"The Datapoohbah is frustrated.  Frustrated with MBA’s and "Highly Educated" people that quite simply, “do not have a clue”.  I have long subscribed to the philosophy that it is simply possible to over educate.  That higher education, without real world experience, is a dangerous thing.  Unfortunately today that seems to be more the norm.

One needs only to look at the economic crisis on Wall Street, banking, big business, retail and the automotive industry.  All of these industries are filled with MBA’s and folks who should know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be smart, right?

• I know a person with a Masters in Computer Science who also holds an MBA and that literally couldn’t change a toner cartridge in a printer without help.
  (Yes I know they can be complicated, but damn, the instructions are pretty clear on the bag that the toner comes in).

The item that really got my goat today can be found here in the article written on November 28th entitled "You Can Support Headcount and Share of Voice on a Tight Budget" by one; "Alan See", Marketing Genius and MBA.

In this ~750 word article, the marketing genius would try to convince you that during these tough economic times you can "Do more with less" and by doing so you can still build sales leads and retain head count.

On the surface the article looks pretty good.  No, it’s not real deep, not a lot of marketing material is deep.

But the reality is this article spins and skews what went down during this "engagement" in a way that is almost criminal.

"the company increased qualified leads by 7 percent while cutting the budget by 24 percent. The decrease in spending was not the result of reducing headcount. During the campaign, the sales force set three consecutive monthly sales records, as well as three consecutive quarterly sales records."

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? 

Who wouldn’t want to hire a guy who could increase your sales leads 7%, set sales records, cut your budget and allow you to retain staff during these tough economical times?  Oh, and while he’s at it, single handedly increase your "share of voice".

So that’s the spun version of what happened at this "engagement", and as you know there’s almost always two sides to every story.

I’ll try to keep this simple so those with MBA’s can keep up.

Suppose you run a lemonade stand.

Your basic costs include: Water, Ice, Lemons and cups. 

Your primary method for advertising includes:

• Word of mouth (Brand X, our lemonade is delicious)
• Print advertising (Direct, local market advertising, perhaps leveraging coupons to reach your market).
• Direct Customer marketing, via email or snail mail.  (Hey Joe, you’ve enjoyed our Lemon aide in the past, you should try our new pink Lemon Aid)

You’re trying to grow your business so you hire engage a marketing genius.

This new guy has lots of great ideas for focusing your marketing. 

• Fewer Tasters, More Buyers (Marketing term: higher quality leads)
  Specifically he wants to reduce the number of ‘shoppers or tasters’ so that you use fewer resources sampling your products (cost savings). 
  (Bear in mind that tasters and samplers aren’t a burden, and history has clearly shown that the more people you have tasting your product the more people buy)
• Stop/Slow Direct Marketing (decrease the spend, save the headcount)
  Stop doing what you’re good at.  Stop that local or direct marketing that has worked so well in the past.  Stop inviting new and current customers to taste your new flavors, that might waste your time.
• Use Smoke and Mirrors (Marketing term: proclaim yourself thought leaders)
  Instead of spending your hard earned marketing dollars to generate leads (tasters of your product).  Spend it on a thought leadership piece, to educate the market on organic lemon farming, water filtration.  The things that help to make good lemonade.  Nothing directly related to your specific product, just over-all feel good, brand awareness marketing. 
• Get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon (Marketing term: leverage social networks)
  The value proposition here is still debatable.  This too is feel-good marketing.  Being where your customers expect to see you.  Nothing wrong with this just, but be mindful of the time you spend doing it and the ripples that come from it.

There is nothing wrong with thought leadership marketing.  It’s generally a good thing.  But it’s the type of marketing you do "in addition to" what has made you successful in the past, not "instead of".

The problem comes in when you cut your marketing spending on your bread and butter marketing and focus all your internal resources on the other.

What you don’t read about in Mr. See’s article is the flat spin he put the company in by neglecting the bread and butter marketing that the company lives on.

Three months of consecutive sales records?  That’s a true statement that had absolutely nothing to do with his efforts to ‘reduce the spend and save the head count’.  
It’s completely unrelated. 

Did any of his work pay off?  Yes, in some ways it did.

It is true that the thought leadership piece did drive a few highly qualified prospects our way.  A few prospects closer to buying without wasting a lot of time tasting.  If we calculate the true cost of those leads, the cost would be considered astronomical.

In the process of this engagement we all learned a very valuable lesson.

Do what you’re good at, and do it well. Ignore the obvious and it will eventually catch up to you.

Today’s experience with Cincinnati Bell only emphasizes why I don’t do business with them.

We have approximately 12 Blackberries from various carriers using our Blackberry Enterprise server.

About once a month one of them will just stop working.  Typically this is usually a device over seas or a device that one of our guys who travels over seas uses.  He’ll make a call to his provider (T-Mobile) to change his plan to something over seas and the break his data package nearly every time.

The conversation usually goes like this:

Salesperson: Is BES working?  I haven’t gotten email in a couple days.
Us: Yes, all 11 other phones are currently working and show activity as recent as a minute ago.  What did you do?
Salesperson: I called (T-Mobile) and asked them to change my plan for international use.
Us: call them back and have then fix your stuff.

Today was special though.  Another user who’s carrier is Cincinnati Bell (ATT under the covers regardless of what the tech support m0m0 tells you) called.

User: I messed up my Blackberry, can you re-activate me?
Us: What did you do?
User: I installed Blackberry desktop manager at home to sync my contacts at home too.
Us: That’s a bad idea, wipe the device and reactivate your password is xxxx.

