Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the changing nature of marketing as people and companies move to a greater online presence.

1. Context and Content Are Becoming More Important as
Marketing Faces Sweeping Changes in the Online World
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the changing nature of marketing as people and
companies move to a greater online presence.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next BriefingsDirect podcast. Today, we explore the changing
role and impact of content marketing using the IT industry as an example. Just as
companies now communicate with their costumers and prospects in much different
ways, with higher emphasis on social interactions, user feedback, big data analysis,
and even more content to drive conversations, so too the IT industry has abruptly
changed.
There's more movement to cloud models, to mobile applications, to leveraging
data at every chance, and they are also facing lower-margin subscription business
models. The margin for error is shrinking in the IT industry. If any industry is the
poster child for how to deal with rapid change on all fronts, it is surely the global information
technology industry.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this forward-looking
discussion on how the nature of marketing is changing. Customers sharing big data in rapid
evolving technology industry are all coming together, and we're going to find out how.
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To explore how we can expect the IT industry to adjust and how the nature of marketing is
impacting it along the way, we're here to develop new ideas with marketing and technology with
our guest Lora Kratchounova, the Founder and Principal at Scratch Marketing and Media in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Welcome, Lora.
Lora Kratchounova: Thanks for having me, Dana.
Gardner: Lora, you and I have been talking about marketing for years now. We're in an
interesting field, and it’s been such a dynamic time. I'm so glad you came to join me on this,
because I have some interesting ideas about where technology is going and where marketing is
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Gardner

2. intercepting, and they are both changing. They are both interdependent on each other in many
ways.
So, let’s start at a high level. Content marketing has proven to be very successful, and you and I
have had a hand in this. Creating compelling stories, narratives about what’s going on and how
people can learn from others, as they go through problems and solve them, has become a
mainstay in marketing. From your perspective, why is content marketing so important? Why has
it been so successful?
Kratchounova: There are couple of reasons for that. The pace of change is tremendous now.
People are trying to get their bearings on what’s going on in their markets, and
a lot of times, they need to get educated. What has changed with social media
now, information is a lot more immediate and transparent, and you can get it
from many more sources than the just online presence of a company, for
example.
The top-down modeling in the marketing is changing. We used to rely on
companies to tell us how to think about the world, and now we can form our
own opinions. As we realize that the customer is in the driver’s seat, they educate themselves,
and they make the right decisions about how to go about change, companies are realizing that
they need to feed into that flow and be part of that discussion. So content marketing has been so
successful, because you become an educator, not just selling to people, and especially in IT.
Gardner: And I think people have become much more accustomed to conversations, rather than
just a one direction information flow. "We're the seller and we're going to tell you what it is."
Now, people want to relate. They want to hear what others have to think. It’s much more of an
actual conversation.
Ongoing conversation
Kratchounova: Exactly. Look at any IT domain. It’s interesting when we look at who is
influencing and who the main voices in it are, who the voices that people consider experts are.
You pretty much consistently see reporters, journalists, and the analysts folks like you, but then
we see that there are a lot of C-level executives from IT companies who are becoming that kind
of a voice as well.
That just points to the need for that ongoing conversation, the need for sharing at all levels of the
buyer funnel. Once people have bought into a selection, they need to make sure of adoption, and
they are maximizing the investment.
So the conversation is very important, and the immediacy of having access to folks and having
the ability to exchange a few thoughts on Twitter or LinkedIn has changed the dynamic
completely. So it’s absolutely about conversations and storytelling, but it's still mapped to the
buyer’s funnel.
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Kratchounova

