Brainwriting better than brainstorming

What Is Brainwriting? from Mindtools April Newsletter

Brainwriting is similar to brainstorming – they're both methods for generating ideas and solutions for a problem.

Brainwriting, however, gives everyone equal opportunity to participate, and it enables all group members to think without any ‘blocking.'

Here are the steps of a brainwriting session:

Seat group members at a table, with a sheet of paper in front of each person. At the top of the page, ask them to write down the problem that everyone is trying to solve. (Note: They should NOT write their names.) Appoint someone to be moderator, and time each round.


Give the group three minutes to write down three ideas for how to solve the problem. They should not edit the ideas, or try to perfect them. Allow them to write in ‘free form.' Do not permit any discussion.


After three minutes, move on to round two. Ask everyone to pass their papers to the left, and then generate three more ideas on the new paper they have just received. They can build on the first three ideas that are already written, or think of three new solutions.


Ask the moderator to decide how many times the papers are passed around the table.


When all rounds are finished, collect the papers, and write all ideas on a whiteboard for everyone to see. Then begin discussing which ideas would work best for solving the current problem.
Benefits of Brainwriting
There are several advantages of using brainwriting in a group:

Because there's no discussion during the initial idea-generating rounds, you can produce many ideas in a very short amount of time.


All group members – even the quiet and shy people – have an equal chance of offering their ideas for consideration.


Everything is anonymous – you don't know who wrote which ideas – so there's more freedom to be truly creative. Participants are often empowered to suggest solutions that they otherwise might have thought were too unusual, or would not be well received.


Exchanging papers still allows group members to evaluate and build on other people's ideas, but in a much more concentrated, creative way.
When to Use Brainwriting
Brainwriting can be used to help solve almost any problem. The process is used often in marketing, design, and creative fields, but it's also gaining popularity in other areas.

Any time that you would traditionally use brainstorming to solve a problem, you could use brainwriting instead.

Key Points
Although brainstorming is the most common technique for generating ideas in a group, brainwriting can be much more effective, because it involves all participants on an equal basis. Both introverts and extroverts can participate, and you can produce more ideas in less time.

Three kinds of meetings

Here is Seth's thoughts on meetings... interesting.

Meetings are marketing in real time with real people. (A conference is not a meeting. A conference is a chance for a circle of people to interact).
There are only three kinds of classic meetings:
Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it's primarily designed to inform.
Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.
PLEASE don't confuse them. Confused meeting types are the number one source of meeting ennui. One source of confusion is that a meeting starts as one sort of meeting and then magically morphs into another kind. The reason this is frightening is that one side or the other might not realize that's actually occurring. If it does, stop and say, "Thanks for the discussion. Let me state what we've just agreed on and then we can go ahead and approve it, okay?"
While I'm at it, let me remind you that there are two kinds of questions.
Questions designed to honestly elicit more information.
Questions designed to demonstrate how much you know or your position on an issue and to put the answerer on the defensive.
There's room for both types of questions, particularly in a team preparing for a presentation or a pitch. Again, don't confuse them. I like to be sure that there's time for the first type, then, once everyone acknowledges that they know what's on the table, open it up for the second, more debate-oriented type of question.

Benchmarketing: Best Practice for Improving Marketing Performance

by Laura Patterson
Published on January 27, 2009

Thought this was worth sharing:

