Do you remember “show and tell” day back in the 1st grade?  I’m pretty sure that many children who went on to find marketing careers were out sick during those sessions.

Dennis Howlett gave the whole E2.0 world a piece of his mind recently, and some well-respected E2.0 rock stars struggled to react last week during an apparently well-attended session at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (and it was specifically intended to be a rebuttal of Dennis’ thoughts!)

Dennis closed out his (excellent) post by asking where the use cases were:

“Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know. In the meantime, don’t be surprised by the ‘fail’ lists that Mike Krigsman will undoubtedly trot out - that’s easy.”

Dennis obviously has a great point here.  If this stuff is so great - why the heck hasn’t anyone seen any tangible proof in the form of success stories, case studies, metrics, properly measured ROI, etc?

To be clear - I’m a big supporter of E2.0.  So this post is meant to be more of a critique of the situation from a marketing perspective.

Some would say that the products don’t necessarily do what they are claiming they can.  I’m not so sure about that.  Frankly - the critique of E2.0 could apply to almost any emerging or relatively new software category right now.  And a big reason for this?

It’s us marketing people.  What ever happened to having a BEEFY case study section on your site?  What ever happened to 3rd party validation of some of those case studies?  What the heck happened to “show and tell?”  Okay - some vendors are doing this well - but it remains to be seen if the case studies page on their sites translates into the way that they’re actually talking about their product to customers, potential customers and the market.

This is a fundamental part of enterprise software marketing - and I would go so far as to argue that it could be THE most important part.  When it comes to emerging technology categories there’s a LOT of hype floating around.  That hype makes it a lot easier to land a few pieces of coverage in the press, or get a ton of traffic to your site… and marketers might have a tendency to get a bit too comfortable when hype is providing them with this much air cover.

The bottom line is that hype won’t sustain any market.  It can feasibly jump-start one, but eventually you have to get practical and start doing the less glamorous stuff like developing copious amounts of case studies, commissioning some research and yes - measuring anything and everything you can about your customers’ success with your product.

The case studies and success stories are only part of it - you also need to highlight failures and use them to acknowledge a weakness and provide some advice to potential buyers in the form of cautionary tales.  This inspires trust - something that software vendors are having trouble doing of late.  Dennis points to Michael Krigsman so often for a reason - and if you don’t read his blog frequently you will probably be surprised to see that it’s really not all that “negative.”  Rarely, if ever, do the stories suggest that a product is just a piece of junk.  Typically - it’s people that made mistakes, or vendors that over-promised, or project managers that didn’t notice the glaring warning signs.  But the posts rarely focus on product features falling flat - remember, it’s “IT PROJECT Failures,” not PRODUCT failures! Don’t be afraid!

The point here is that the E2.0 world has to stop being defensive and really needs to stop relying on hype.  It’s time to turn the corner, leave the hype behind, and start doing the things that SHOW that you’re invested in your customers and how successful they are with your product. Again - this isn’t to say that there aren’t a bunch of E2.0 vendors doing amazing marketing work right now - but it seems to me that this topic is becoming a big debate because there’s a disconnect causing a problem somewhere along the line.

Much of this really does come down to a marketing problem - not a software problem.  If the vendors shift some focus to showing (case studies) instead of telling (hype) then I would bet that this issue will go away pretty quickly.

The case studies are out there - but the marketing world needs to start thinking back to what they learned in the first grade.

I bet this conversation is obliterated by June of next year.  I can only imagine that the vendors are being much more diligent about more pragmatic messaging now, and there are probably a whole bunch of very busy writers at work on some seriously good case studies at this very moment.