People say that marketing for “cloud services” are really over the top right now – selling a lot more promise than can be delivered. If that’s true, social media is somewhere out in the stratosphere of hype – pushed into orbit by leaders like Twitter and Facebook - I’ve heard many people say if they were trying to avoid reading yet another article on the wonders of connecting to “communities” on the web.

If that’s the case for you – I hope you’ll set your prejudice aside and listen to our podcast this month on Haut Tech Conversations. You can download the show and listen to it at your leisure. Our guest was Jonathan Hyland, the Client Relationship Director for iCIMS, a leading SaaS provider of “Talent Management Systems.” Jonathan is deep in the trenches of the user community at iCIMS because he is responsible for managing the client renewal pipeline, user satisfaction, user advocacy, and maintaining visibility of the value proposition their services deliver.

I enjoyed this conversation because social media is still a widely misunderstood subject among SaaS and Cloud Service providers. Many see everything social as an unnecessary and noisy “distraction” that is a waste of resources and time. I understand their point of view because if they come from traditional software marketing, support, and sales environment,  they are part of a legacy that rarely focused on end-users or tried to foster communications among them. And if you’ve ever tried to sip from the Twitter fire hose, you can probably understand their discomfort with jumping on the band wagon.

We covered the many sides of communities in SaaS including:

• Inbound Marketing – Getting found by vertical and best practice communities while building up a presence for your brand and the services it provides.
• Marketing to the Converted – Retaining subscription renewals, up-selling, and evangelizing your existing end-users and the key stakeholders that drive client adoption.
• Product Management – The balancing act that comes from involving end-users in driving product development without crossing into crowd-sourcing and losing your strategic direction.
• Support - Leveraging the community to provide best practices and support while continuing to be strongly involved in providing assistance and guidance.

And finally – how a community relations director can keep from looking like a product shill, serve user needs, retain subscriptions keep the sales funnel full and have time to take off for vacation in a 24/7 product world.

I think the take away from this conversation was very interesting and I don’t want to spoil it for you – but we found that “being social” is a lot more hands-on and face-to-face than you might think. It really is still true you need to be balanced between social tools and more traditional face to face approaches than you might think.

Joining Jonathan on our panel was Jessie Kliza, the Business Development Director for Apprenda and Peter Cohen of SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors, who also happens to be one of our fraternity of Haut Tech Irregulars.

Our Special Guest -

Jonathan Hyland, M.A., PHR – Client Relationship Director at iCIMS. Jonathan has a background in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, graduated with honors from Monmouth and finished his graduate work at Hofstra University. He started as an intern at Questus but moved up quickly when he came to iCIMS. He now carries responsibility for managing the client renewal pipeline and upsell opportunities, ensuring client satisfaction with internal advocacy, and the development of marketing materials covering the value proposition of the  iCIMS platform.  In that role, he works with user communities at all levels for iCIMS. You can find Jonathan most days on Twitter and read some of his thoughts on his jaHRd blog.

Our Panel –

Jesse Kliza – Director of Marketing at Apprenda, the creators of SaaSGrid, a distributed SaaS platform that eliminates the difficulties of building and delivering Software as a Service.  Prior to joining Apprenda, Jesse was Community Evangelist and Product Manager at SaaS ISV, Autotask.  Among Jesse’s many contributions while at Autotask, he was responsible for the creation and oversight of the Autotask Community  – which won a coveted ITSMA Marketing Excellence award in 2008. Jessie can be found on SaaSBlogs, Appenda’s best practice blog for the SaaS community and his Twitter feed.

For those who are not aware of SaaSGrid, it is a service that greatly reduces the barrier to entry for SaaS by overcoming significant technical hurdles like multi-tenancy and grid scalability, while at the same time providing “out of the box” application services like metering and monetization, billing and subscriber management, and much more. Scio is a Premier Development and Implementation Partner for SaaSGrid.

Peter Cohen - Peter is the founder and managing partner of
SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors. His firm provides expert guidance to help companies effectively market and sell software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to enterprises. The firm’s clients includes several large, well-established clients, looking to enhance their SaaS marketing practices, as well as smaller companies that need guidance in launching a new SaaS solution to the market.

Peter has more than 25 years’ experience developing and implementing successful marketing strategies for technology companies, including Computervision, Lotus Development, IBM, and Authoria. Peter has spoken on the topic of SaaS Marketing for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and written for widely-distributed publications including MarketingProfs. He publishes a monthly newsletter and a blog, both entitled “Practical Advice on SaaS Marketing.”

So – you can download the show,  you can subscribe to our feed on iTunes or use the widget below. And if you would like to comment here or catch me on Twitter – we’re always interested in extending the conversation.

