Jul 30 07
The “Digital Conversation” at Ariba
Guest host Maureen Taylor spends some time talking to Christine Crandall, the VP of Corporate Marketing at Ariba. Christine breaks down the organization’s communications efforts and gives her insight into the recent shifts taking place within sphere of corporate marketing and communications. (Total Runtime 10:16)
Full transcript after the jump
Maureen Taylor: Hello! This is Maureen Taylor, guest host for this edition of More Than Talk. Today I’ll be talking to Christine Crandall, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Ariba.
She has more than 20 years of experience in strategic marketing and has worked with organizations such as ILux, Oracle, and SAP America. Tell me a little bit about Ariba’s marketing efforts. Which audiences are you targeting?
Christine Crandall: What Ariba is really most responsible for is all communication and all activities that touch the marketplace, and that means not only communicating with customers but also with prospects and other types of influencers in the marketplace.
Included in that is also all the communication that touches our sales force and the training that goes along with it. So how they understand how to communicate our products is really outgrowth from our understanding from what the market has told us. So it’s a bit of a closed-loop kind of scenario in that area.
Maureen Taylor: As you’ve evolved in your job, what changes have you seen as far as the need of the audience?
Christine Crandall: There’s been a substantial amount of change. And some of it is really, from my marketeer’s perspective and from a company executive perspective, is very welcome change. We look at companies getting their product and service information from a wider array of channels today than they did probably 10 years ago. That doesn’t mean that traditional channels like print and direct mail are dead.
But today’s channels are predominantly electronic. They’re self-selected and they’re referentially based. No longer can I say, “Well, I want to go talk to the chief accounts officer in this type of a company so I’m just going to go push him a direct mail and he’s going to respond to it.”
Today what typically happens is that the procurement officer, she’ll go online and say, “I choose to tap into these particular media channels,” because it just fits her particular interest and it filters. And she determines what has trust and what has credibility. So looking at blogs and podcasts, like this, as a recent phenomenon, have dramatically altered the marketing landscape. I mean, users decide for themselves which blogs they’re interested, and more importantly, which one’s are credible.
A related social phenomenon is social networking and communities. We see a lot of that within Ariba and we’ve nurtured a number of communities. And they’re either industry-oriented, or they’re solution-oriented, and in some cases, they’re goal-oriented.
And what we find is that users share information between themselves—it’s sort of like electronic word of mouth. And a user will value another user’s opinion more highly than they will a vendor. And that realization is really important. For the market here, it means that messages need to be professed online to each of the channel. So when I look at Ariba, we’ve increasingly shifted much more to the digital conversation.
What’s unique to Ariba, and what we found having a lot of success, is taking the digital conversation and then driving it into it face-to-face. What to me was very, very enlightening and interesting, and one of those “Aha!” moments, was our prospects and our customers looked to us to enable networking.
We drive folks through things like Ariba Live, which is a rolling thunder kind of a large event that we host, all the way down to something we recently did which was the Supply Watch Road Show, wwhere we’re taking our commodity specialists and putting them on the road, connecting them up with our customers and folks in the market then let them talk.
Maureen Taylor: Christine, I really love that you’re acknowledging and utilizing this concept of digital conversation. What I’m hearing is you used these forms to find out what an audience wants, what they need. Going further you actually used the information to offer a content that is driven by those conversations.
Christine Crandall: Right. Because you’ve got to understand what different groups of people tune in to, not just in terms of channels but information element. The key under there is finding the end of it to match the message to the channel, to the actual end target.
If we go back to the traditional days, you have a limited number of channels and it was reasonably easier to go do that. And in order to model how I’m going to touch my intended audience to what channel, what impact is going to ultimately have on the business, really takes a completely different skill set.
What’s really interesting is watching what happens inside a company. This is not just outwardly facing. Marketing is responsible for employee communications, so you have that same challenge internally. But first, how do I talk to my employee?
Maureen Taylor: That’s a nice segue to another issue we’d like to address and that’s the internal communicator. So many people think that information does need to pushed because they feel that there’s so much information that employees need to know. What do you think?