A few hours later:

User: It won’t activate.
Us: After poking around on the BES server we can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work.    Let’s call your carrier.

Placing call to carrier…

Tech Support:  How may we help you?
Us: A user jacked up his Blackberry and we’re trying to figure out why it won’t re-activate.  Can you look and see if there have been any changes?
Tech Support:  Why yes, I see we changed your account 48 hours ago.  The BES plan is now $20 more than the Consumer plan so we changed you to the consumer plan.
Us: WTF?  So when were you going to let us know this happened?
Tech Support:  I don’t know if they are going to send a letter out or not.
Us:  So 6 months ago we purchased the phone and told you we were going to use it with BES and you sold me a $30 unlimited plan.  Who made the decision to simply disconnect us from our company server?  Who there thought, Oh, this user doesn’t need the corporate package?  Let’s just cut them off at the knees.
Tech Support:  Let me transfer you to someone that can help.
Tech Support 2:  So I understand you’re unhappy about the price change?
Us: No, what I’m unhappy about is that you just broke my connectivity to my employer without warning.  That you made me look stupid to IT because I thought I may have jacked up my phone, or that their stuff was broken.   What I’m upset about is that I’ve spent quite a few hours figuring out how I might have done this, and IT has spent time looking into a problem that isn’t theirs.
Tech Support 2:  I understand, I can reactivate your corporate package, and offer you a $20 credit for 6 months will that help? 
Us: Yes that will help.

The price increase doesn’t bother me, most corporate data plans are around $50 a month.  What bothers me is that these fine folks couldn’t plan ahead 30 days and warn the user that the cost will go up unless they choose otherwise.   Instead they decided for this user that they no longer wanted/needed the package and defaulted him to a package that for the same cost did absolutely nothing for them.

Thanks, Cincinnati Bell Wireless.

A colleague and I were recently discussing this new trend in social networking.  It was also the first day that I unlinked from someone, on purpose.

What’s a Linked In Whore?  Where do I find one?   Are they cheap?  Just what will they do for money or a connection?

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple years.  Linked In was one of the first online contact managers/social networks.  Probably not the first, but certainly one of the better, and one of the first to embrace Web 2.0 stuff.   So it’s kind of like FaceBook Lite, without all the touchy feely “Come be my friend stuff” and about 11 million times more professional than MySpace.

It’s supposed to be more professional, more business like.   Store your contacts online, see who they know, etc, etc.  Through these connections you can ask to be introduced to your connections, connections.  If you’re in public relations or sales this is probably a good thing.   They do try to protect you though.  Just because you can see my connections doesn’t mean you can contact them.   Instead you have to ask me to be introduced.  You get to play match maker.  Instead of going up to the woman in the bar and asking her out, you have to ask a friend to introduce you.  Again this is generally good because it’s on the Internet and you don’t know these people, it’s also virtual, so you can’t turn them down directly or slap them if it’s appropriate.  So a referral is generally welcome.  But Linked In whores are screwing this all up.  They’ll introduce anyone to anyone.

My 115 legit connections link me to 730,400 other professionals and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  It might be a good thing if I were selling something directly, or in the job market.  Otherwise not so good.

For the record I submit if you have: (500 or more connections) you’re a Linked In Whore.

This means you’ll link to anyone just for asking.  You have no scruples.  (You’re also likely to be a recruiter which only validates that you have no scruples).  I also proclaim that if you have 500+ connections you don’t know most of them, and couldn’t recognize them if you saw them.  No way no how.   So why are you connected to them?  Why am I connected to you? 

Of my 115 connections I’ve personally met probably 110 of them.  In fact that’s one of my personal criteria for linking with someone.  I’m sure I have a few (less than a dozen) with whom I’m only vaguely familiar with.   What value is there to having them on my list?  I’ve probably done business with them or may want their opinion on something, some technology, or maybe some person some day.  Everyone else is out.

All my bad Linked In experiences come from Linked in Whores.  Generally connections to them, like a bad STD, they just want to spread.  They want me to introduce them to my connections and I don’t know who they are.   Just because they are connected to someone they must be good right?  Uh, no, especially when their a whore connected to another whore.

The biggest epiphany for me came from Sales people using Linked In.  (Generally also connection whores).  These typically seem to be those those that I’ve met in the past, or one of their co-workers.  If I’m not a customer now, what makes you think that just because you’ve found a way to be connected to me via a group or other connection that I want to buy stuff from you now?   I don’t.  I don’t like cold calls, I don’t like solicitations for business.  I don’t want that through Linked In.  Linked In for me is a network of people I trust.  I submit that nobody knows and fully trusts and respects 500+ people.  Not for any length of time.  Not really.

If I were Internet Czar, I’d make these connections expire.  If you haven’t contacted me and I haven’t contacted you in 6 months to a year, then I don’t really know you, don’t do business with you and probably don’t need you.  But more importantly I don’t need you or any of your connections trying to sell me stuff.   Maybe they don’t really go away, but they go into a “Time-Out” state where they can see my connections, but none of their connections can see my connections.  I *might* need them someday, that’s why I probably Linked to then in the first place.  

If you find yourself in job seeking mode you can ask your connections to hook you up again or take you out of “Time-Out”.   Yeah, that would help out a lot.

The Internet is full of wonderful stuff, but as with anything else in life it only takes a few to screw it up for the rest of us.