The recent rumors that Twitter could complete a capitol raise of $250mm have set the “blogosphere” afire. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research did some number crunching and came up with a value of $73.52 per active user for Twitter. This follows news that the social media darling turned down a half billion dollar acquisition by Facebook. And – it’s old news but – the Gartner Group says social networks shouldn’t be ignored by retailers. Surprised? Maybe you should take another look at social marketing in your business model…

Many of my “less connected” friends tell me, “All this social networking is crazy. I’ll stick to the tried and true – social marketing is junk.” This isn’t a new conversation. I have heard it in regard to all sorts of networking – from showing up at business events to the most recent phenomena – “following” people on Twitter. I’ve said it before but – here’s my take on it:

The Internet is a disruptive communications medium that works in all directions at once. If you do not send, receive, answer and search the communication stream proactively you are not participating in the conversation. You are not providing value to or gaining value from your community.

So what do I mean? Take the average “business blog.” The numbers of new business blogs started every year are beyond counting, but still the majority provide nothing more than a public relations feed. They don’t contribute to the conversation in their industry, communicate effectively with their customers, or go beyond giving new product “highlights” to prospects. They are part of the larger “brochureware” that clutters every keyword search on Google. When executives of these companies tell me they get little value from their Internet presence, I can only agree. You will not get value if you do not give value to people who use your site. All the search engine optimization in the world won’t change this simple one-to-one relationship.

Let me give you some simple facts from my own experience. I use news postings on LinkedIn Groups to promote the articles we post on this blog. We’ve been writing on this site for a little more than two months. About 50% of our referrals come from LinkedIn. So what? The LinkedIn Groups we belong to and post on are specific to our industry. This isn’t a random sampling of search terms – it is a list of people who have an interest in our field, have read a title that is of interest to them and chosen to read the content. Beyond that, our page views – requests for specific pages – outnumber our front page “hits” four to one. That means readers are requesting specific pages AND staying to read more than one article.

For about a month now, I’ve been using Twitter to make contact with people interested in SaaS and cloud-computing by actively searching for people chatting about our subject areas. At this time, Twitter provides a little over a third of our total traffic. And from our statistics, I can say that is a growth of more than a third overall. Twitter is enabling us to reach new friends that have not found our content through LinkedIn. In fact, thanks to using TweetDeck to improve my productivity, last week was produced our highest traffic so far. The remaining referrals we get come from cross posts – conversations – on other blogs in the general community. Search referrals provide almost no traffic. In other words – if we were writing a pure PR blog and waiting for search engines to deliver readers, we’d still be talking to ourselves.

Let’s take this another step. What if we had a SaaS product and built aspects of social marketing right into the feature set? Not passively – not hanging on because it is “so Web 2.0.” I mean using the concepts of social media to build a community that we as a product owner would proactively participate in to build relationships. On its face, this idea isn’t a lot different than the car dealer who participates in local schools, giving to team sports and supporting the community while being with his own kids. But the Internet gives a lot more ways to interact in our community while still not “blasting” our message in negative ways. If we were getting similar results to my little personal experiment, we would be getting virtually all our prospects from social media.

However, just like participating in local schools is a little hard to value for the car dealer, the value of crowds on the Internet is not just a numbers game. Does the Twitter user who has several thousand “followers” get the same value out of them as I do my much smaller group? It is hard to say, but if the followers are not gaining value from the association, probably not. In the end, the value of the crowd is not in pure numbers. It exists only if a community of value between members emerges at some point. Making that happen is actual work – it doesn’t come out of the blue and there are no magic formulas. But, if you add social marketing to all the traditional marketing tools, it can become a very powerful engine for targeted marketing that is of value to your business and your customers.

Useful? Copy, Paste and Tweet It!

Social Marketing: The Value of Crowds http://bit.ly/4jgpQc

In the fourth article of our series about SaaS and The Long Tail, we are exploring the tail that according to some sources – wags the SaaS dog. At the ultimate end of The Long Tail is the individual – the “me” we all embody. Strategies for SaaS that employ The Long Tail concept, all leverage the power of the Internet to satisfy the individual without addressing them directly. Is it magic? Smoke and mirrors?

If you have been following this series and have grasped the concept of The Long Tail and how it applies to SaaS – you know that the best implementations take in a wide range of needs within a market, but still enable individuals within that market to find what they need or accomplish their specific tasks within the application’s framework. In the eCommerce world, implementations allow sellers to reach individual buyers “transparently” and Amazon is the most used example. But business tools like Salesforce, the CRM powerhouse, and Plex, the SaaS ERP for manufacturers, have also leveraged a single online platform to serve both different industry segments and different line of business (LOB) areas.

These examples represent two, non-exclusive, threads we see in SaaS vendors reaching the “tail” of their customer base successfully:

• In the Community Model – keyword search, recommendations, reviews, vendors, and communities within the platform provide ways to reach out to an individual, tap into their desires and help them satisfy their needs using an “opt-in” approach.
• In the LOB Model – a single platform carries modules, features, and embedded processes that can be leveraged and customized to satisfy particular needs and give users specific roles and views, without creating multiple versions of the application.

This is not a “one way or the other” proposition. A specific service may utilize elements of both approaches – as Salesforce does in many respects. The community model is inherently “noisy” and so has to leverage the tail in many ways to limit the noise to a segment so that it is useful to an individual. The LOB model is inherently complex and requires administration, roles and processes that can be customized to fit specific business areas and organizations.

