How Big Data crushed my hubris as a B2B marketer
It was a moment of shock. I sat in front of my battered MacBook Air and couldn’t believe my eyes. Things started to cogwheel in my head – if this is so…what then for the rest of B2B?
So what had happened in the months and hours leading up to this moment? One thing was that I had held a talk on sales and content marketing at the STING incubator at KTH. It’s a place where people flow between internships at Spotify, Klarna, TicTail and other Stockholm start-ups to own small, often sci-fi tech start-ups, often combined with academia at various KTH institutions: robotics, machine learning etc. A vibrant place! Kind of like the geek’s favorite swimming pool…
So there I was holding this speech, trying to convey some of my learnings after +10 years of start-up life in behavioral targeting, IP and cookie-based banners, e-learning and lately an agency in content marketing. The room was steaming with attitude and brain power. I could notice a group of people far down in the room, but we didn’t interact.
Some 6 months later one of them, Sriram, contacted me. He wanted to meet. He mentioned the talk at STING – and I directly inferred that this was why he contacted me. Obviously I had made such a good impression…
Of course I was wrong. It turns out that they, Ram and Johannes, had run some algorithms, network analysis and identified me as an active player in both the Stockholm tech community and an influencer within content marketing. Worth contacting because of data patterns, not some expensive event like talking to a crowd of people. Hmmm…
This got me interested. What else could happen? I had been running the content marketing agency feverpitch for the last 3 years. And I had observed us (clients and agency) struggling with marketing’s mushrooming complexity. Choice was exploding – what social networks, what blogs, what language, what content? Choice after choice emerging… So where place your bets? The canvas was growing by the hour and we were trying to keep up painting. The potential was there, but clearly the mind wasn’t coping.
Everyday I sensed us making stupid choices… Or perhaps stupid choices is a bit harsh, — uninformed is a better word. Why was this so? Because if RAM-memory is limited, the number of processes has to be limited as well. If not, everything the brain does gets done slowly. We simplified and simply didn’t venture down alleys that could have been worth exploring because we didn’t have bandwidth.
And this is where we — the industry — are at the moment. Everyone that dives deeper than PowerPoint (i.e. is not just a an “expert” consultant) and engages in practical marketing knows this is true. We make delimitations because we cannot stand the width of complexity. We learn one, then two social networks well (and then we struggle to keep track of the changes that occur within them). We learn one content format, say blog posts well, then video, but then we often stop… It is just too much for us as humans.
Let’s look at this human limitation for a sec – note: Not only marketeers have a limit…; ). There are leadership tests that test leadership capabilities based on how complete our understanding is of the organization’s different parts. E.g. if you are a leader within the military at battalion level you must know the different parts of this ecosystem and its dependencies. The different platoons, the supply they need, the sleep they have at the moment and can go without…Then the test looks at your ability to look forward and to project, plan and execute your actions with the system at your command. The same goes for companies and government. How broad can you see, how far ahead can you project – and how will you lead given these capabilities? Everybody has limitations in both dimensions and accepting this can be both hurtful and scary. We all try to live emotionally with the fact that we are limited in our capabilities…
So this is where hubris comes into play. If I accept that I am very limited in what I understand about my direct reality — both the ecosystem of my own company and the larger universe surrounding it — then I am perhaps a bit enlightened. But most of us are not – the incompleteness just hurts us too much. So better have a bit of ignorance or hubris to act as a cushion. Myself? I have to admit that I use this cushion almost every day…
So let’s bring this philosophical talk back to B2B marketing. What happened? And what was the shock? Sriram, Johannes and I started HAAARTLAND together and one day they made me try the part in HAAARTLAND’s solution that identifies influencers in a niche. I thought, why not have a go at influencers in ‘content marketing’ in my own region? I thought I would know 90% of the people in my niche. Note: a niche I had spent every waking hour in for the last 36 months understanding and mapping and more than a decade in when it comes to digital marketing and sales in the tech space…
The result?
10%-15%! I only knew 10–15%…
This was a shock.
Then it started to sink in:
· This is only one aspect of my niche…
· This is only static data, it does not weigh in anything dynamic such as changing topics, new influencers emerging…
· It does not show any hidden correlations – these types of influencers use this kind of language, whereas this kind of influencers…
From that point on I was hooked. If we give marketers this kind of super-granular data, we give them super-powers.
This is what HAAARTLAND is setting out to do.