Ad Age's article published on January 5, 2009 ("Economy Weighs Heavily on Marketing Execs for 2009") started with, "Marketing executives are tired of buzzwords such as Web 2.0, blogs and social networking."
The article goes on to say that marketers are going back to the basics with an emphasis on addressing four areas: customer satisfaction, customer retention, marketing ROI, and brand loyalty.
While the economy certainly weighs heavy on all of our minds, marketers who use this opportunity wisely to improve performance and demonstrate their value will fare the best.
Our work reveals that CEOs and CMOs are interested in seeing marketing organizations improve their performance in two key areas: effectiveness (the ability to produce the desired result) and efficiency (reducing waste). The economic environment makes these efforts even more top of mind.
Often the question that remains is this: How much do we need to improve?
One way to assess your organization's performance and to understand what changes to make is through benchmarking. Robert Camp suggests that by using benchmarking to identify and replicate "best practices," a company can enhance its business performance.
This is a good time to do deploy benchmarking. The economic environment creates a level playing field. This two-part article explores how to use benchmarking to assess your organization's performance and to understand what changes to make.
Part 1 addresses what is benchmarking and its value. Part 2 identifies marketing capabilities and process that can be benchmarked and outlines the five phases associated with a successful benchmarking initiative.
What Is Benchmarking?
Webster defines benchmarking as the "study of a competitor's product or business practices in order to improve the performance of one's own company." In order to do benchmarking, one requires a benchmark: "a point of reference from which measurements may be made; that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged."
The American Productivity and Quality Center defines benchmarking as "the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices and process from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance."
Benchmarking is not the same as a metric. A metric is a comparative number, whereas a benchmark is a standard for the best.
The Value of Benchmarking
The idea behind benchmarking is that by implementing the best-practice for a particular process your company can close a performance gap in order to achieve superior results and enhance its own competitive advantage.
Benchmarking can produce tangible, quantifiable performance targets that you can consistently measure over recurring time cycles in order to ascertain performance changes and the impact of those changes on your organization. Frequent and regular benchmarking enables you to measure changes in your own performance relative to best-in-class companies. By using an external reference, you can gain insight into these best-practices.
The point of benchmarking is to collect data that will show you what can be achieved and provide you with the insight into how this performance was achieved.
To use benchmarking, you must have at least one company in the study that serves as the benchmark: the standard with which others compare themselves for both the way the process is run and the results obtained from that process. This benchmark can be either within or outside your industry.
The benefit of benchmarking is that it provides valuable insights into what drives performance. Companies have used benchmarking to evaluate hiring, customer service, equipment maintenance, collecting outstanding receivables, and so forth. Benchmarking can be done for nearly every business process, including marketing.
Unfortunately, many companies do not benchmark their marketing—a missed opportunity.
When times are tough, marketing is even more important to support revenue generation. Sadly, too many companies pull back on their marketing efforts during down cycles, essentially putting their revenue-generation efforts in idle mode.
The Profit Impact of Market Strategy research has shown that those companies which invest in marketing during a down cycle recover from the cycle faster, with increased gains, compared with those companies that turned off their marketing as a way to reduce costs.
There is an old saving that "one cannot save their way to revenue." In times such as these, we believe that a company should make sure that its marketing is firing on all cylinders and operating as effectively and efficiently as possible.
As the CEO or part of the leadership team, you should expect your marketing leadership team to be benchmarking the company's marketing processes in order to identify how much performance can be improved and how.

Great resources to become a better product manager

The following link provides a great number of wav files for product managers.

http://aipmm.com/podcasts/

Learn from other's mistakes and fast-track your development.

Profile of a high performing marketer

Here is an article on MarketingProfs that is worth of a second look. Want to be high performing... have a read.

Marketing Champion Focused on Customer Analytics: Q&A With Paul Barsch, Marketing Director of Teradata
by Roy Young

Published on October 21, 2008

Paul Barsch, Marketing Director at Teradata, the business intelligence and data warehousing firm, is responsible for coordinating services engineering teams to define, build, and bring new offers to market.

A self-described "information junkie" with over 15 years in marketing for information technology and consulting firms, Paul challenges all marketers to bring value to their organizations by taking the analytical path to understanding customers.

As his frequent posts on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog and this interview make clear, he holds himself to that same high standard.

Roy Young: To what do you attribute your success in marketing?

Paul Barsch: Constant learning and continuous improvement. I hate to admit it, but I'm an information junkie. There's so much to learn and absorb, that frankly most days I cannot keep up with everything that's going on.

RY: How have you had to transform as a marketing professional to continue to be effective?

PB: I've worked in three Fortune 500 companies and collaborated with some extremely talented marketers. Some of my best campaigns were a result of input from a fellow marketer or an idea that I've taken from one company and implemented at another.

I tend to learn a lot by observing others, discovering their best practices and seeing if there's applicability to what I'm doing in my sphere of influence. If there's not applicability on this particular day, I keep an active database of best practices that may come in handy down the road.

RY: What has been your most satisfying marketing achievement?

PB: There are few things better than being on a multi-disciplinary team (sales, finance, operations, marketing) and helping land a multimillion-dollar deal.

When I was at EDS, a typical deal ranged from six to ten million dollars, and some "mega-deals," as we called them, were $100 million and above. I wouldn't target my entire marketing budget on those opportunities, but I would do whatever I could to help push the deal through the last mile and drive those deals to close. So that means if a particular deal has an identified business need, we might develop thought-leadership materials around that need and case studies that showcase our expertise. Marketing dollars might also go to funding a private hosted reception at a business conference where a key decision-maker is speaking, and then of course inviting that speaker to attend.

Working with account teams, I would strategize on the best marketing activities that would help push the ball forward. Now, obviously, from a cause and effect perspective, there are many diverse variables that influence a sale. That said, we would tag and track sales opportunities to marketing campaigns so that we could show that marketing had influence on a particular deal.

