Friday, 3 February 2006
Cymfony Adds "Knowledge" Center... Kind Of
« Happy Pennukkah! | Main | Playboy Interested in Volkwagen's Kerri Martin! »Steve Rubel scooped me on this but I wanted to post on it anyway. Cymfony has just opened a "Knowledge Center" on their website that includes summary articles discussing "important trends driving change in marketing and public relations planning, strategy, and execution." Currently, they have articles on blogs, CGM, PR Measurement, and Web 2.0. Jim Nail, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer for Cymfony, has also posted a bit about in on the Cymfony's Marketing Insight blog.
I think the site is interesting for a couple of reasons. I've read through much of the information and, while I don't agree completely with some of their definitions, I think their coverage, for the most part, is fair and largely accomplishes their stated goal of giving "you the maximum information in the smallest amount of reading." That said, the information provided is really more of a primer for the uninitiated rather than providing new cutting edge information and is laced with some skewed Cymfony marketing propaganda. In this regard, I think it's a good place for business communications folks to start who are trying to get up to speed on the basics. That is, if you can bring yourself to trust any of it.
My biggest complaint of the site is that Cymfony uses the guise of objective industry informational resource as a thin facade for their own marketing message. For example, in their Brief Book for Blogs, they have a document titled "Tools for Searching and Analyzing Blogs". The document lists mostly free blog publishing, search and analysis tools such as PubSub, Bloglines, Technorati, and Ice Rocket. The closest they come to mentioning an actual competitor is listing Intelliseek's free blog only search tool BlogPulse. Now, most everyone will agree that BlogPulse is a "consumer facing" tool, but it is generally considered to be one of the most powerful free blog analysis tools on the web. This might be surprising to someone who read Cymfony's description of BlogPulse in which they say "[Blogpulse] is useful for a quick glimpse of online discussion trends, however it does not filter out duplicate or irrelevant mentions to a level required for marketing research and analysis." First off, I think whether "duplicate or irrelevant mention filtering" is required for "market research and analysis" really depends on the project and application. It feels like this statement is designed exclusively to disparaged the reader from serious investigation. Second, BlogPulse is a teaser product. It (at least partially) is a marketing tool for Intelliseek to attract attention for their commercial (non-free) products, which are also considered to be among the best in the industry, but Cymfony fails to list these products. In fact, not only is there no mention of Intelliseek's non-free products, there's also no mention of other Cymfony competitors such as BuzzMetrics, Umbria Communications and Biz 360.
There is, however, a large entry on Cymfony's Orchestra product. Someone who's not familiar with the space might infer from this "objective" document that there are no serious alternatives to the Cymfony offering. This, of course, is simply not true.
Now, is it so wrong for a company to produce marketing information that promotes it's own products on it's own website?
No, of course not.
So what is the problem here? The problem is that Cymfony is portraying their "Knowledge Center" as an objective resource. They've comingled serious objective and credible industry resources with their own blatant propagandistic marketing material. The end result is that, as a reader, I find myself wondering which pieces are propagandistic and which are objective resources. This lowers trust and credibility and thus lowers the value of the site as a serious WOMM resource.
This is unfortunate because there is actually a lot of good stuff there. The list of blog tools I mentioned, for example, is actually quite good as a list of the major free and low cost tools. Cymfony could have left themselves off the list (because the Orchestra product doesn't really belong) and had a blurb at the bottom that indicated Cymfony provides more advanced professional tools that have capabilities far beyond the tools listed. This approach seems much less smarmy to me. Separate the objective list of free resources from the marketing message of Cymfony's commercial offering. Simple.
Think of it this way. Pretend you know nothing of means of transportation. One day you meet a car salesman. He says to you "Before you can make an informed decision, I can see that you need an education. Lucky for you, I have a Knowledge Center to help you get up to speed." This, of course, sounds pretty good. The salesman goes on to say "Now, you can get around by walking, running, crawling, riding a bike - but you'd have to pay for the bike - or by buying one of my cars." He has two on the lot: a two seat convertible sports car and garbage truck. Now, maybe he's got the right car for you. Maybe he doesn't. But how are you going to feel about the salesman when you learn about other cars, airplanes, trains, motorcycles, trolleys, and skateboards? Will you trust him?
As it turns out, Cymfony does something fairly unique among it's competitors - it combines CGM with 200,000 traditional MSM resources, but because they chose to pretend that they're competitors don't exist, they miss the opportunity to contrast their offerings.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on Cymfony's site, the lead statement in a section labeled "What do we do?" says...
Cymfony helps companies keep their products and messages in tune with the fast-changing expectations of their most important audiences
Oh the irony. I don't know if I'm a member of Cymfony's most important audience, but I expect them to keep their propagandistic messages on the marketing side of the fence. A Knowledge Center is great but keep it objective. BlogPulse could easily drop all mentions of Cymfony from their search engine or move them to the bottom of the search results, but they don't. If Cymfony's site develops into a real resource, objectivity will breed credibility and that will lead to sales. The fact that Cymfony has faked their own product placement makes me question credibility. The fact that they dis BlogPulse makes me think they're scared.
In the age of transparency, you have to compete on your own merit. You'd expect a company capitalizing on consumer generated media to get that.
Comments on this entry:
Hm. I don't know if I agree. The car salesman example is helpful in that respect: I KNOW where he is coming from, I know what he wants. So all of that Knowledge Center talk I take with a grain of caution. Same with Cymfony. When I check out their company website, I don't expect them to be as objective as that - I mean, after all, it's their OWN advertising vehicle! If they were running a blog called "objective cgm research ressource", then things would be different. But on their own corporate page? It's like when you go to a convention that they might organise - sure, you expect lots of interesting stuff. But you'd expect bias in favour of their own offer just as well, wouldn't you?
