Video from Agile Marketing Panel at Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston
Thanks to Jim Ewel for putting the agile marketing panel together. While the conversation was short, it was great to have a chance to spread the word and connect with the other panelist including Scott Brinker, one of the founders of Ion Interactive and the blogger behind Chief Marketing Technologist, Tom Wentworth, Chief Strategy Office at Ektron, Steven Gilbert, Director of Marketing at EMC and Bradley Smith, Director of Marketing at PRNewswire. Here is the...
Eloqua presentation on April 4, 2012
I prepared this presentation for a “lunch and Learn” session with Joe Chernov and his team at Eloqua. An introduction to agile for marketing View more PowerPoint from Frank...
My slides from B2B Magazine’s NetMarketing Breakfast
I asked the question “Does B2B marketing need a new management paradigm?” B2B Magazine’s NetMarketing Breakfast on Sept 23, 2010 Does B2B marketing need a new management paradigm? View more PowerPoint from Frank...
Corporate Social Media: After the Buzz
I was a guest on This Week in Social Media hosted by PJA Advertising + Marketing. The show was rebroadcasted last week. I had a chance to listen again and thought there were some interesting nuggets. Mike O’Toole and I talked about the practical aspects of running social for a public company. I really like the way we came up with a top five list of “rules” for helping an organization be more social. 1. Find people who are willing to speak in the first person and aren’t afraid to have a personal point of view. You need people who are passionate about a given topic and have the domain expertise to add value to the conversation. 2. Be ruthless. Help your team find time for social marketing activities. What will they stop doing to make time to join the emerging conversations? Find the bottom 10% of activities and stop doing them – life is a zero sum game and something has to give. 3. Think small and simple. Social media can be overwhelming so people need to get started in simple ways and scale from there. 4. Use agile project management. Social media is still quite speculative and you will need to test things before making bigger investments. Agile provides an adaptive approach that helps accelerate learning. 5. Need to create an open, principle-based policy to provide guidance to the team. It is impossible to create rules for every possible scenario so you need to give people baseline behavioral guidance. There is much more to the conversation if you have the time to listen. Are there any other things we should add to the list? One last ask: I could also use your support for my panel on Agile for Social Media at the SXSW conference. Vote early and vote often my friends. And as always, thanks for your...
IDC Advisory Service, Marketing Operations Board meeting on May 26, 2010
IDC Advisory Service, Marketing Operations Board meeting in San Jose on May 26, 2010. Seven ways to make your marketing more agile View more presentations from Frank...
A seven step approach to agile marketing
In the past, I’ve discussed the benefits of applying agile project management to marketing programs without actually discussing the details of how it works. Based on the suggestion from a regular reader of the the ‘Slice, here is the agile process I frequently use for managing marketing projects. Keep in mind, that this is not great for projects with many hard deadlines like tradeshows, direct mail or print advertising. 1. Assign roles – The key stakeholders are the “scrum master” (the person who runs the daily scrum meetings), “program owner” (clearly articulates the goals for the project), “chickens” (people involved in the project from an informational standpoint), and “pigs” (the people who will do the heavy lifting for the project). 2. Decide on the duration and frequency of the sprints – In the world of agile project management, the idea is to break the work into smaller digestible chunks (ie sprints) and meet frequently to discuss progress on the specific tasks. I prefer two to three week sprints. In a perfect world we would have short scrum meetings daily but most of my agile marketing projects have meetings every other day. The scrum frequency depends on the work velocity. 3. Set goals for first sprint – The first one is the most difficult. I suggest first convening a “sprint planning meeting”. Before starting the sprint, we discuss the theme, review tasks and estimate time requirements. We’ll then put these tasks on post-it notes on a dedicated wall. I prefer Post-its to note cards to avoid the need for pushpins. Finally, we segregate the Post-its into the current sprint (what we will work on for the next two weeks) vs. the sprint backlog (what will come in later sprints). If there is time, we’ll also discuss who will handle specific tasks. 4. Sprint meetings – I put the scrum meetings in the calendar for all the stakeholders except the “chickens”. I’ll send the birds an email letting them know about the meetings and welcoming them to join us. My logic is that this is an open meeting but only the people with real tasks responsibilities are required to attend. 5. Discuss, discuss, and discuss again – We basically run through the Post it notes on the wall and sort them into “in process” tasks vs. the “spring backlog”. We then close the meeting by asking the “pigs” “what have you completed”, “what are you working on next” and “what are the risks”. The goal is to quickly identify risks. These meetings should be short (under 20 mins) so there is nothing wrong with taking issues offline to keep things...
