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10.08.07
Managing By Embarassment
By Mike Moran
In my speaking engagements, I often talk about my experience working at ibm.com, a huge Web site any way you slice it-millions of pages, dozens of languages, over 90 countries, thousands of people.
It's those thousands of people that proved the most challenging for Internet marketing, because most techniques must be coordinated, but they can't be centralized. (You'll never have a blogging department, for example.) So, how do you coordinate hundreds or thousands of people across a company to do the right thing for Internet marketing?
Unfortunately, Internet marketing in medium-to-large companies can require more of a background in organizational behavior than in marketing itself. When you need dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people to move in the right direction, you've got a real challenge on your hands.
You can't centralize or outsource blogging. You must create an environment where your rank and file employees can blog effectively to improve the image of your business.
Search marketing is similar. Sure, you can hire an agency to manage parts of your paid search campaigns. You can centralize or farm out search strategy and maybe keyword management, but the basic blocking and tackling of organic search must be done throughout your organization-Webmasters, writers, and lots of other specialists must do things right every day on every page.
How do you respond to customers who complain about your company on message boards? It won't help to assign customer service people to the job-what you need is experts who are part of the community. They'll have the kind of credibility you need when a crisis hits.
Add in social media marketing and wikis-so many forms of Internet marketing require coordination across the organization. How do you do it?
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Your basic tools are:
• Evangelism. To get people to change behavior, they must understand why they must change. You need to convince people that the tasks you want them to do are important- important to your company and important to them personally.
• Policies. Sometimes, you need policies to address what is needed. Bloggers should know the rules before they start. Webmasters should know that they are expected to perform search marketing tasks as part of their jobs. Larger companies need policies and procedures, but smaller companies might just need checklists. Regardless, you need to fold new tasks into the fabric of existing jobs.
• Training. Don't expect people to know what to do or to "pick it up on their own." Conduct training to explain exactly how to do things so that each person knows what is expected.
• Coaching. No matter how much training you provide, you'll always run into unexpected situations. Provide experts who can be summoned for sticky problems, such as helping a poor blogger who is under fire for something she said.
• Tools. To whatever extent you can automate the policies and make training simpler, do it. Can you remind people to blog each week? Can you provide an internal community to find partners to blog with? Can you offer a message board to converse with experts to aid learning?
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Copyright Mike Moran
Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert on Internet marketing, and the author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., the best-selling book on search marketing. Mike also writes the popular Biznology newsletter and blog.
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