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Category: David Offierski

Interview with Thomas Purves, Futurist, at the Canada 3.0 Forum

Published June 16, 2009

By David Offierski

The Tie that Binds Great Design: Marketers Must Be Conversation Starters (Part 2)

Thomas Purves, Toronto-based blogger, futurist and technologist spoke to me at the Canada 3.0 Forum about how the social web and mobile ubiquity will change the game for marketers. Having a good product is not good enough; marketers have to create the conversations for consumers to involve themselves, and their peers, with the brands they support.

Virtual training and online seminars are favorite tools of marketers and sales people because they are practical, cheap and the technology behind them has improved significantly over the past few years. Let’s face it; “Connect with your clients, without ever leaving your desk chair!” is a pretty strong sales pitch to lazy marketing and sales folks. I am not knocking the utility of Webex or GoToMeeting.com as sales and training tools, but when it comes to creating meaningful conversations with clients that help you glean insights about how they are using your product, virtual interactions are kind of like taking a photo with your finger covering half the lens.

My point is nothing beats real face time with users. This is a more traditional approach to sales and marketing but the opportunity to get designers, engineers, sales and marketing people in the same room with customers is an important way to learn how users are interacting with your product. A company conference, training retreat or a refresher course luncheon are great ways to get some face time with the end users, but make sure you drag a few of the engineers and techies out for the event too. This can be a challenge because often engineers are not comfortable interacting with clients but get inventive in terms of incentives. Otherwise,
find support from senior management as they often have special powers of persuasion.

Continue readingInterview with Thomas Purves, Futurist, at the Canada 3.0 Forum
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Interview with Amanda Holtstrom from Opentext at the Canada 3.0 Forum

Published June 16, 2009

By David Offierski

The Tie that Binds Great Design: Marketers Must Be Conversation Starters (Part 1)

I interviewed Amanda Holtstrom, Senior Product Designer for Opentext, at the Canada 3.0 Forum. We discussed how user experience has evolved as key area of focus for the development and implementation of enterprise (B2B) software solutions.

If you are in the enterprise software business, presumably your company will create products that will provide a solution and resolve a pain point within an organization (CRM, content management, project management software, supply chain, database management, data mining, data analytics etc.). In Opentext’s case, they are masters of content management and create solutions to deal with the massive amounts of
data being produced by modern corporations. As Amanda points out, often times enterprise software will solve a problem for the IT department, but unless those who are expected to use your solution fully embrace this new piece of software, the relationship and the product are destined for failure.

I would guess that someone who has worked for a number of years in a sales or marketing department of a large company has seen quite a few losers in terms of enterprise solutions. Think for a second about where those that failed went
wrong. Implementing enterprise software across a large organization can be a costly and time-consuming affair, fraught with many challenges for the IT department. An implementation gone wrong can be very wasteful for organization, not just in terms of costs but also productivity, morale and losing valuable data. Check out this ArgoWiki
page on some of the most spectacular enterprise software failures in recent
history.

But this post is on what happens before and after the implementation. It is about
communication driving great design, and great design driving user adoption. This is where marketers can make the difference.

Continue readingInterview with Amanda Holtstrom from Opentext at the Canada 3.0 Forum
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