LOB applications have long utilized workflow or “business process management” (BPM) to provide process capture and automation. However, implementation and customization could be a long and expensive process. In the SaaS world, the difference is that the primary changes needed for something like supply chain operations for a specific industry have been implemented on the core platform and marketed directly to a vertical by the ISV. This lowers the time to implement and adopt the application for customers and provides a managed approach to product development and marketing that is easier for the ISV to handle. These applications also allow a customer to continue the customization to “the last mile” to adapt specific processes, terminology preferences and internal standards while they continue to embrace industry “best practices.”

The community model is relatively new, although it is an outgrowth of many so-called “social media” applications that have been developing for a long time. Some of the key technical concepts are:

• Adaptive Search (example – Google and Amazon)
• Personal Digital Publishing (weblogs, microblogging – examples Blogger, Twitter, WordPress)
• Recommendations and Reviews (community and individual rating systems – examples Yelp, BizRate, Epinions)
• Forums (examples – Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Amazon Forum)
• Communities (examples Ning, Facebook, Second Life)

A SaaS offering may adapt some or all of these concepts to reach their customers and marketing may adapt them either on or off the platform (or both) as a way to broaden their audience while reaching specific segments. Using social media for external marketing and customer contact is something we will explore in future articles. Using social media within a SaaS platform to help users find and evaluate services and products, provide support and to increase customer retention are the primary uses we’re seeing adapted now.

Consider the restaurant review and guidebook service, Zagat. From a company that started as a restaurant guide publisher 30 years ago, this service provides user-driven ratings and reviews, voting, discussion boards, news, video, and yes – online purchases of the original guide series. Zagat has built itself into a community with aspects of every concept in our list. Together they become an indispensable and trusted guide for users with a low subscription cost and very personal approach. The same service provides vendors with advertising, online reservations, menu presentation, and ordering – all of which can be monetized in some way.

On the business side, Salesforce has adapted the community model in several directions. For customers, it provides discussion forums, user groups, best practices, and blogs. For partners it provides an Appexchange where they can demonstrate and sell custom solutions to Salesforce customers and leverage the Salesforce platform to provide their own applications. For developers from both customer organizations and vendor partners, it provides Developerforce which is a community onto itself. Few business SaaS providers have been able to adapt the community model so completely to their platforms because if it isn’t carefully considered, it can become unwanted “noise” in the environment. But as this vendor has successfully shown, it can become a value that completes the product in many ways.

Building a service that embraces these concepts is something that takes a lot of planning. In truth, none of the examples I’ve mentioned “sprang full-fledged” as the services they are today. But as SaaS “matures,” more providers are considering these aspects up front and including them in their business plans from the beginning, whether they are included as features in “Version 1.0″ or not. At this point, I think every “would be SaaS entrepreneur” must consider them or face the fact that their competition will use them to take customers and prospects.

This is the last article in this four part series but certainly not the last time we will cover The Long Tail. In future series, we expect to be looking into platforms that enable SaaS ISVs to concentrate more on their product and less on the developing their business back end and social marketing. Stay tuned!

Useful? Copy, save and Tweet it!

SaaS: At the End of The Long Tail – ME! http://bit.ly/p5d5

Our words from 2008 in a word cloud from Wordle.net

It doesn’t take a lot to see what we’ve been writing about in the month and a half Haut Tec has been around. So, just because it is the time of year when everyone is putting together predictions for the new year and hanging them out to view, I’ll make a bold prediction for our future – more cloud computing, SaaS, Agile, RIA and the business of On-Demand services. We’ll find other subjects I’m sure, but these subjects are core of our work and in fact – the issues that lead on most lists of computing technology for the near term.

From my recent experience, I can also say we’ll be discussing social media and (glup!) Social Marketing in 2009. I’ve started leveraging this area just recently and I can say without a doubt, if you are on the web and you are not leveraging the new forms of social media like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (which isn’t all that new really, but many people are still discovering it) to find potential customers and partners, you’re going to be left at the dock next year and in years to come. Come to think of it – blogs are a form of social media so we’re there too – but the point is a lot of people have not figured out that if you are going to be centered on the Internet you need to fully leverage all of the tools available. In fact, just to follow that thought, here’s my contact list for those who have already figured these things out:

• Scio’s Facebook Page
• LinkedIn Public Profile
  
• Twitter
• Facebook

And yes, I am an open networker, a member of a lot of LinkedIn groups, I “follow back” on Twitter and accept friends on Facebook. I’m sure there will be others too – I’ve been networking on Twitter this week – like a lot of people – and it is exploding with new users.

We’ll also be continuing our series about The Long Tail and many more areas – I also hope to hear from you if there are subjects we’re working on that you would like to hear more about. I expect us to plunge into Agile Product Management soon – Luis Aburto’s Agile post was our most popular subject so far. We’re also continuing to expand the ISV Resources listing so if you’re interested, there is new information there for you.

Addendum – We’ve just been added to the cloud-computing feed on Alltop as you can see from our new badge on the sidebar. Thanks to Guy and his team at Alltop!

So, here’s is looking forward to a bigger and better year in 2009 for everyone!

Próspero Año Nuevo! from your Friends at Scio!