Vocus Marketing Suite: Still Mostly Social But Marketing Automation is On the Way

If you’ve heard of Vocus at all, it’s probably as vendor serving public relations professionals. Its core offerings include a huge database of media contacts; media monitoring and social listening; and press release distribution. But since late 2011 the company has also offered a suite aimed at marketers, which now has more than 4,000 paid clients.

Even in the small business sector, that count would make Vocus one of the largest marketing automation systems.  But Vocus doesn’t quite match the profile of standard marketing automation products.  It lacks the Salesforce.com integration of B2B systems (due early next year), the lightweight CRM of micro-business systems, and the lead scoring and distribution of both. On the other hand, it does offer email and landing pages, two marketing automation basics, as well as several features borrowed from Vocus PR software.  So it's best to treat Vocus Marketing Suite as a class unto itself.

The product's two most intriguing features draw on Vocus’ monitoring of social media and news outlets. “Recommendations” finds conversations on client-specified topics across 130,000 online outlets, 10,000 print outlets, 35 million blogs, and posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites. It presents these to Vocus clients with an interface that suggests a reaction but lets users decide how to reply or repost across several social channels. Clients can have Vocus add new topics, a process that takes a couple of weeks to allow testing and fine-tuning of the selection mechanism. “Recommendations” will also identify influencers for a selected topic, based on actual influence (number of reposts or references) rather than the number of followers.

“Buying Signals” draws on Twitter only. It identifies Tweets with a dozen or so purposes related to a client’s product, such as fact checking, asking for recommendations, shopping, or reporting that something has been lost or broken. As with Recommendations, users are presented with a list of messages they can review and reply to individually as appropriate.

Other features include press release posting via Vocus’ PRWeb subsidiary; Facebook promotions such as sign-up pages, sweepstakes, and fan offers; a central image library; and management of local directory listings. I’ve already mentioned email, which is reasonably powerful, and landing pages. The email engine will be enhanced with multi-step campaigns by the end of this year. Other traditional marketing automation features will be added as well.

User rights are organized around “profiles”, which might relate to a company, brand, or product line. Users are either assigned to a profile or not; there are no finer divisions of rights for specific features. This approach makes sense for small businesses – the bulk of the system's current client base – and for marketing agencies who manage separate profiles for each client.

Pricing is defined in tiers ranging from $3,000 to $30,000 per year, based on the number of profiles, amount of content monitoring, email volume, press release formats, and other variables.

As both the pricing variables and features suggest, Marketing Suite is still mostly a social media monitoring and public relations tool. This will change as Vocus adds conventional marketing automation features. But until those features mature, companies who want to do much beyond email will find they need a separate marketing automation product as well.

Lattice Engines Automates All Steps in Prospect Discovery

There’s nothing new about using public information to identify business opportunities: it’s why lawyers chase ambulances and bankers phone lottery winners. But the Internet has exponentially grown the amount of data available and made it easily accessible. What’s needed to fully exploit this resource is technology that automates the end-to-end process of assembling the information, identifying opportunities, and delivering the results to sales and marketing systems.

Lattice Engines was founded in 2006 to fill this gap. The system scans public databases, company Web pages, and selected social networks to find significant events such as title changes, product launches, job openings, new locations, and investments. It supplements this with data from the clients' own systems including customer profiles, Web site visits, and purchases. It then looks at past data to find patterns which predict selected outcomes, such as making a first purchase, buying an additional product, or renewing. It uses these patterns to identify the best current prospects for each outcome, and makes the lists available to marketing systems or sales people. The sales people also see explanations of why each person was chosen, what they should be offered, and recommended talking points.

Each of these steps takes significant technology. Lattice Engines currently monitors Web sites of five to 10 million U.S. businesses, checking daily for changes.  The system’s semantic engine reads structured texts such as management biographies and press releases, extracting entities and relationships but not trying to understand more subtle meanings such as sentiment. Clients specify blogs to follow, which receive similar treatment. The company also monitors Twitter, Facebook company pages, Quora, and LinkedIn profiles of people within each sales person’s network. Additional data comes from standard sources such as business directories and from special databases requested by clients. Information from all these sources is loaded into a single database available to all Lattice Engine clients.

Lattice Engines also imports data from the clients own systems, although of course this isn’t shared with anyone else. Again, there’s some clever technology needed to recognize individuals and companies across multiple sources. Lattice Engines doesn’t try to link personal and business identities for individuals.

All this information is placed in a timeline so that modeling systems can look at events before and after the target activities. The models themselves are built automatically, once users specify the target activity, product, and time horizon. Users can then build a list of customers or prospects, have the model score it, and send high-ranking names to marketing or sales for further contact. Results can be exported to a marketing automation system or appear within the sales person’s CRM interface. Lattice Engines is directly integrated with cloud-based CRM from Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle, and via file transfer with SAP CRM. Users can export lists to Excel and Marketo, with connectors for Eloqua and other marketing automation systems on the way.

The net result of this is a single system that performs all the tasks needed to exploit the wide range of information available about customers and prospects.  Marketers could theoretically use separate systems for each step in the process, and integrate the results for themselves.  But few really have the skills to do this.  And, in most cases, it would be more expensive than purchasing a single system like Lattice Engines.  It's particularly helpful that Lattice Engines supports both prospecting and customer management -- further reducing the need for multiple products, and further encouraging cooperation between marketing and sales departments. 

Pricing for Lattice Engines starts at $75,000 per year and grows based on the number of data sources and sales users. Client data volume doesn't affect the cost, since Lattice Engines’ own databases are vastly larger than any client data. The company has close to 50 deployments, nearly all at large B2B marketers including Dell, HP, Microsoft, ADP, and Staples.