3. People are still educating and still looking at options for a change or for replacement, one or the
other, until they select the people they want to work with. And it’s usually people in brands. It's
not just that they want to work with this company, but the people behind it. We're moving more
to a people economy.
Gardner: As you point out, you can get to the real source of the knowledge nowadays.
Publishing is available to anybody whether they're tweeting, blogging, posting on Facebook, or
putting something up on their company website. Anybody who has something to say can say it. It
can get indexed and it can be made available to somebody who wants to hear about that
particular topic.
Most people now don’t just sit back and wait for information to reach them. They're proactive.
They go out, they start to search, they do hashtag searches on Twitter, and they can do Google or
Bing on web.
It’s much more of, "I know something; I'm putting it out." And there's another case of someone
saying, "I need to know something; I am seeking it." They come together on their own. The
content makes that possible. The better the content, the better the likelihood that those in a need
to know and those in a need to tell come together.
Kratchounova: Exactly, but I think you hit on something very important. Everybody can
publish, and a lot of people are publishing. Yet, we're interested in a love for your people, falling
in love for your people, and what they have to say.
The ability to publish is great, and it democratizes the means of how we communicate with each
other and educate each other, but yet you still have to earn it. This is very important. People who
really are influential are usually domain experts and they're there to help other people. That’s the
other aspect of it that both companies and their marketing teams and their executives need to
think about. You have to actively participate and show your expertise, it doesn’t come for
granted.
Important of curation
Gardner: And there's another aspect to greasing the skids between the knowledge and the
acquirer of the knowledge, and that is this curation. There are people who point at things, give it
credence, and say that it's a good thing, you should read it; or that’s a bad thing, don’t waste your
time -- and that helps refine this.
Kratchounova: It’s pretty exciting.
Gardner: There are machines doing the same thing. There are algorithms, there's indexing,
there's both human and machine aspects of winnowing down the good stuff and providing it to
people in a need to know, and that’s when we are going to get more powerful.
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4. Kratchounova: Great. I'm sure you know about Narrative Science. I've had a professional crush
on this company for few years now. They take data, turn it into storytelling, and they think this is
phenomenal. Obviously, that’s not going to replace some of the human storytelling that needs to
happen, but some of the data storytelling will come from technology. This is one particular
application where marketing and technology come together to bring something completely new
into life.
Gardner: So we can get knowledge through expertise or we can get knowledge through
experience, someone who has gone through it already and is willing to share that with you. If
you're acquiring IT, it’s super important to avail yourself of everything, because it changes so
rapidly and the costs are high.
If you make a big mistake in how you're designing a data center, you're out millions of dollars,
your products don’t work, and your top line businesspeople and the front office are going to
come screaming down on you. You have to make the big decisions and you have to make them
correctly in IT. There is the whole business is at stake now when it comes to IT. It’s not just a
service to the business; it is the business.
So, let’s think about the IT industry in particular, and then think about how content marketing as
we’ve discussed is powerful. How do IT people acquire content marketing? Do they get it
through websites, emails, or tweets? Is it delivered to them at a webinar that they opt into? How
does content marketing reach somebody who's an IT buyer?
Kratchounova: IT depends on the IT buyer, because we can’t necessarily lump them together
and ask how the IT buyer goes about it. There are people with different needs, and it depends on
their role. If you're CIO or CTO, there is a different mix of channels and sources you use. If
you're on the dev or on the ops side and looking for specific solutions, you're going into
completely different channels.
For example, if you're a DevOps professional, you're maybe on Stack Overflow and you might
be seeking advice from other folks. You might be on GitHub and sharing open-source code and
getting feedback on that.
If you're a CIO or CTO, what we have found working with number of different companies, be
that global companies or maybe companies that are growing, is that they do seek their peers to
validate what the peers are going through. One of the best things that companies can do, when
they try to talk to the C-level, is expose some of those connections that they already have from
their customers. Make sure that the customers are part of the discussion, and they can chime in.
Another important source of information for the C level in IT would be folks like you, analysts,
and strategic system integrators like Accenture and Deloitte, because these folks are exposed to
the kinds of challenges that a CIO or CTO would go through. So they have a lot to bring to the
table in terms of risk mitigation, optimal deployment, and maximization of the investment in IT.
Making those connections and sharing those experiences we have seen work really, really well.
Page 4

