Marketers should have their heads in the cloud.
If you haven't read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company's IT center — is becoming real. Fast.
Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where marketers now work beyond the borders of their company's sandbox, and the widespread proliferation of web services and mash-up APIs, the cloud has become marketing's new IT platform.
For marketers, this is a terrific opportunity (a) to re-calibrate the relationship between marketing and technology and (b) to expand your capabilities in the "new marketing" environment, where the pace of innovation in online marketing channels and methods continues to accelerate.
I think of "computing in the cloud" for marketing in fairly broad terms — more broadly than the technical definition of cloud computing — and divide it into four buckets:
1. Web sites where you are a participant or sponsor, particularly social media communities. These are sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, Digg, del.icio.us, Twine, etc. This isn't what most tech people think of when they talk about cloud computing, but from a marketer's perspective, these are important services out on the Internet that you must plug into to do your job. Your audience is in the cloud, and you have to go in there after them. The IT aspects, however, reside outside of your control.
2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. These are applications that you access through your web browser, are hosted on a server farm by a third-party, for which you have zero operational involvement. Some are free, such as Google Analytics, but many are provided on a subscription basis, such as Salesforce.com. Pay only for as much as you need for as long as you need. There are a plethora of SaaS applications for marketers available today, with more coming online every month — if you have a favorite that I've missed in my "for instance" below, please add it in the comments:
- customer relationship management (ex: Salesforce.com);
- landing page management (ex: LiveBall — disclaimer, my firm);
- surveys and questionnaires (ex: SurveyMonkey);
- email marketing management (ex: ExactTarget);
- web site analytics (ex: Google Analytics);
- marketing resource management (ex: MarketingCentral);
- blogging platforms (ex: Typepad);
- lead nurturing (ex: Marketo);
- digital asset management (ex: Celum Imagine);
- search marketing management (ex: SearchIgnite);
- project management (ex: AtTask);
- web conferencing and webinars (ex: WebEx);
Click here to read the rest of this excellent piece from Scott Brinker's Chief Marketing Technologist blog.
Nick Martin: A truly great introduction to Marketing in The Cloud from Scott Brinker...or the future of marketing services. He's quite brilliant!
One significant challenge remains how to glue together several marketing components, which is why Salesforce's apps exchange is so compelling, acting as it does like an apps bus/ backbone for a myriad of third party Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Nonetheless, as long as database integrity is far from ideally managed - and so often seriously compromised - there will remain questions around the feasibility of integrating web components into a Cloud based set of marketing processes. That's where marketing utilities come in, to glue bespoke solutions together made up of numerous application components around database integrity, quality and real time customer information management. More thoughts on this coming soon...