CRM Evolution Conference: Social CRM Takes Center Stage

I caught an all-star panel on social CRM today at the CRMEvolution conference in New York. Up on the dais were Jim Berkowitz of CRM Mastery, Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar, Brent Leary of CRM Essentials, Ray Wang of Constellation Group, and Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research Group. You won’t find a more distinguished set of gurus, and moderator Berkowitz asked appropriately incisive questions.

Yet my final impression was that social CRM is a problem in search of a solution. Maybe it was because the speakers kept emphasizing the need to define strategy and goals for any social CRM project. Of course this is sound advice, for social CRM or anything else. But that the speakers kept repeating it suggests pretty strongly that they’ve seen lots of people deploy social CRM without that sort of planning. In addition, the goals the panel cited, collaboration and customer intimacy, struck me as pretty darn vague themselves. A couple of audience questions asking for more specific examples of the benefits didn’t yield much more substance.

The group did better when it came to tactical advice. Two suggestions that stuck with me were that companies should start with internal collaboration projects before trying to collaborate with consumers, and that companies recognize they shouldn’t be equally transparent about everything.

The panel also recognized the serious privacy issues raised by social channels, and the danger of appearing to be creepily aware of everything customers have done in different public forums. The focus was more on the dangers of displaying the information than on the dangers of gathering it in the first place. That probably mirrored the concerns of the audience.

For what it’s worth, I did pick up a pair of intriguing buzzwords: the need to display information in “context” and to pick the context based on the user’s “intent”. At least two people discussed these, so apparently they've been echoing through the gurusphere for some time without my noticing. The general idea is that context and intent can tame the flood of raw information by giving users only the data they need in formats that make sense. That's certainly not a new idea, but if some nice fresh buzzwords can get people to do a better job presenting data, I'm all for it.

LoopFuse Captures More Web Traffic Data

Summary: LoopFuse has extended its system to capture more Web traffic data, which lays the foundation for future analytics.

LoopFuse recently released its latest enhancements, which it somewhat grandiosely labels as making it “the First and Only Marketing Automation Solution with Inbound Marketing”. In fact, as the subhead to their press release states, what they’ve really done is somewhat more modest: add “real-time Web traffic intelligence” by providing features to capture search terms, referring sites and page views, and link these to individual visitors.

The new release also adds real-time social media monitoring (directly for Twitter and Facebook, and through Collecta for blogs, YouTube and other sources).

These features are certainly useful. But my idea of "inbound marketing" is more along the lines of HubSpot, which provides search engine optimization, paid search campaign management, social media monitoring and posting, blogging, and Web content management. Although LoopFuse might eventually add those functions, it hasn't yet and isn’t necessarily moving in that direction.

Accepting their labels for the moment, let’s look at what LoopFuse has added:

- “content marketing” is a set of reports that tracks Web traffic related to different assets. Users get a list of the assets ranked by number of page views. They can then drill into each item to see a graph of traffic over time and to see details such as the number of visitors, views per visitor, and referring domains and pages. Because the views are tied to individual visitors, users can also click on the referring domain to see what other pages people from that domain visited. This is essentially the same information as provided by...

- “inbound marketing”, which shows visitor sources by category (direct links, paid search ads, organic search) and details within each category (specific messages, ads or keywords). As just noted, users can drill down to see which Web pages were viewed by visitors from each source.

- “social monitoring” provides real-time monitoring of user-selected terms on the various social Web sites. Unlike the other Web traffic data, this information isn’t stored within the LoopFuse database and isn't tied to specific individuals. LoopFuse plans to provide some trending reports in the future. Of course, the real trick would be linking social media comments to lead profiles.

All of these are valuable reports. Having them within a single system is particularly helpful for the small businesses targeted by LoopFuse, where all channels are likely to be handled by a small department and possibly the same individual. Otherwise, the users would need switch among several systems to do their job. In larger firms, where different people would be responsible for different channels, each channel can be managed by a separate system without requiring anyone to use multiple products.

Saving effort is nice, but the real value of a unified marketing database is being able to coordinate marketing messages and relate all marketing contacts to sales results. LoopFuse hasn’t publicly revealed its approach to marketing performance measurement but definitely has something in the works. I’m particularly hoping they'll use the detailed behavior information to relate outcomes to specific marketing messages, rather than just looking at movement through purchase stages. Although stage data by itself can project future revenues, it must be tied to specific marketing programs to measure those programs’ value.

In case you’re wondering, LoopFuse is storing the new Web traffic data in denormalized tables that are separate from the operational marketing database. This enables much quicker response to ad hoc queries and, should eventually support the time-based views needed for trends and stage analytics.

For those of you keeping score at home, LoopFuse’s Roy Russo also told me that the company stores each client’s data in a separate database instance. Russo said this has proven more scalable and cheaper than the textbook Software-as-a-Service approach of commingling several clients’ data in a single instance. So far as I know, most (but not all) marketing automation vendors use same approach as LoopFuse.

Russo also said that all data in the system is accessible via standard API calls, something that’s also not always possible with competitive products. In fact, Russo said LoopFuse’s entire interface is built on using the published API, which means that technically competent clients could build alternative interfaces to embed LoopFuse data and functions within other systems. If nothing else, this gets them Geek Style Points.

Of course, no discussion of LoopFuse is complete without mentioning its freemium offer, launched last June amid considerable controversy. The company says that nearly 1,000 accounts have now signed up for this, which is impressive by any standard. No news yet on how many have converted to paid.

One side effect that I hadn't anticipated – although LoopFuse apparently did – is that agencies and consultants use the freemium to service new clients, who convert to paid when their volumes grow. This gives LoopFuse an edge in the competition for channel partners. The value of that edge is a bit uncertain, though, since an increasing number of service firms – including Pedowitz Group, Annuitas and LeftBrain Marketing – are now working with multiple marketing automation vendors.