That’s when Mark Evans, director of content publishing and technology applications at United Stationers, will present “How To Manage Content and Cross-Media Campaigns Like A Rock Star” at eTail Palm Springs 2012, being held at the JW Marriott Desert Springs in Palm Desert, California.

Mark’s session will provide you with “actionable information and strategies to employ as soon as you return to the office.” A few topics Mark will cover at this 3:00 p.m. session:

• Effective content management from product and beyond
• Cross-media publishing and campaigns
• Innovation vs. cost cutting — persuasion is not a commodity
• Real-world case studies
• Driving change in a large corporation

United Stationers is a $4.8 billion retail distributor of office supplies and workplace products and the nation’s seventh largest multichannel merchant. Mark is a compelling speaker and an expert in leveraging marketing content in cross-media campaigns for greater retailer success.

We should know; Mark and United Stationers are Enterworks customers, using Enterworks Enable to manage and publish their content for “marketing campaigns that support customer retention, new customer acquisition and sales growth,” as a recent Internet Retailer article put it.

The article details how Enable lets United Stationers dynamically assemble marketing collateral and other sales material to help their retailers sell the products it supplies them. Using Enable, Mark’s team can

…manage the product information and associated rich media assets, like product photos and videos, for all of its products. [It can also] manage the brand assets of its resellers, such as their logos, messaging themes and local selling information so it can create marketing collateral that appears custom-made and targeted to retailers’ customers. It also can distribute the marketing campaigns on retailers’ behalf, such as via an e-mail blast to customers.

If you’re a retailer or retail distributor, you won’t want to miss Mark’s session.  Put his session — February 27 at 3:00 p.m. — on your eTail Palm Springs agenda and say hi for us when you see him.

During the holidays we had friends and family over to play games, including “Taboo.”  It’s a game where you have to guess a word based on your partner’s description of the word.  But your partner is forbidden from using the word itself or a list of related words. 

My partner was a Gen Y’er (the boyfriend of one of my daughters). He started out describing the secret word as “an old-fashioned, obsolete way people once used to purchase products.” 

Can you guess the secret word?  It was “Catalog.”*

I’ve gotten over people thinking things are obsolete or old-fashioned when I think there’s still plenty of life left in them.  But it did strike me as interesting that these attributes would immediately come to a Millennial’s mind when describing catalogs.  (It doesn’t seem too long ago that I blogged about my wife’s teen-age cousins gushing about the advantages of print catalogs.) 

In fact, there was a vigorous point-counterpoint in DM News just last month on this very topic.  Nancy Sloane, principal at marketing agency Zoom IQ2, came down firmly in the “anti-print” camp for cost, performance, and environmental reasons.  While conceding the value of “small quantities of printed brochures and catalogs with a specific and purposeful distribution,” in general, “print catalogs are antiquated and should be eliminated.” 
 

On the other hand, “any online marketing effort, especially in the retail space, is made more effective by having an ancillary print component,” according to Rob Reif, president of space broker Media Networks Inc. That was also the conclusion reached concerning the B-to-B space by Jonathan Bein and Jim Tenzillo of Real Results Marketing in a study conducted for Modern Distribution Management magazine:

Catalogs and e-commerce are critical individual components in distributors’ marketing arsenals. Distributors that have taken advantage of clear synergies between the two are reaping huge benefits, including cost savings in product information management and marketing. What’s more and, perhaps most important, they are making buying easier for their customers by allowing them to purchase when and how they want.

In another study for MDM magazine, these same authors asked rhetorically, “Is print dead? Do distributors need to stop producing paper catalogs?”  Their research revealed that “over 65 percent of distributors who produce a catalog for their customers find that catalogs are an effective channel.” They cited flexibility and branding effectiveness as being among the advantages of print.  In fact,

We believe that for many companies, print catalogs are in fact underutilized. They can provide competitive advantage in many sectors if properly utilized. Coordination with e-commerce programs can provide even greater return on catalog efforts. 

On that note, Lois Brayfield, president of catalog consultancy J. Schmid & Associates, spells out strategies for leveraging print catalogs as a multichannel vehicle in a Multichannel Merchant magazine article.  By changing the way you think of your catalog as a marketing tool, Brayfield suggests, “your print catalog has a unique opportunity to engage at new levels while enhancing your online activities.”

