What's your big idea?

I was having dinner with a super smart marketer a few weeks ago, and I asked him what his big idea was for 2010.  And this bright guy articulated a strategy of media dominance, of placing his brand everywhere that his market looks.  I said to him, "no, what's the big thing you want to do, the thing that when you point to it later on, you can say to yourself 'I did that.'"  He smiled and said he hadn't thought about it, hadn't come up with the big idea.

John Landau, Oscar-winning producer of Titanic, spoke to the CMO Club last week.  He described Director James Cameron's process of putting together the Terminator movies, that he originally wrote the story as one movie, but realized he needed to wait for the technology to catch up with his vision and so split the story into two pieces.

In marketing, we typically follow technology -- blogs, podcasts, social engagement sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter -- all have pulled marketers into having conversations with customers.  And it's great that leading marketing organizations are following the customer conversations, engaging with our communities of users and embracing the 10-year-old tenets of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

But what's the next big idea?  What's the vision of marketing that will drive the technology?   How can we as marketers create a huge wish list of technological advancements and ways of interacting that will help our customers buy, use and recommend our brands?

Interested to have a conversation ...

Comments

[christopher.dunagan@gmail.com]

Steve, here's one big idea that I just don't see anywhere- yet. Perhaps like the later post on the Terminator thing...it hasn't caught up yet.

I've been in the throes of implementing Marketing Automation tools for our incredibly complex global megacorporation, and we've beat lead scoring to death.

What I don't find is any analogy on the Sales side for Opportunity Scoring- based on the correlation (regression based) of activities most likely to result in a sale closing. Of course, these are _probablilites_, not just scores, but this idea intrigues me in that it could be a literal and simple extension of MA- albeit requiring some advanced SaaS based predictive tools to accomplish.

Interested in your thoughts...

[Steve Gershik]

Hi Christopher,

You bring up a huge issue, not just the specific one around creating scoring analogs for opportunity management, but the need to create better deep funnel tools/processes to improve visibility and momentum through to close.

I think the tools to enable what you're talking about are becoming increasingly available to marketing. You're already seeing salesforce.com moving into the social space with their new chatter offering, a development that will increasingly enrich intelligence about pending deals. And companies like CrowdCast, which uses the "wisdom of the crows" theory to create better sales forecasts will extend to opportunity scoring for individual deals.

I'd be interested in hearing about how your company beat lead scoring to death!