5. Let me just throw this in as well. The other thing we have seen is that the C level is still going on
Google. They're still doing the searches. We have compelling data, across the board, that in any
B2B complex enterprise environment folks are self-educating as well. So it’s not a question of
either/or; it’s what’s the right mix for each company depending on channels, depending on where
people sit.
Spectrum of content
Gardner: So there is a spectrum of content, some highly technical and defined, on places like
GitHub that are germane to a technologist. Then, there is that spectrum up from there to a higher
level towards peer review of products and peer review of solutions. Then, there are more
business types of topics about what is strategic, what’s the forward direction, how do I
understand at an architectural level decision processes, and where can I go for more information
to find out what’s coming down the pike and then put it in place.
Kratchounova: Think about Spiceworks. They're probably at five million IT professionals at
this point, and the community is there for a reason. So again, with each particular, there isn’t one
size fits all. One thing that we always recommend to folks is that if you’re looking to develop an
influential strategy and approach IT, it really depends on what domains you span.
You find that even if you're doing mobile application development, the folks who were really
influential and set the standards of that stage are somewhat different from the folks who are
concerned with security in mobile app development. So there isn’t necessarily one pool of
influencers that you need to go then to develop a relationship and understand what’s in their
mind. It really depends on your domain.
Gardner: So if you're a marketer and you recognize that quality content is super important, you
need to have a spectrum of content. It needs to be some content that would be germane to a
technologist that’s highly detailed, a how-to type. You need to have peer review and stories, case
studies, testimonial type content where the customer is telling what they’ve done, why it
benefited them, and what you can learn from that.
You also need to have higher level discussions with experts to help people chart the next course,
the strategic level. So content needs to come across a spectrum, and we recognize that the way in
which people get that content might be through search. It might be through web, e-mail,
webinars, webcasts, reading certain online sites, listening to certain Twitter feeds or groups, or
having a select group of people that you follow. All of that happens.
But what’s interesting to me, Lora, is that all has to do with the web. What we're seeing in IT is a
rapid movement towards mobile apps, rather than just the web, and in many cases, they're
starting to overtake the web as to where people spend their time. I'm sure you're using a
smartphone and you have mobile apps. You're not going on the web to find a cab; you’re going to
the Uber app to find a cab.
Page 5

6. If you're looking for a restaurant review, you’re not necessarily going on the web and doing a
search. You’re going into a specific app on Yelp, OpenTable, or somewhere else to find out where
your restaurants are and you’re going into Google Maps to find out how to get there.
So more-and-more, we're seeing, on the consumer side, people using mobile apps for more of
their processes, for their inquiry, for their actual productivity. It seems to me that that’s the case.
Then, on the enterprise side, the business-to-employee (B2E) side, we're seeing people using
cloud services more-and-more.
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It’s a portal from 15 years ago that’s morphed into more APIs that are on their way to be micro
services, and they are using them in the context of either back-office application activities and
systems of record. They're using ERP apps, but they're becoming more granular, more mobile,
and interestingly, we're also seeing big data analysis brought to the table, so that we can provide
process efficiency to people in the context of what they’re doing, where they are actually
operating in their day-to-day activities.
If that’s all the case, and I believe it is, we're moving more towards mobile applications, cloud
services, an API-driven world that leverages big data and analytics in order to put context into
process. How does content reach people? Do we lose the ability to deliver content to people now
or we need to have the content find them too?
Different perspective
Kratchounova: The answer to your question is both, but I do have a little bit of different
perspective on what you're describing. I don’t know that we are moving to a mobile app
experience necessarily. When we think about the apps and the examples you gave -- Yelp or Uber
-- yes, they're best-of-breed applications that we use because these are the most frequently used
applications.
But what you're seeing is actually a digital transformation. Digital no longer means the web, as
we know it, going online through your computer. You're actually navigating on a mobile device.
So it’s this digital transformation that’s happening, and the trend that we're seeing is aggregation.
It’s not about one individual app, but it’s more about what is the flip-board within the enterprise.
You're seeing that sort of aggregation bubbling up to the top because information overload is a
huge problem. People can’t prioritize anymore. They can’t toggle among those different
applications and companies.
Page 6

