including but by absolutely no means limited to shareholders.
Ask yourself?
- What specific problems do we solve?
- Why are these problems worth solving?
- By doing so, whose lives do we make better?
- And by making their lives better, what impact are we having on the world?
- What issues do our customers care about and how do we advocate for them?
- How do we do all of this in ways that are appreciably better or more effective than our rivals?
By answering these questions, you’ve begun to unpack the essence of what your brand stands for. And once you do that, you’re better equipped to tell stories that audiences want to hear—and want to share.
What does your brand stand for?
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | May 10, 2013 | 3 Comments
Earlier this week, I had a conversation with a strategy consultant named Steve Shapiro who wrote a book with an intriguing title: Best Practices Are Stupid. I haven’t read it yet, but I absolutely will. (With a title like that, how could I resist?) It got me thinking about patterns in general and the fact that it’s often every bit as important to study worst practices—what not to do. After all, as Shapiro suggests, following someone else’s patterns is often the opposite of innovation.
If you ask me, the best strategies are informed by both patterns and anti-patterns.
Patterns are the repeatable abstractions of road-tested success. They’re the examples we celebrate and the case studies we cite. Anti-patterns, as you’ve already concluded, are the exact opposite. They come directly from the mistakes that we should know better than to repeat.
In the business of digital marketing, we’re still in the early days of building our collective compendium of patterns and anti-patterns—but the examples are emerging. In fact, you can probably recite some of them by heart. Social marketing has plenty:
- Oreo’s masterful tweet in the dark? Pattern.
- Auto-posting on Marathon Monday. Anti-pattern.
Mobile marketing has its share, too:
- Sephora’s in-store mobile programs? Total pattern.
- JCPenney’s iPad at every checkout? You get the point.
The point is that we should reflect on (and off of) both documented successes and failures to define digital strategies that yield more of the former and far, far fewer of the latter.
To that end, let’s take a closer look at these specific examples:
- PATTERN: Oreo’s slam dunk. It was the tweet heard around the world. How did they pull it off? Oreo’s agency ran a fully staffed war room, including lawyers at the ready. When the moment struck, they were there. The lesson? Real-time is often anything but.
- ANTI-PATTERN: Social media on autopilot. The scores of brands that failed to suspend auto-posting on the day of the Boston Marathon were deemed unintentionally tone deaf as a tragedy unfolded. The lesson? Timing is everything.
- PATTERN: Sephora’s mobile beauty. By finding the opportunity hidden inside the showrooming risk, Sephora deepened engagement with its customers and then turned the mobile web into its endless aisle. The lesson? Recast a threat as your best opportunity.
- ANTI-PATTERN: JCPenney’s overnight transformation. Ousted CEO Ron Johnson took a page from the Apple and Target playbooks, wildly missing the mark with a tired brand unready for such aggressive change. It turns out that, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. The lesson? Know your customer. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
This last example has stuck with us, both because of the egregiousness of its miscalculations and the scale and consequence of its failure. In an effort to attract a younger, more affluent demographic, Johnson alienated his core customer. He transformed the in-store experience with iPads at every checkout and an everyday low-price strategy that took the fun out of shopping. Traditional customers fled en masse and the aspirational target never materialized.
For me, what is most significant about this particular failure is that it represents a failure of customer empathy. Simply taking a close look at their brand loyalists should have been an indication that these aggressive changes were an anti-pattern in the making.
The lesson? It’s more fun to talk about victories, but sometimes the more important truths are found in failure.
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | May 8, 2013 | 4 Comments
The debate rages on: Big data or big deal? Gartner sees big data maturing rapidly, as indicated by its position on the hype cycle. It’s not dead or dying, by any means, but the dynamics are changing.
Perhaps calling it a raging debate is an overstatement. But if you follow this blog, you’ve heard me argue that data alone isn’t sufficient—that we’re lulling ourselves into the false sense of comfort that all truths are held in the giant, all-knowing corpus in the sky.
You’ve heard me say that our data obsession is drawing us into a world of small ideas. Like the day trader who can’t see beyond the closing bell, we can lose sight of the bigger picture when we’re excessively dialed into data. If you ask me, data can both illuminate and blind us.
Here’s why. If you accept the premise that intelligence is roughly derived from the combination of analysis, synthesis and emotional intelligence, you’ll see that data alone is no silver bullet.
Sure, data-driven technologies can help mine insights from each, but they all require smart people asking smart questions, drawing smart conclusions, and taking smart action. Let’s test the theory:
- Analytic—while machines can crunch massive volumes of data to detect patterns and make predictions, the questions we ask are every bit as important—perhaps more important.
- Synthetic—to make data actionable, smart people must draw inferences and connect the dots between disparate structured and unstructured threads that help shape the storylines that lead to decisions and action. (Just try bringing the raw threads into the boardroom.)