RY: Please describe one marketing initiative you are working on now that you find particularly exciting.

PB: Recently our company acquired a small consulting firm to help us in some key verticals where we had some gaps in coverage. So we had two weeks to identify where this company fit in our services portfolio and create a new value proposition for this company now that they were part of a much larger firm.

Working with another team in the company, we created sales proposals, sales materials, updated our Web site and built an internal training presentation within a two-week time-span. It was intense, but I think the end work product was fantastic. As a result, we now have over 100 new proposals to customers with "opportunity" in the millions of dollars.

RY: Considering the marketers you have respected most, what made them effective?

PB: You might expect me to list key marketing gurus like Seth Godin and Philip Kotler. And while I deeply respect and read those folks on occasion, I'm more influenced by people like Ted Minnini, Lewis Green, and Stephen Denny. Ted, Lewis and Stephen are all bloggers on the MarketingProfs DailyFix and each is president of their own marketing consultancy.

Ted Minnini is an expert on packaging and design. I love his perspectives on the importance of good design and the impact of design on consumer decision-making. Lewis Green is an influential marketing consultant who understands social media and marketing return on investment. And one word for Stephen Denny: brilliant.

RY: What is the greatest challenge you and your marketing colleagues face today?

PB: One of the greatest challenges that marketers face today is the perception of relevance by the C-suite. As marketers, we know we're moving the ball forward on deals, helping create better customer experiences, and building powerful brands. But for some reason, the C-suite of executives isn't making that same connection.

For the most part our measurement systems are terrible, and we often lack the ability to toot our own horn because our measurement systems are terrible. I wrote an article for MarketingProfs earlier in 2008 that details a panacea for this situation.

RY: What do you think is the single-biggest constraint facing corporate marketing departments today?

PB: The marketing function is not getting enough people, budget, or tools to do the job properly. If marketing were seen as a critical component of the organization, something where the CEO would rather lose his or her left arm before cutting the marketing budget, we'd actually have the resources to effectively do our jobs properly.

There's a bucket in the mind of every CEO called "the customer." You, Roy, have said that marketers need to show the CEO how we are reducing customer churn, increasing wallet share, and adding new customers. We need a data-driven approach so that marketing can tell a CEO all about "the customer"—who they are, what and when they buy, what they'll buy in the future, whether they're profitable, etc. Then and only then will we have the proper resources allocated to our departments.

RY: In your experience, what has made marketing influential and powerful in an organization?

PB: Working closely with the CIO, the marketing function needs to take the lead in championing and building an analytical infrastructure to better understand customers. If marketing is leveraging data to understand customer behavior, developing customer strategies that improve cash flows, driving richer and more personal customer communications, and establishing our department as the "voice of the customer," we'll be much more influential and valuable to our organizations.

RY: What changes do you expect to face in your work over the next 3 years?

PB: Will we see robots taking over marketing functions in the near future? No, but I've previously written for MarketingProfs that technology is going to drastically change marketing in the next five years.

Moore's Law and the fact that data is doubling every three years for most organizations means that marketers must take advantage of new technologies to capture and analyze available data and distribute intelligence to employees in strategic and operational functions. Intelligence in the hands of those who need it most—when they need it—will lead to better service, increased loyalty, and more profits.

RY: What do you like most about your work now?

PB: I love the subject matter. Business intelligence and data warehousing are changing the way companies market and sell to and service customers. Better than that, these technologies can help improve the entire value chain—both demand and supply.

If you examine my writing over the past three years, you'll see that I've been profoundly impacted by the field of analytics. I've also learned a new way of thinking—the need for deep and probing analysis and how to tear apart a problem to discover many viable options.

Unlike a multiple-choice test, I'm discovering, there is usually more than one right answer to dealing with a business challenge.

RY: What do you look for in people you hire and promote?

PB: One of the most difficult things to discover about a candidate is "do they know the value of a dollar?" A candidate may be brilliant, but if their work ethic is shoddy or they aren't constantly improving and acquiring new information and skills, then they'll probably be left behind by employees who are aggressive in these areas.

Woody Allen once said 80% of success is just showing up. That's bunk. Showing up is table stakes. An employee who puts in an honest and productive day of work and one who is constantly getting better at his or her job is worth their weight in gold.

RY: What was the first hard lesson you learned in business?

PB: It's often hard to predict the next big thing. When I was a divisional manager for a regional telecommunications company, I made a bet on a product I was sure would be a hit. I bought a lot of it, and unfortunately the product was ahead of its time. So, I had to unload it at a pretty steep loss. I had been in the telecommunications business for five years and thought I had stumbled onto a winner—but I was two years too early in the adoption cycle. Sometimes there is a big difference between a customer saying "that sounds like something I would buy" and the actual opening of his or her wallet.