The role of the print catalog continues to evolve in the omnichannel marketing environment.  It isn’t dead yet, and it certainly isn’t taboo.  Retail and B-to-B marketers would do well to “infuse new thinking as you evolve your own catalog program,” as Ms. Brayfield puts it.

(*The full list of “taboo” words for describing “Catalog”: Shop, Order, Merchandise, Buy, Mail.)

Modern Distribution Management (MDM) magazine has published the third in its series of articles examining the state of catalog marketing and e-commerce in wholesale distribution.

It includes results from a survey conducted for the article by MDM and Real Results Marketing.  These findings reveal the synergy between print catalogs and Web-based e-commerce.  For example:

• 85 percent of companies with a successful catalog believe that their catalog helps drive Web sales

• 73 percent of companies with a successful e-commerce channel believe that their catalog helps drive Web sales

The piece also details other benefits of an integrated e-commerce/print catalog strategy, such as a consistent brand image across all marketing channels and the power of the print catalog to support other sales channels.  A notable quote:

In most industrial businesses, when a computer is not available, catalogs are, and customers needing a product solution reach for the company’s with which they feel most confident. Again, the multi-channel marketing distributor has the edge in getting that business…

The customer call that begins with “Hi, I am looking at your website and I have your catalog opened to page …” is becoming more common. This may happen even more with customers who are not quite sure of the right solution.

The article also specifically calls out the value of product information management (PIM) systems for maintaining a central repository of vetted, sales-ready content for all marketing channels:

The information required on each product is similar whether it goes into a print catalog or onto the Web. Clearly, this provides enormous efficiency for distributors that use both Web and catalog channels.

Because it helps ensure complete and accurate product data from all suppliers in all channels, a PIM system is critical for effective multi-channel marketing.  The survey found that nearly three of four distributors with successful Web channels and 60 percent with successful catalog operations consider their product data to be highly complete; in addition, 82 percent of successful catalog distributors report high product data accuracy.

This piece is an outstanding summary of the value of sound product information and the ability to manage that information across all marketing channels. If you’re an MDM subscriber, you already have access to the full December 12 issue.  If you’re not, the issue can be purchased singly.  You can also read the article by itself at the Real Results Marketing Web site.

(This blog post should not be construed as an endorsement by Modern Distribution Magazine or Real Results Marketing of Enterworks offerings.)

We’re in the midst of several significant milestones in the history of the Internet, computing, and communications.

Ten years ago last month, Apple brought the iPod to market – the progenitor of the iPhone and iPad, and arguably the precursor to the explosion in mobile computing. In August, we passed the twentieth anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee publishing the first Web site.  And 20 years ago next month, the first Web server in the U.S. came online.

These milestones bring to mind some of my earliest experiences with leveraging online computing and communications for commerce.

In the early 1990s I worked for a large electronics component distributor (semiconductors, memory chips, etc.).  We had read this small article about Mosaic, the Internet, and a guy name Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois.

There were no illustrations in the article to show what a “Web site” looked like, so we sketched a few pictures and faxed them to Marc to confirm that we were in the right ballpark.  We then created the HTML pages (in HTML 0.4) and launched our first site. This eventually led our company to become one of the first to offer B-to-B e-commerce over the Internet and one of the first companies, if not the first, to do Internet seminars (what are now called “Webinars”).

Fast forward nearly two decades, and it’s astonishing to consider that today we enjoy high-speed Internet connectivity and massive computing power almost wherever we go.  We were amazed in the late 1990s when we could first get on the wireless Internet at 4800 or 9600 bps.  Today we take multi-megabit access for granted in most urban and suburban areas.

It’s also remarkable to think that your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969 when it sent the first astronauts to the moon, and that the birthday card you receive in the mail that sings “Happy Birthday” has more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945. A recent blog post describes how the capabilities of the iPhone would have required a wheelbarrow or even a truck for mobility a generation ago.

What is important, endures.

But some things never change in e-commerce.  The key to our success on the Internet in the mid 90′s is the same as it is today.  And that’s the need for sound product data and related content.

Product information needs to be governed according to rigorous data quality standards and centrally managed for use by all people, applications, and channels to ensure customer satisfaction and accurate transactions.

And especially as businesses and consumers rely more on social and mobile media to gain immediate access to your product information, it’s essential that the information be clean, current and correct.