Christine Crandall: I think it’s a little bit of both and it depends again on the audience. We’ve done quite a bit internally of pushing out customer profiles. We did this for this company and this was the result. This is important to them. I want to know what happens that some customers are actually using what I just built.
Some of it is actually polled. You have a whole other group of organizations interested on seeing customer stories but are much more interested in just-in-time tools. So it’s very just-in-time-oriented. The challenge becomes the net on how you actually go through that.
Maureen Taylor: OK Christine, are you a digital native or a digital immigrant?
Christine Crandall: If I were to describe myself, I think I’m a digital immigrant—in many ways. So I run the program on the main frame. When the digital thing kind of came along, you know, I’m of a different generation, and again that’s something else.I look at people that work for me that are in their early 20s, they have an innate understanding of how the digital community works.
Maureen Taylor: One of the interesting things is that this group of millennium is going to be the biggest work force since the baby-boomers
Christine Crandall: That’s very true and I think one of the things that I look at when I look at the very younger generation and realize that as they become so digitally-oriented, their… some of the special skills of the baby-boomers just don’t really transfer over.
Although the work ethics are the same between the baby-boomers and the millenniums, the priorities of those work ethics actually reversed it. Baby-boomers really value interpersonal communication, whereas the millenniums, that almost becomes last on their list.
And I think from a marketeer’s perspective, or even from a manager’s perspective, that awareness is actually critical because we’re wired differently. And that impacts not only getting teams to work, it impacts customer relationships. And I don’t think the wall-closed, the marketing community actually really thinks about it that way.
Maureen Taylor: Do you see these changes having an impact on the culture of the company at Ariba?
Christine Crandall: It has, in the longitudinal view, yes, it has changed the culture. If we were to go back to the early days when email first became commercialized, there were no mechanisms for drumming into the CEO’s office bypassing that chain in order to get there.
With digital communication, that completely changed. I look at Ariba’s culture, it is normal and it’s customary for people to just fire-off an email to the CEO. And he reads them, he values them, and he will respond.
In Ariba, it has actually made the company stronger because information now flows very freely throughout the company and we’re much better aligned and we’re much more tuned in to what’s going and what’s happening than if it were the model 10 years ago or 15 years ago.
Maureen Taylor: You know, that’s interesting to hear you say that. But so many of the companies that we talked to, there’s a natural resistance to the derogatization of access and distribution. But what you’re saying is that it actually helps bring these people closer together.
Christine Crandall: It is an interesting dilemma. You’re not going to be able to change it so you better just turn around and accept it and deal with it—it’s sort of my view on it. But we see a number of employees that are now bloggers and now all of a sudden the relationships start to change.
It used to be as just an employee was part of an organization, and they had a business in organization, and they knew there’s a boundary within which could be operated. Now the employee becomes a blogger, which means the employee is also a stakeholder, the employee is now an influencer in the community—completely different sets of relationships now.
When I look at the younger generation and it’s like, “Well, what are the rules now for being successful?” Is the rule that you do a good job, and you meet your MBOs, and you strive, and you be a good team player, and all of that stuff? Or, is the rule in order to advance, that you become wider known in the community and you have a credible reputation because you happen to have a blog?
Maureen Taylor: In closing, what advice do you offer up to your colleagues out there in the market?
Christine Crandall: My advice is one of the old adages, which is first of all, go listen to the market. Spend time with customers and ask them the basic questions—what do they read, what do they tune in to, what do they really value—and do it themselves. There’s nothing like hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth.
The other thing is, don’t jump into things with both feet. Pilot, pilot, try and measure it. And view the relationship with the customer from a ‘lifetime of profitability’ perspective—don’t view it as a one-time-shot deal. Because that relationship with customers will support a longer relationship and that is a different type of marketing.
Maureen Taylor: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. You’ve given us great insight and I’d say you’ve really bridged the gap between immigrant and native very well.
Christine Crandall: Well, thank you very much and thanks for the opportunity. This has been very enjoyable
Maureen Taylor: That was Christine Crandall, vice president of corporate marketing at Ariba.
