IBM distinguished engineer on, um, marketing?

Hey – Robert – you’ve found my latest hero…engineer? He kicked off as an accounting major – woot!!!! so some of ‘us’ can do good.

Great stuff…

A lot of IBM lately. I don’t really get that company. I know they are huge, and they must earn money somewhere, but they are all over the place, and still I don’t connect them with what is happening in Silicon Valley (not the place, the concept).

Jan: Two interviews is “a lot?” Interesting. I did 600 at Microsoft.

IBM does a lot in our industry, though. Yeah, they certainly aren’t sexy anymore, though. Maybe that’s the disconnect you’re sensing? This guy, though, is totally talking about blogging and SEM and such. Did you watch the interview?

Yes there is a lot of IBM as this whole thing of liberating people to talk and explain has unleashed a good percentage of the 300,000 people in the company as eightbar shows

Very interesting–sounds like Cluetrain 2.0.

I sort of come from the “old world” too. For twelve years I worked in one of the world’s leading telco companies (not the one starting with N…). It wasn’t sexy, as you write, but it had a lot of resources, and it could do anything it wanted to. The only problem was that it had lost its sense of direction, although it wouldn’t admit to it for the world. But the truth is that the market didn’t move in the direction the company wanted, and everyone became hypersensitive to criticism. In the end, I left to found a start-up. After all, life is too short doing things you don’t believe in. And yes, Robert, I viewed both interviews (I view most of them).

Next up, an in depth technical and architectural interview with a marketing dude.

Makes me wonder if there are any IM gurus out there that did it all wrong already. And that are willing to share that information without turning it into yet another IM sceme/scam.

Mike Moran was one of the most popular speaker’s at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit. Several people commented that they did not expect such an entertaining, dynamic presentation from someone with “engineer” in their title.

Just for clarification, the name of our nonprofit professional association is “Internet Strategy Forum” and the name of our annual conference that Mike spoke at is the Internet Strategy Forum Summit.

I’m just going to go ahead and put in my comments from The Fresh Peel:

“With online marketing it is ironic how much control we gain in areas such as consumer tracking and conversion rates, but for those numbers to matter and in order to be truly successful online, you have to be willing give up a lot of the control (or the illusion of control) that existed with traditional mediums.”

Thank you for SAYING all the things I was intuiting… and for connecting a lot of dots.

I will use this info on my blogs and as a visionary in the network marketing arena.

We are always looking for new ways to educate consumers and distributors in this industry to the dirty tricks, and back alley stabbing tactics that are going on all over the industry – taking advantage of naive people’s dreams, aspirations, and desperation.

I love the discussion that nothing can be hidden anymore… even if someone thinks they are a small invisible fly.

Time for Full Disclosure, I say. More Power to the Web.

Thanks for posting this great video.

Pat Crosby

I totally agree that nothing can be hidden. That pretty much should keep everyone on their toes, and minding their p’s & q’s, but it doesn’t. Thank you for this article!

Robert – always interesting to hear a deep enterprise search guy discuss marketing.

Makes complete sense – to engineer a search solution, you need to get into the headspace, and linguistic and computational space to pull forth the nuggets of information that people are searching for.

And what’s a guaranteed way to determine whether what you think people searching for, and what they actually get match up? Doing marketing and measuring the end results of sales versus your marketing efforts.

Ah, if only all marketers understood this, and everyone looking at enterprise search understood this as well.

If enterprise content was created to be found (and understood) in the first place (instead of being yet another TPS Report [for Office Space fans]), life would be a lot easier “behind the firewall.” Long road to haul though!