Today I went to Exact Target’s Connections 2011, and it was a data frenzy that would get most analytical marketer’s tails wagging. Founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales gave a keynote address, but the presentation that stood out for me was the second keynote speech (Scott McCorkle), where they showcased the Interactive Marketing Hub. This tool pulled and compiled data from numerous sources; you could find someone’s Klout score matched against their email address, Twitter mentions, ReTweets and website comments, along with their gender and age group – all through one interface. Rather than being depressed that I’d never get my hands fully on such data (largely because I’m not a data analyst), it made me figure that we’re entering a new age – one of data driven integration. The standard consideration of the semantic web is that data driven devices connect and become integrated, but integrated data will also drive more integrated marketing departments.
Founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales gave a keynote, but the Interactive Marketing Hub spurred more thought
Opportunism Led to Silos
It’s been some time since Don Pepper’s and Martha Roger’s marketing gem The One to One Future. Some of the ideas and predictions presented there have evidently worked brilliantly for many companies, but for most the vision has not been realised. Many digital marketers have developed different strategies according to specific knowledge, skillsets and verticals.
1960s maybe, but Harry Crane shows an opportunism shared with many digital marketers
This is often the consequence of opportunism. If you read a book like Seth Godin’s Linchpin, it’s possible to conclude that digital media has created so many gaps in marketing structure, that you only have to be the most passionate (which normally means the most knowledgeable) about that medium within your own organisation if you want to fill a role there (if you’ve seen it, think about what Harry Crane does in Madmen with the invention of TV). You also have an agency mix up of email specialists, search specialists and, more recently, social media specialists. It’s not often clear how often these people meet to discuss the client’s objectives in an integrated manner.
The problem is that most of these new departments and agencies have not been correctly aligned. There might be an offline marketing department relying on data fed back from their focus group centric agency, a digital team feeding off Google Analytics, and within that an email team that uses an email service provider – yet the goals and funnels used to assess email users are not set up within Google Analytics.
Thus, what have evolved in this landscape are pockets of data, and a general failure of integration between departments. The biggest gulf lies within divisions between traditional marketers and digital departments – a marketing department that lines up alongside a digital specialist team, but has no digital skills of its own, and thus there is no integration. What often unfolds is that both teams make misinformed judgements about the other team’s ‘specialism’ – although they should be considered as one department. The marketing department’s forays into digital may ignore perceived obstructionism from digital specialists, but then return with egg on their face when their execution doesn’t work. Meanwhile, digital specialists may be creating campaigns on social media or search, which may work far better if they included workings from the marketing department which already exist. In the worst case scenario, neither department is aware of the other’s existence, and the two operate in siloes.
The Extent of Siloes in Digital Only
Even if we removed traditional marketing from the equation and examined digital structure, you would still find many instances of isolated siloes. We noted earlier of the divisions of email, search and social, but it is possible to delve into further isolated specialisms – such as PPC, SEO, social publishing, mobile and display. Further segmentation is even possible – in SEO a good structure would consist of: analytics, web development, content, outreach (link building), although very few inhouse departments can lay claim to all of these specialisms. In some digital agencies, some of these teams seldom communicate with each other.
Data Should Be Automatically Seen, and Not Manually Shared
A leading cause of departmental siloes is that everyone is accessing and possibly creating their own data, and inefficiency is created by making the action of sharing, compiling and then assessing this data an action at all. There is rarely a widely accessible central hub for everyone to automatically feed their data into, thus many people rely on manual feeding and office email to compile data. It only takes a few people to be on holiday, or to have left the company without immediate replacement, for whole systems to deliver serious inconsistencies or grind to a complete halt. In many businesses data is reported but not actioned for so long that the action of sharing is deemed worthless and stopped.
Thankfully, we are steering towards a position (through tools that Exact Target are now offering) which are doing a much better job at integrating data sets from communications like email and social media, as well as other open data sources. But without data analysts already present in your company, you will not be able to make sense of what data you already have, and thus not be able to benchmark the improvements that integration will bring (which will at least be matched against the cost of integrated tools). Thus it is imperative to allow analysts to assess data sources and workflow of access to data before you begin the task of integration.
The Arrival of an Integrated System
When an integrated system arrives, marketers need to be trained on the system and access it as the standard hub for doing their job. Once this occurs, over a period of months, it is likely that marketing and digital teams will integrate much more closely as they will share common and automatically reported goals. But it’s important to remember that this still doesn’t meet the big marketing picture of completely integrating online and offline data centres, and it doesn’t integrate SEO efforts, which can be a major factor in the success of websites. I’ve seen a demo of Google Analytics which does attempt to match media value vs. search volume and other metrics, but since it hasn’t appeared in v.5 of the free version of GA, I can only assume that it is part of the enterprise package. I’m unlikely to be looking at this any time soon.
A data sharing hub is the key to integration between marketing departments
Picture credit from We Are Circle
In Conclusion…
We are certainly creeping towards a more integrated norm. In this norm, the data siloes of different departments and sub-departments should be better integrated, which should break down the barriers which currently exist within marketing and indeed digital departments. But even so, only when the action of sharing data is no longer a manual process between any departments, can we say that we have arrived at a truly integrated future. Although integrated data centres appear to have caught up with the varying media that we now use to reach consumers, new technologies continue to arrive, and it could be forecast that we never arrive at a stage of perfect integration.