- Emotional—while machines can assist us here, there’s no substitute for human interaction. Increasingly, ethnographic techniques are a key part of how marketers understand customers, not only by the answers and insights customers provide, but by the behaviors they betray through first-hand observation.
Because this argument continues to rattle around in my brain, I’m always keen to find new way of thinking about it—frameworks for making sense of this head versus heart, man versus machine dialectic. So I was pleased to come across the work of Tim Kastelle, an innovation expert and senior lecturer at University of Queensland in Australia.
I spoke with Tim last week and here’s what he described:
The most durable business advantages, Tim suggests, are enabled by a combination of smart tech and smart people—Stage 4 found, not surprisingly, in the northeast corner of the matrix above. Tim provides a detailed analysis of this framework here. I’d highly suggest reading his full post on the subject.
My inference? Big data is a big deal. But it, alone, isn’t enough. What do you think?
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | May 3, 2013 | Comments Off
Cool is a tough thing to pin down. It can mean an unconventional twist—or it can mean cultivated conformity. It can mean laser-focused intensity—or a devil-may-care attitude. Fonzie was cool. Williamsburg is cool. So is Detroit. Portland, Seattle, Mini Coopers, iPads. Cool? You be the judge.
You’re the judge because cool is a state of mind—and a very subjective thing. What’s cool to me (don’t ask), may be completely passé to the next person. Truth is, analyzing cool is probably the exact opposite of cool. It’s something you recognize reflexively. It challenges your thinking by standing out in some unique way. It hits you viscerally. It broadens your perspective and may inspire you to think differently.
Once a year, Gartner analysts become cool hunters. We set out to identify a crop of vendors who are doing something different and interesting. Sometimes they’re turning a business problem on its ear, thinking about it differently. Sometimes they’re exploiting emerging technologies in an innovative way. Sometimes they’re simply putting together a set of ordinary pieces in ways that others have not.
What makes Cool Vendors cool? Any and all of these things. Perhaps most importantly, what makes Cool Vendors cool is that they challenge conventional thinking. They cause us to stop and take a step back. What makes the selection process cool is that it suspends some of the traditional rules dictating our research agenda. Cool Vendors aren’t necessarily tomorrow’s tech titans, but they are some of today’s forerunners. And, for that reason, they’re worth paying attention to. Because, after all, who doesn’t like cool?
Here are Gartner for Marketing Leader’s Cool Vendors for 2013:
Digital Marketing
Social Marketing
Data-Driven Marketing
Mobile Marketing
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
by Jake Sorofman | April 30, 2013 | 3 Comments
In a recent HBR post, I discussed the rise of the digital CMO—specifically, what digital marketing asks of leadership and what it means for accountability. I signed off with what will be seen as a hopeful call to action or ominous pronouncement, depending on where you sit (organizationally and philosophically):
“Disruptions can be swift and unrelenting, and it is much better to be a disruptor than one of those being disrupted.”
This got me thinking about the collateral damage of change—those left behind by the swift and unrelenting forces of disruption.
IT knows this all too well. Each subsequent generation of technology brought new complexity that forced IT organizations to automate anything that wasn’t nailed to the ground. In many cases, the complexity of these environments exceeded the unaided capacity of human beings, making automation of manual steps and abstraction of low-level operations the only option.
It all sounds a bit wonky, I admit, but the analogy has important implications for today’s marketing leaders. Digital marketing requires standardization and automation of many procedures that were once performed by human beings. The speed, complexity and precision of the discipline depend on it. In the same sense that automation made some IT folks uneasy, digital marketing will surely do the same for some marketers.
But, as we’ve learned through the industrialization of IT, as each layer of technology is automated and commoditized, it allows talent to move up the stack to focus on higher-level, higher-value work.
Here are some IT lessons that may lend perspective to those weathering the digital marketing storm:
- Automate yourself out of a job—drive the process of designing and implementing the next-generation. Instead of carving off and protecting the spaces you’ve traditionally occupied and owned, look for ways to automate yourself out of a job. Then look for new ways to add value.
- Develop higher-level skills—automation is liberating. It allows you to cultivate higher-order skills and thinking by elevating your orientation from a game of Whac-A-Mole to a game of Stratego. Use automation as your lever to move up the stack.
- Bravely lead the change—trust that leading the change globally, despite the provincial risks, will strengthen your position in your organization and in your profession.
- Start a revolution—IT has done a great job building communities of change. Open source, ITIL, DevOps—these movements were created and sustained by likeminded professionals with passion and a strong point of view. Organize or join a movement with a vision and agenda for change.
Digital marketing is nothing short of a disruption. Chances are it will substantially change your role. On which side of history will you fall? Be like the best in IT. Be one the disruptors, not the disrupted.
Category: digital marketing Tags: digital marketing