Product information is a relationship builder and the single most influential content for raising purchase intentions.  Due to the emergence of social media strategies, the primary job of a brand Web site is to provide product information.  The strength of new media is in referring customers back to the Web site to finalize the job of cementing consideration.

We recently published an e-book called “Preparing for PIM.”  It’s aimed at business decision-makers who are responsible for gathering, managing, and publishing information about the products their companies make or sell.  Here’s a summary of the steps it outlines:

1. Quantify or qualify the business problems resulting from product data problems.  Organizations often recognize problems with their product information when they first appear as problems with key business processes.  After a while you realize that the common denominator among these process problems is product information problems.  Having identified these, it will be easier to quantify them in order to build the business case for correcting them.

2. Identify participants, champions and sponsors.  An important point to remember is that yours isn’t an IT-driven or IT-sponsored undertaking.  You’ll want to include IT personnel, but you and your business colleagues need to be the motive force.  You need to identify the key executives who are most affected by inefficient business processes resulting from bad product data. Approach those with the most “pain” and diplomatically recruit them as a sponsor or champion of your PIM initiative.

3. Identify locations and sources of product data. You’ll also need to identify the attributes, descriptions, images, and other content associated with the data.  Begin by creating an inventory of where the product content originates, for what purpose it was originally created, where it’s managed, which people and processes use it, and which media and channels consume it. Ideally the metadata for these assets are stored and managed in a registry or repository, which will help in identifying some of these aspects of the data.

4. Create a data quality framework.  You need clean, standardized, rationalized, and normalized data as you start your PIM initiative.  Which means you also need to determine what constitutes quality data according to your requirements and establish a framework that defines and quantifies those metrics.  These may include completeness, accuracy, consistency, continuity, timeliness, redundancy, and uniqueness, among others.  It’s up to each organization to identify and define the metrics that matter most to the processes they’re addressing.

5. Perform a data quality audit.  The exercise of creating your data quality framework should highlight a number of areas where data problems needs to be fixed.  Having identified these, you need to audit your data to determine at which points they fail to live up to the metrics in your data quality framework. The report produced by this audit will help quantify the level of data quality work that needs to be done in advance of the actual PIM deployment.

6. Establish a data governance council. Your organization may not be ready for a formal data governance council with executive overseers and teams of data stewards.  It may be best to simply “re-purpose” the existing team of process participants and sponsors into a data governance committee for data relating specifically to your PIM initiative.  Note that over time, this group may expand into a more formal data governance council, especially as your efforts intersect and overlap with those of other like-minded people in your organization.

We invite you to download the complete e-book, “Preparing for PIM,” which offers greater details on each of these points.  Let us know if you’d like to talk further about your product information challenges and aspirations.

We just got back from a wonderful family vacation with our three daughters and their SOs.  During the visit, our eldest used a funny expression to describe her husband’s smartphone.  She calls it his “tiny Internet.”  Whenever he needs to know something or check on something or order something, he whips out his “tiny Internet” and everything is right at hand.

He wasn’t the only member of the family who needed to stay connected with work.  During that same vacation, I interviewed an e-commerce executive with an industrial manufacturer about his company’s vision for product information management.

Part of the vision encompasses the “tiny Internet,” or at least a “mid-sized Internet.” He described a concept he called “service in the trench.”  A contractor is in a ditch, realizes he’s missing a part, whips out his tablet, and puts in the order.

This executive also sees his internal sales force and independent reps using their tablets on sales calls to provide customers with immediate access to current, authoritative information about their products to help close the deal. “When our customers order our products, I want them to get what they need and expect,” he said

I’ve written before about IDC’s concept of “omnichannel commerce,” in which mobile technologies are immersing consumer and business customers in opportunities to shop, source, and purchase merchandise.  This new dynamic is empowering customer and vendor alike, on both sides of the sales relationship.

Tech-savvy customers can help themselves by pulling out their mobile device and putting in their own orders.  Old school customers can get better service when their sales reps are armed with a tablet and the latest pricing and product information drawn directly from the source.  These scenarios apply in both consumer and industrial markets.

The key to success in these scenarios is using a central source of reliable product information to fuel all your marketing media and sales channels. Whether your customers use the “tiny Internet” (smartphone), mid-sized Internet (tablet), large Internet (laptop or desktop), or no Internet at all (print catalog), all your product content should come from the same, canonical source.

I recently heard about a technique used by teaching hospitals to quickly focus the thinking of medical students and interns on grand rounds.*  It’s called the One Minute Preceptor, described as a framework that “encourages students to think critically about the case and gives insight into clinical reasoning skills.”