RY: What advice would you give to someone who is just beginning their career in marketing?

PB: Interestingly enough, I wrote a post on that very topic titled "Desperately Seeking Distinction."

RY: What are your final thoughts?

PB: Life, including business, is a series of choices. Read much, ask questions, and spend the time to do the analysis. Then choose wisely. Flying by the seat of your pants and making choices haphazardly without the facts or reviewing all the angles is a recipe for much heartache.

Pay special attention to outliers and don't be so quick to dismiss them. Those "once in a hundred years" events, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us, often have a way of happening every 5-10 years!

How HP Boosted Product Sales 84% by Letting the Blogosphere Run Its Online Marketing Promotion

by Kimberly Smith

Case study published on 10/14/2008

Company: Hewlett-Packard
Contact: Scott Ballantyne, VP & General Manager for Hewlett-Packard's Personal Systems Group
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Industry: Information Technology, B2C
Annual revenue: $104,286,000,000
Number of employees: 172000

Quick Read:

Hewlett-Packard Personal Systems Group VP and General Manager Scott Ballantyne simply handed over a $5,000+ computer prize package to each of 31 bloggers, asking them to give away the prizes to their readers in any way they saw fit. He trusted their influence over the market he was hoping to reach.

It was a promotion designed to increase sales for the company's HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook, and it involved zero advertising and not a single new marketing message from HP. With the exception of a couple of minor stipulations, each aspect of the giveaway was designed by the blogging community for its readers—a risk that paid off in spades.

More than 50 million impressions were registered during the 31-day promotion, leading to an 84% increase in HDX Dragon sales, a 10% increase in overall consumer PC sales, and a 14% jump in Web traffic.

"The results were stellar," Ballantyne said. "Sales went through the roof."

Challenge:

In mid-2007, Hewlett-Packard introduced its Pavilion HDX Entertainment Notebook PC. Nicknamed the "Dragon," the system—which boasts HP's first 20.1-inch widescreen display, an HDTV tuner, a subwoofer and four Altec Lansing speakers, a low-light Web camera, a dedicated ATI HD2600 XT graphics card, and fingerprint reader technology—is one monster of a machine and, not surprisingly, carries a hefty price tag, starting at $3,000. Accordingly, it attracts a fairly niche target market: 25-34-year-olds with plenty of disposable income.

Considering its specs, the Dragon was well received by the tech community when it first came out, but sales didn't measure up. The pressure was on Scott Ballantyne, VP & General Manager for HP's Personal Systems Group, to effectively reach this target market and turn sales around.

Campaign:

Ballantyne saw his answer in the blogosphere and together with Austin, Texas-based Buzz Corps, a social-media and word-of-mouth marketing firm, created the "31 Days of the Dragon" promotion to play out within selected blogging communities.

Identified for their influence within the HDX Dragon's target market, 31 bloggers were summoned to develop their own contests for giving away an HDX prize package valued at over $5,000 (including software and movies). A new contest was launched every day between May 2 and June 1, 2008 on one of the designated blogs, which were responsible for creating all of the rules, messaging, and Web 2.0 tools for the giveaways.

HP's only stipulations were that (1) the prizes had to be awarded to readers and (2) the bloggers had to regularly promote the giveaway throughout the 31 days with posts about the other sites' competitions as well as their own.

Several of the contests, including those from AbsoluteVista and HardwareGeeks, resulted in blog postings and videos on sites such as YouTube and Blip.tv, submitted by contestants who explained how the Dragon notebook would benefit them, such as improve their productivity and mobile gaming. HardwareGeeks offered extra points for producing a commercial-like video promoting the HDX system.

Others instituted innovative ideas for increasing traffic to their blogs, such as the following:

• DigitalMediaPhile designed a treasure hunt. Users had to search through the blog's posts to find an image of the HDX Dragon, specs for its Intel processor, and other information, such as the first HP Pavilion Entertainment PC ever referenced in the blog.
• GearLive monitored the activity of its members during its week-long competition and awarded the prize to the user who collected the most points, which were granted for various site interactions, such as posting (non-spam) blog comments and participating in forums.
• Notebooks.com readers had to (1) submit a post to the site's forum explaining why they need and deserve the HDX Dragon, (2) get at least five friends to comment on those entries, (3) start at least five non-contest-related forum threads, and (4) write substantial comments on at least 10 other forum threads.
• LockerGnome picked a blog post at random and chose the winner from the reader comments left to that post; that approach goaded users to comment on all of the blog's posts.
• TheDigitalLifestyle made its readers search through the site's forums to find the details on its competition.