7. For example, one of our clients, not to necessarily add a plug for them, actually is very germane
to the discussion. Harmony does exactly that.
In those kinds of environments, what we're finding and where I totally agree with you, is the
ability to read and understand context, so that you can support the user, be that an employee with
internal work experience, or external customers, to support them to get the job done.
The role of content is actually merging with big data, because big data is helping us to
understand context and say, "What do we serve this person here?" On the marketing side, and the
lingo side it’s more about ongoing customer journeys. Think about the same thing on the
employee side, ongoing employee journeys or partner journeys.
Once you understand, then you understand what a partner is trying to do. Why are they are here,
what’s the context, what’s the most logical next step or the optimal next step? Now, content
becomes both an ability for people to find something, but also for marketers or product
development folks. I think those functions are emerging as well to deliver the right content in the
right format so that the user can get the job done. That’s my perspective on that.
Gardner: There's no disagreement from me on this issue of context to process, context to
location, context to need for knowledge all being much more granular and powerful going
forward. What I am concerned about is that, when I talk to developers, the vast majority of them
are much more interested in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.
They're not much interested in building what we used to think of as big honking applications in
the enterprise. They're much more interested in how to bring services together in context to
provide a better productive outcome and how to leverage low-cost services in APIs and micro
services from my cloud, your cloud, any cloud -- they don’t care which cloud it’s from -- in order
to accomplish that.
Discovering inference
So, to me, it becomes, on one hand, all the more important to have the ability to deliver content
contextually into these processes, but at the same time these processes are becoming fragmented.
They're going across hybrid-cloud environments, they include both what we call cloud and SaaS,
and I'm not sure where the marketer now can get enough inference to support the injection of
content appropriately.
The ways that it’s been done now is usually through the web where we have links, and we have
code, and we can do cookies. It’s sort of like, it’s Web 1.0 mechanisms by which marketers are
injecting content, but we are moving not only pass Web 2.0, we're into Web 3.0 platform. To me
this is a question mark.
Page 7

8. Kratchounova: It is a question mark. I don’t know that there is going to be one mode of
delivering what we're talking about or one approach or one framework. I'll give you one
example. Look at how web content management has changed. It used to be about managing
pages and updating content. Now, web content management is becoming the Marketing
Command Center, if you look at a web content management system like Sitefinity, for example.
Now, marketers can deal with the customer through his own mobile and on the web, so they can
inject the content that needs to happen there. The reason they can do this now is because there is
this ability, the analytics that come from all of these customer interactions of you, actually
creating cohorts of people as they're going through your web experience or online experience.
You know why they're there and what’s the optimal path for them to get where they need to be.
So, you're seeing this ability to distribute content to post content to people, but in a much more
contextual way. So, there is going to be a pull and push, but the push is getting a lot smarter and
very contextual.
Gardner: So it’s incumbent upon us who are examining this marketing evolution in the context
of the IT industry to create that spectrum of content to make it valuable, to make it appropriate
and not too commercial or crass, but useful. And at the same time now, think about how to get
this in front of right people at the right time.
It seems to me that if I'm an IT company, and more and more of my services, whether it’s a B2B,
B2C, B2E, or all of the above, I need to be thinking about ways that I'm going to communicate
with my existing universe or market and move them towards new products and services as they
need them in context of their process.
Think about this in a B2C environment in retail, where I am walking through Wal-Mart. I have
my smartphone and, as I turn the corner, they know that now I am interested in home goods, and
they are going to start to incentivize me to buy something. That’s kind of an understood
mechanism by which my location and the fact that I turned a corner and made a decision
provides an inference that then they can react to with content or information.
But take that now to the B2B environment where I'm in a business setting. I'm in procurement,
I'm in product development, or I'm looking for a supply chain efficiency. I want to move into a
new geographic location and I need to find the means to do that. All of those things are also like
turning a corner in a Wal-Mart, except you're in a business application using cloud services,
using a mobile device.
It seems to me that if I'm an IT vendor, I'm going to want to have content or information that I
can bring to that situation, perhaps even through an example of what other people have done
when they face that same cross roads. So the content can be more important and more germane.
These are multimillion dollar decisions in some cases.
Don’t you think that big companies should be starting to make content with the idea that it’s
going to become part of their application services, part of their cloud delivery services, and that
they need to use big data and analytics to know when to inject it?
Page 8

