With your nose pressed to the glass it’s easy to lose perspective. The glass in this case being the product or organization you’re marketing or the idea that you’re evangelizing. In my experience, creators, such as Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers, are notorious for exhibiting this myopic view. While communicators, such as Product Evangelists are not. The primary reason is proximity. The proximity of the orator to the audience. Traditionally, PMs and PMMs are insulated from the word on street and rely heavily on analysis reports, CxO round table events and internal subject matter experts to form the appropriate marketing collateral. Evangelists on the other hand speak face-to-face with users of the product from multiple perspectives. Some of these (perspectives) include that of channel partners, technical sales persons, sales persons, end users, etc.

It’s this type of first person communication that makes their perspective so valuable.

• Valuable to collateral creation
• Valuable to ongoing and new product development
• Valuable to channel development

In short these are the true communication gymnasts of your organization.

The problem with this scenario is a lack of scalability. It’s simply difficult to communicate in an evangelistic, first person style, consistently and cost effectively. Sure, there are technologies, such as web conferencing tools that can mitigate the issue slightly but these solutions are only addressing the symptoms and not the problem.

In order to truly address the issue, a hard look needs be taken at;

• What types of collateral are being produced?
• How is your collateral being used and where does it fail?
• Who is the actual audience verses the intended audience?
• What is the best way to reach the defined audience?
• How are they expecting to be communicated with?
• How are you to maintain a close, customized, first person conversation with this audience?

These questions cannot be answered by increasing the marketing budget to allocate more resources. This economy won’t allow you to do that. Rather, the way you become the rockstar is by figuring out a way to market conversationally through conventional and possibly unconventional channels. All the while leveraging the majority of collateral that has already been created for marketing and communication purposes.

This is precisely the point where marketing and e-learning align. The prevailing point being, your audience doesn’t trust you. They are leery of your high level fancy communications. They distrust your ROI calculators, not because they are wrong but because you created them. What they want is to be able to kick the tires of your solution. They want to see what’s under the covers. Most importantly they want to see how your product fixes their problem. They certainly don’t care to see how it addresses 38 other issues they don’t have.

Case studies are one way of accomplishing this goal. White-papers are another. Podcasts that are associated with white-papers and case studies are even better. The point is, in order to win, you must communicate in a fashion that your audience can hear you from multiple perspectives without having to think about how to consume the material. You must communicate like an evangelist. The only difference is, it’s critical you, moreover your organization be able to speak to the appropriate audience from within a context they can hear you through.

Posted by Amin on 04.23.2009 at 9:55am   Tags: elearning
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