Four questions asked early on in this process are:

• What do you think is wrong with this patient?
• Why do you think that?
• What other possibilities have you considered?
• What are you going to do?

Solving business problems should also focus first on identifying the problem, not deciding on the cure.  So it occurred to me that these questions would be suitable early in a discussion among business and IT decision-makers to develop a thumbnail diagnosis before settling on a course of action.

It would especially be useful for data governance advocates (in either business or IT) to introduce the uninitiated to business problems that can arise from poor data governance, quality, and management.

To wit:

• What do you think is wrong with this business process?  Are the problems due to human factors, such as lack of training or bad judgment? Are they due to a lack of reliable data?  Or is the data reliable, but inaccessible?

• Why do you think that?  Are most of our bad decisions being made based on intelligence from this one data set?  Do comparable decisions made on other data result in better outcomes? Have we discovered that our otherwise sound data is kept in stovepiped applications or databases?

• What other possibilities have you considered? Have you ruled out other issues, e.g., sales might be declining due to changing consumer tastes rather than poor marketing processes?  Have you checked your premises to make sure you aren’t biased toward one solution or another (e.g., biased toward a technology fix rather than cheaper/faster alternatives)?

• What are you going to do? Is this more of a human-side issue, calling for re-training in best practices?  Are there tools that can help address the issues you’ve uncovered? Can you make a business case for investing in these tools?

You might not want to justify a complete overhaul of the way your business unit works or justify a million-dollar technology purchase based on this thumbnail assessment.  But it’s a useful sequence of questions even just to organize and clarify one’s own thinking, and to help begin the task of probing, understanding, and fixing business problems.

*I realize that this is my second post in a row using a medical theme. Medical professionals treat people with a variety of modalities — surgery, medicine, technology, therapy, homeopathy, lifestyle change, etc.  I think that model certainly applies to treating business ills such as bad processes and poor data, which explains why medical metaphors come naturally to mind.

We usually think of the brain and the heart as being our most vital organs.  But kidneys also play a literally vital role in the proper functioning of the human body.  Without them keeping our blood clean and chemically balanced, we would eventually die.

Those whose kidneys have failed use dialysis to imitate their function.  The patients’ blood is pumped through the dialysis machine* to cleanse it and then circulated back into their bodies.  It isn’t a perfect solution, but it does keep renal patients alive when their own kidneys don’t work sufficiently.

In the enterprise, some people (either business or IT) might think it’s more trouble and expense than it’s worth to develop the processes and deploy the technologies for a master data management initiative, to ensure that data in their ERP and other enterprise systems is kept clean, current, and correct.

After all, they might reason, the data is already there in the ERP system; why take it out of the system (even virtually, in registry-style MDM) to be managed in an MDM hub, which is only going to serve the data back to the system?

They might think that a better solution is to emphasize best practices for data governance among the users of the ERP system – that best practices alone are sufficient to ensure the ERP data stays accurate and up-to-date, and is maintained according to the organization’s standards.

But in many cases that isn’t realistic. Most ERP systems are notoriously inadequate at the technical functions that help support sound data governance.  And, honestly, most people (being human) are notoriously inadequate at the human side of data governance. Both the systems and the people need tools to help them with these vital tasks.

An MDM platform serves that role, similar to the function of a dialysis machine.  It takes raw “impure” data from the system, ensures that it’s clean, current, and correct, and then circulates it back to the originating system for use in the enterprise.

Beyond just ensuring data quality, MDM also integrates and manages data from a variety of sources, uses a flexible data model to create associations among complementary data, and makes the master data available for all requirements and applications across the enterprise, such as business intelligence, multichannel publishing, partner feeds, and others.

(To push this hematological simile even further, it’s almost like a combination of dialysis and blood transfusion; you take data from a variety of donors, cleanse it and make it available for other life-giving enterprise processes, then make sure it goes back to the original donors.)

I’m sure that renal patients would rather not go through the expense, discomfort, and inconvenience of dialysis therapy.  But it’s better than poisoning themselves with their own blood.  In the same way, enterprises that rely on ERP and other enterprise systems need to go through the effort of MDM and sound data governance to ensure they don’t poison their critical processes and operations with their own data.