Martin,
Thanks for the comments. I get your point and you are right – when we visit a company's web site we have an expectation that the information there will promote that company's product in an overly positive way. Furthermore, we expect that the website will either not mention competing products or that it will talk about competing products in some negative way whether it directly or indirectly.
I have to admit that I'm having trouble putting my finger on exactly why I feel uncomfortable with this particular approach. I guess my problem is that the tone of their presentation of the site suggest to me objectivity. Sure, we are naturally skeptical and expect that the information is really marketing. When we discover that our skepticism is well founded then Cymfony loses credibility. It's not that I think Cymfony is wrong by doing what they have done, it that I feel that what they have is significantly less effective than it could be.
Here in the states there is a automobile insurer named Progressive. They provide quotes on their website from several different auto insurers – even when they do not have the lowest price. They run lots of TV spots explaining this.
Now, the consumer might expect that if they go to the site that Progressive might only show quotes that are higher than theirs, but this is not what happens. As a result people buy Progressive, often even when they are not the lowest cost choice, because they have established trust with the consumer.
So, are we surprised that Cymfony thinks that "a few of the most important statistics to quantify the importance of each of these trends" seems to always include marketing material from Cymfony? No. But I'd trust Cymfony more if I felt that they were bing objective. I just think it's an opportunity lost.
One last thought – what if Cymfony did it my way? What would Cymfony lose? What's the risk? The reality is that any serious prospect is going to learn about competitors. Cymfony has the opportunity to say "You're going to learn about these guys anyway – you might as well hear it from me because I'm going to be straight up with you."
-Matt
I hear what you're saying (well, I don't, incidently, I am rather reading it... ;-). I remember that insurance example from a paper by Dave Evans that I discussed with him a while ago. He suggested the same thing for Amazon. So I do understand that there may be quite some value in that. But that approach really is so modern in terms of marketing that I honestly believe it will take many companies a long time to make it through to that approach. So I am not saying your questions are not the right ones, I was just trying to point out that the approach Cymfony are using is the tried and tested one everyone is used to. Even though it might not be a good one, at least for the dawning age of Web 2.0 etc.
Additionally, I have had a closer look at their Knowledge Center, and I kind of see what you are saying - it does appear to be very unbiased, which it then ultimately may not be, just like you described!
So - let's meet half way and shake hands. (Kidding... Not that this was a dispute anyway! :-)
Matt,
I tired to post this on Friday -- maybe my math skills are really bad ;-) and the post got trashed. Let me try again.
Thanks for the post and feedback. These are exactly the kinds of comments I had in mind when I invited visitors to tell me what they think. You clearly put a lot of thought into it, so let me detail the principles that guided the design and selection of the articles, which will hopefully answer a number of your concerns. This will be a lengthy post, but the issues of trust and transparency are at the heart of why launching Knowledge Center was the first thing I did here, and if I'm off course, I want to correct it.
My first design criterion was that the information should be useful, valuable, and educational, not "a thin façade for their own marketing message." To that end, I moved all of the explicit Cymfony collateral out of this section (which used to called "Resources").
It seems that the red flag went up for you in the article "Tools for Searching and Analyzing Blogs." Your point that most of it talks about free tools, and then we throw in Orchestra but not our competitors, is a fair point. I'll take a second look -- we may have crossed the line there by including this white paper which we had originally written with a different audience in mind.
You also are concerned that we don't mention our competitors in the Knowledge Center. One reason is that in trying to answer questions like "Why is blogging a big deal?" and "What are different types of consumer-generated media?", it's not important to mention any of us. On the other hand, we do mention the whole universe of free tools, as well as the software options mentioned in the CRMBuyer "Blog Mining Gets Real." Your suggestion, though, to limit the Cymfony pitch to a blurb about offering more advanced tools is a good one.
I also have not edited the selection to exclude our more direct competitors: the ClickZ article "Blog Marketing Strategies and How to Measure Them" includes BuzzMetrics and Intelliseek, and the WOMMA presentations we link to include these companies and Umbria.
Finally you bring up "transparency." I very consciously labeled each of the Cymfony-originated pieces as being a Cymfony white paper, or by "Cymfony VP of Product Strategy..." (P.S. Out of 40 articles in Knowledge Center, only 6 are Cymfony-originated.)
The second design criterion was to be, in your words, "a primer for the uninitiated." In meeting with prospects (and from my days at Forrester), we hear comments like, "My VP just tasked me with developing a blog strategy and I don't know where to start." I believe the greatest barrier to growth of this area is lack of knowledge and understanding of the trends and how they impact business.
This is why the majority of the articles are about blogging, CGM, Web 2.0 in general terms-the audience, the growth, how to do a corporate blog right-and a minority of the content is specifically about CGM monitoring. My hope is that as companies appreciate the size and scope of the trend, they will realize they need to take action and their first action should be to listen to consumers. As market understanding advances, we'll update the articles with more cutting edge information. Again, I welcome suggestions on those.
The last design point is that Cymfony is not trying to be an all encompassing, objective resource for everything you need to know. WOMMA is doing a much better job at that. First, we want to educate people on the basics. Second, we want to demonstrate our experience, knowledge and expertise. I've tried not to be heavy handed with marketing spin about how great we are. Instead, I'm trying to demonstrate our expertise in the thoughtful selection of valuable articles with just the occasional Cymfony-authored case studies and points-of-view that are focused on how companies can benefit from the information, minimally on the features of our products and services.
The line between "marketing propaganda" and "curriculum marketing" (to use Lester Wunderman's phrase) can be a thin one. I'll review the articles and if we crossed the line, try to dial it back a bit. In the meantime, let's continue the dialogue.