Marketing as an Integrated Business Process

Posted on April 22, 2011

Background

One can often think of a complex business activity as a business process that consists of a set of sequenced or parallel steps or activities, decision points and branches, roles to perform the steps, artifacts that are produced along the way  completion criteria for each step, milestones, and more. There is also a need for monitoring and metrics so one can measure how well the process is running. This can provide some insight into bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the process and help identify opportunities to streamline and optimize the process in subsequent iterations.

Marketing is no exception. In An Overview of Marketing I looked at some marketing basics and reviewed various marketing functions. Here I want to explore marketing as a multi-stage business process to show how these functions come together to successfully bring a product to market.

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An introductory note on BPM

Posted on January 13, 2011

Business Process Management (BPM) for some time now has been established as an important business management practice and discipline. Complemented with BPM software, often referred to as a BPM Suite (or BPMS), a category of enterprise software, BPM has shown that it can help organizations streamline and automate their key business processes, effectively monitor and measure them, and provide the means to optimize those processes on a continuous bases.
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An Overview of Marketing

Posted on December 22, 2010

What is Marketing?

It may be useful to step back and look at a definition of marketing here. According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” This definition is quite general, but it has a few critical elements that should be highlighted:

1. Marketing is a set of activities, institutions and processes.
2. These activities and processes are concerned with creation, communication, delivery and exchange of offerings.
3. Offerings: there is always a product or service to be marketed.
4. Value: the offering must have some perceived value for the intended audience.
5. Target audience: there are always customers, partners, or even a society.

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Status Updates in Social Media

Posted on December 12, 2010

How big is your social presence? How many statuses do you have and how many of them do you actively maintain? How do you manage them? How frequently do you update them? What is the nature of your updates? Do you cross-post or syndicate any of your updates on other social sites? In this post I discuss these questions and provide guidelines and best practices that I hope will help you better manage your presence on various social media sites.
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Oracle Ambitions and Plans

Posted on November 1, 2010

Oracle with the 2009 revenue of $26.8 billion, market cap of about $135 billion, and a future revenue goal of $100 billion, has been a powerhouse in software for some time. Many in the IT world – both vendors and customers – fear Oracle. From a vendor perspective they are a threat to most, and from a user perspective organizations even government agencies such as NSF do not like that they increasingly have to rely and depend on a single vendor for software, and now to some extent for hardware as well. See New York Times article “Oracle Growth Plans Worry Rivals and Customers”.
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Social networking till death do us apart…and then some

Posted on May 13, 2010

By Philippe de Champaigne, 1602-1674, via Wikipedia

In memory of Sanam Kordestani, a friend who passed away Feb. 2010 at the age of 38. She was a�friend to many and a�natural networker, way before “social networking” had become fashionable.

I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. We all eventually get there sooner or later, whether we like it or not. We play, we learn, we love, we compete, we win, we�lose, we create, we collect, … and then we leave it all behind —�rich or poor, happy or miserable, loved or hated, all alone or with a large family. The best we can hope for is that we’ve done some good and have had a positive impact in the world somehow during our lifetime.
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Virtual Social Influence

Posted on March 1, 2010

I’ve been thinking about my presence on the internet from the early days, from my time at Argonne National Labs near Chicago in 1988-1989 and from my graduate school days at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1989-1992. That was even before the web browser days, which didn’t come out till 1993-94. Mosaic browser was first released in 1993. And I remember the excitement we had at work at Salomon Brothers in New Jersey when we installed an early version of Netscape browser in 1994.
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Leveraging Social Media in Your Business

Posted on February 22, 2010

In my last post I explained that before you embark on using social media for your business, you need to first determine your objectives and define your strategy. And this strategic planning does not and probably should not involve any specific social media channel at the outset.

A good article for the planning and strategic upfront work is “10 steps to a practical social media business strategy” by Allen Bonde, where he describes the basic but necessary steps such as creating a mission statement and a marketing plan, assigning ownership and defining policies, all before getting to specific social media channels.
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Using Social Media in Your Business: Strategic or Tactical?

Posted on February 8, 2010

A while ago I read a blog post from a marketing executive who wrote that he had prohibited the use of certain words in his strategy and planning meetings. Among those words there where many popular social networking and media words such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Though that might seem odd at first, it makes a lot of sense. The point is that while social media may serve as an effective method of promoting your business, it is only a set of tools and channels that you may use to execute against your business plan and strategy. It is part of the tactical stuff that you do after you have figured out your strategy.
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How do I tweet? Let me count the ways …

Posted on January 16, 2010

One of the great and unique things about Twitter is that it is a fairly simple and easy service to use. From an end-user perspective, setting up an account at twitter.com and starting to tweet, is a couple of minutes of work. I can describe the concept of Twitter and its features to any internet-savvy person in 5 minutes. The basic functions on twitter.com can be summarized as follows:

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