9. Understanding context
Kratchounova: I absolutely agree. I think that difference between the example you just gave
for Wal-Mart and a B2B environment is that, in Wal-Mart, you don’t need to understand so much
about who the person is, what their role is, whether they work at an accounting firm or whether
they are a physician, for example.
In a B2B environment you do need to understand context, and context is the location or the point
where they are in their journey, whatever that journey maybe, and their role as well, because
different people do have different decisions to make.
It’s a little bit more complex to bring context in a B2B environment, but it’s absolutely essential.
You used the word inference. We always get enamored by the concept of the big data and guess
what, once the machines are there, they're going to analyze everything and it's going to be this
perfect world of marketing where everyone is aligned.
Just look at the history of marketing. We don’t know ourselves as people. We individually don’t
know ourselves as well, let alone someone else getting to know us that well. Inference is very
important, but it’s going to be a balance between inferring what the person needs and allowing
the person to customize this experience as well. So it’s going to come both ways.
Some people going to one extreme or the other. Some people still believe that it’s a relationship-
based world and, therefore, there's no need for a digital experience for their customers or for their
potential buyers, which is actually never the case. Other people believe that it’s all digital;
therefore they don’t need to touch them in any other way, which is rarely the case, especially in
IT.
Gardner: I agree with you that, in the B2B or B2E environment, it’s more complex and the
stakes are higher. But I would also suggest you that the data is more readily available, because I,
as an employer, as a corporation, control what’s going on. I know what that employee is doing. I
know what apps they're using. I know what data they're seeking.
Kratchounova: Unless, Dana, you are practicing rogue IT and you don’t know that much.
Gardner: That’s true. If you have to go off the campus and you're using cloud services, you
might lose some of that, but that’s why you are going to want to have a relationship with that
cloud provider. They're going to provide a feed of data back to you about what’s going on, on
those apps from your very own employees.
That’s something I encourage people to do. If you have rogue IT, recognize that your employees
are doing something that they find beneficial, but then make it official and create a relationship
with that cloud provider so that you can get your data, you can cut your costs, buy in bulk, and so
forth.
Page 9

10. That’s a different story, a cloud’s topic. What I'm suggesting then, as we begin to think about
closing out this fascinating conversation, is that you need to have content, stories, and customers
lined up, so that you can uncover their path to truth, their path to value, and have that content
ready. Not only you are going to be using it in webinars, webcasts, podcasts, blogs, but pretty
soon, if my hypothesis is correct, you're going to be using that content in the context of process
and inside of applications in cloud services.
Way of the future
Kratchounova: Maybe this is an opportunity, because it is the way of the future, and some
people are more mature and others are less mature, but maybe we can bring other people into the
discussion and see what other folks in the field think about where the content is going, how to
contextualize and how to deliver it. One of the biggest question is how do we scale this. You can
still do a meaningful experience or create a meaningful experience one on one, but it’s hard to
recreate that even if your customers are 200, 500, or even 5,000 within the IT space.
Gardner: You also have to remember that, just recently, we saw from Apple, the Apple Watch.
One of the things that’s important with the Apple Watch functionally is that it’s very good at
alerts and notifications. It can also detect a lot of context of what you're doing physically and
your location, and it can relate, because it integrates to your phone, with what you're doing with
applications and cloud services.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if you're wearing an Apple Watch or equivalent, you're in a business
setting, and you come up against a problem that you might not even know yet, but all of these
services working together are going to say, "That person is going to be facing a problem; they are
going to need to make a decision. Let’s put some information, content, and use cases together for
them that will help them as they face that situation to make a better decision." That’s the kind of
role I think we're heading towards.
Kratchounova: Absolutely agreed, and let’s continue this conversation.
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Gardner: We're going to bring in some other people and continue this conversation. Before we
sign off, Lora, tell me a little bit more about Scratch Marketing Media, what you do and why
that’s related to this discussion we have had today.
Page 10

11. Kratchounova: Scratch Marketing and Media is an integrated marketing agency. We help B2B
technology companies with market growth. Sometimes that means helping the sales folks within
IT companies and sometimes it means working with the marketing folks on things like content
marketing programs, PR, and all its relations, and influence their relations in social media.
Gardner: And how could they find out more information about Scratch Marketing Media?
Kratchounova: You can go online at www.scratchmm.com.
Gardner: I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing the change in role and
impact of content marketing using the IT industry and the great changes happening there as an
example. We've seen how the nature of marketing with customer sharing and big data and the
rapidly evolving technology industry coming together, perhaps gives us a bellwether that it will
happen among many other industries. So, with that I want to thank our guest.
We've been joined by Lora Kratchounova the Founder and Principal at Scratch Marketing and
Media in Cambridge Massachusetts. Thanks so much, Lora.
Kratchounova: You're welcome, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect discussion
on the changing impact of content marketing.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host. Don’t forget to come
back next time to BriefingsDirect. We've certainly enjoyed having the time to be with you, and
we hope that you found this valuable too.
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Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the changing nature of marketing as people and
companies move to a greater online presence. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015.
All rights reserved.
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