*From Wikipedia:  “Dr. Willem Kolff, a Dutch physician, constructed the first working dialyzer in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Due to the scarcity of available resources, Kolff had to improvise and build the initial machine using sausage casings, beverage cans, a washing machine and various other items which were available at the time.”  Extraordinary. 

The other day I wrote that a key benefit of data governance is having the confidence in your data to react quickly and nimbly to changing market conditions.  One customer of Enterworks is taking advantage of their data governance and master data management (MDM) capabilities to rapidly respond to new business opportunities in an emerging global market.

The company’s vision is to provide engineers in that region with high-quality, quick-turnaround service to complement the company’s resource-rich Web site of electronics products and components.

Their e-commerce Web site carries over a million products from more than 400 suppliers.  Their microsites help educate engineers on product features, benefits, and applications, and provide them with product diagrams, drawings, demo videos, and technical documents.  Their mobile site allows engineers to search for and buy the components they want wherever they’re working.

All these resources enable the company’s strategy of rapidly responding to their customers’ needs.

But what if this company couldn’t be sure that their product data was clean and accurate?

What if they couldn’t be sure their data was coming from the most up-to-date sources?

What if their images and documents weren’t linked with the product data they go with?

What if they didn’t have a way to get that content from where it is to where it’s needed – in customer-facing media such as Web sites, mobile apps, and catalogs?

This company doesn’t have those concerns.  Because underlying their customer-centric marketing strategy is an authoritative repository of master product data, product information, and related digital assets.

This repository allows the company to centrally manage their product content and to publish or syndicate it to all channels: e-commerce pages, microsites, mobile apps, their 2,000-page print catalog, and others.

The tremendous diversity of new marketing media and channels can be a great boon for reaching new customers and serving existing ones.  But you must first have confidence that your product content is complete, current, and correct, and be able to publish that content to those media and channels in streamlined and automated processes.

Telemetry is a technology for remotely measuring and reporting information.  The word comes from the Greek roots tele (“remote”) and metron (“measure”).

Engineers use SCADA telemetry to remotely observe the performance of oil rigs, pipelines, and other infrastructure.

Doctors and nurses use biotelemetry of heart rates and other vital signs to monitor the condition of multiple patients in an ICU.

Aerospace engineers use telemetry/telecommand systems to collect data from spacecraft to ensure everything is “A-OK.”*

In each case, telemetry data informs users of the status and condition of the system (or person) they’re monitoring. A complete collection of reliable data from all points lets them know that the system is in good condition.  Missing data or sub-optimal results raise a red flag and indicate there’s a problem.

What does the condition of your product data communicate to your customers? 

When they pull up your e-commerce catalog or retail app…

• …is the product information current, complete, and correct?  Or are key features and benefits missing or inconsistent with information in other channels?
• …are there multiple images and rich media associated with every product?  Or are digital assets a hit-and-miss affair?
• …are the products “findable” in a site search? Or does even a variety of search techniques fail to turn up relevant offerings?

These are critical “telemetry signals” that tell your customers either that everything’s fine or that something’s amiss with your business.  Product information that’s missing or incomplete, that’s wrong or inconsistent wards off potential customers from doing business with you.

If this merchant can’t even get their basic product information right, they think, how can I trust that they have these items in stock?  That they’ll deliver on time?  That they’ll make things right if there’s a problem with my order?

Kimberly Struyk is vice president of client strategy for digital marketing research firm CRM Metrix.  She uses detailed study findings to explain the vital importance of product information for successful e-commerce in a compelling blog post, “Product Information: A Relationship Builder”:

…sites who under-deliver on such information see visitors who create alternative plans to buy a competitive product… Ultimately, lack of or sparse product information results in overall brand impressions that plummet by an average of 19 percentage points. [emphasis added]

A product information management (PIM) initiativecan help you send your customers a strong and consistent signal about your business and your offerings.  PIM integrates all data and information about your products in a central repository, ensures and enforces data quality standards, and makes the integrated content available to all print and digital media.  PIM ensures that your product information is always complete, current and correct in all marketing channels.

Struyk concludes that “product information is the single most influential content for raising purchase intentions.”  So don’t under-deliver on product information for your customers.  And don’t send them the wrong signal about the reliability of your enterprise.  Let your product information build their confidence in doing business with you.

* According to Wikipedia, author Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff that NASA engineers added the “A” to “OK” during radio transmission tests because the sharper sound of A cut through the static better than O.