Others used the promotion as a means for learning more about reader preferences. For example, Jake Ludington's MediaBlab asked readers to share their opinions on the best freeware available in 22 categories, and TheGreenButton requested suggestions for improving its blog.

All the bloggers carried out their own marketing, cross-referenced each other, and together, without any persuasion from HP, built a communal Web site promoting the giveaway with links to every participating site.

All in all, the campaign cost HP and its partners $250,000 in prizes and payments to offset taxes for US winners. No money was spent on advertising or media buys, and no new marketing materials or tools were created by HP for the promotion.

Results:

According to Alexa data, the "31 Days of the Dragon" promotion registered more than 50 million impressions. It was translated into 40+ languages and reached 123 countries. A Google search garners over 380,000 links to discussions of the giveaway, and the more than 10,000 videos posted on sites such as YouTube.com and Blip.tv by participating contestants have received over 5 million combined views.

HP and Buzz Corp say that there are "virtually no negative comments about HP or the promotion that can be found" and that readers "overwhelmingly came out to praise HP, their products and the company as a whole."

Throughout the 31 days, more than 25,000 entries were received by the 31 participating blogs, which averaged a 150% increase in traffic during the campaign (some had as much as 5,000% more traffic during this time). Months later, these sites continue to report a 50% increase in monthly traffic compared with pre-campaign levels.

And their sites weren't the only ones to benefit. HP.com's traffic increased 14% due to this promotion.

More importantly, HDX Dragon system sales increased 84%. Overall consumer PC sales also increased 10%, and sales gains have reportedly been sustained in the months since the giveaway.

Lessons Learned:

The "31 Days of the Dragon" campaign illustrates the power of marketing for the community by the community. By surrendering control and allowing the participating blogs to independently create all of the contest specifics, marketing messages, and tools, HP was able to achieve third-party credibility which led to greater results, both in campaign reach and in overall product sales.

Another key benefit was the reduction in campaign cost as well as legal risk, since the bloggers were ultimately responsible for the contests and invested their own time and resources into launching and running those events. HP also limited many of the usual legal and internal approval requirements by giving the prize packages to these blogs with very few strings attached.

But as "hands off" as this campaign may have been, it was not something that came together overnight. "This is not adjunct PR or afterthought PR," said Ballantyne, adding that if you treat this type of campaign solely as a go-to-market strategy, "you will be seen through at some point."

"The blog community does this because they think and know in their hearts that it's real," he pointed out. "You have to have a trusted advisory/listening relationship with the community from day one. If you go in as a salesperson or just try to drop in, it won't work."

HP was able to build that trust by taking the time—well before the launch of this campaign—to forge long-term, open relationships with the blogging community. This included regularly reading their blogs and talking with them, organizing dinners for them, introducing them to the company's VPs and CIO, and giving them a tour the HP "Garage"—a treat usually reserved for the company's most serious customers. Moreover, it was about really listening to these folks as peers and taking action when their feedback was less than positive.

"It's different from the traditional PR/marcom environment. You have to be responsive, open, and speak in their language," Ballantyne said. "Like a marriage, every day you have to wake up and try at it."

Ballantyne offered additional tips for developing a successful campaign of this nature:

• Creating synergy through partnership and community: Both HP and the individual blogs benefited from the cooperative efforts of the bloggers. Since each blog actively promoted the giveaway and upcoming competitions on the other sites, even after their own piece may have already concluded, the "31 Days of the Dragon" program achieved greater exposure and all of the participating blogs received significantly higher volumes of traffic, a decent percentage of which has endured post-promotion.
• Taking a holistic approach: It's about getting the right message to the right people in the right context, which also means ensuring that both your product and company effectively support those messages at every point along the way. If you don't have a quality product and a solid infrastructure in place, the viral engine can quickly turn against you.
• Understanding the inherent risks: To generate independent buzz and reviews, you ultimately have to be prepared to "take a black eye," said Ballantyne. "You can't control these communities; if someone writes something bad, you can't shut [the blog] down." Instead, he says, it's important to be true to yourself, your brand, and your product—and figure out what you can improve to change that perception.

Related Links:

• "31 Days of the Dragon" communal site
• Hewlett Packard site
• Buzz Corps site

How good are your communication skills?

Here is a test you can take to check out how good your communication stills are. They ask some interesting questions.

Survey



The interesting points are being aware of :

• Non verbal communication
• Communicating complex concepts the best way
• giving thought to how you communicate
• listening really well

Sounds simple doesn't it. Take the survey and see how you go! Maybe get your partner to rate you too.