Comscore data shows that the under-24 age group actually declined from 2008 to 2009 as a percentage of the total audience on Facebook. Chances are that even if you are a B2B product marketer, the buyers who make buying decisions on your product and the end users who will impact their buying are actually using more social media, not less. Besides, social media is not just about selling – it can be used for so much more.

So, how can a savvy B2B tech product marketer leverage social media? Here are 5 ways.

Identify influencers and early adopters: Especially for startups with low marketing budgets, places like Twitter and LinkedIn are great places to identify the influential people who are talking about the sector that you operate in, and whose recommendations are likely to influence other users.

Get heard in the noise: The most popular technology bloggers today receive a deluge of press release emails everyday – and poorly targeted, irrelevant PR annoys people. Instead of just spamming bloggers and journalists in the hope that 1 out of 10 releases get picked up, use social media such as blogs, forums or Twitter to engage with people first. Conversations lead to a much greater probability of your news being heard.

Seek feedback: Launching a new version? Want to understand a customer problem better? Use social media to run surveys or interact with users – Facebook applications, for example offer many possibilities in this area. Traditionally, most companies have been wary of talking about ideas before they are out in the market, but time and again, it’s been proved that great implementation to market matters more than just having a good idea. Engagement marketing is the way to go.

Brand building: Yes, as a B2B company, you sell to other companies, but companies are not faceless monoliths – the buying is still done by individuals. Use social media to carry forward your company branding consistently. Individuals ultimately carry forward their perceptions of the companies that they deal with, into their buying decisions.

Customer support: Places like your Facebook page or Twitter profile are an additional channel for you to listen to customer problems. Why do you need these if you already have a hotline? Because it’s not about you – it’s about the channels that your customers want to use! As more customers spend time on social media channels, that is where they will talk to you. Word of caution though: Don’t do this unless you can maintain the conversation. It’s better to stick to a well-manned hotline than offer a Twitter ID that talks to no one!

Mashable’s business is Content, and while “honoring” fans, it is cleverly getting them engaged in the process of creating more innovative content, whether online, or as in this case, as a giant billboard. Clearly, Engagement Marketing is something that we will be seeing more of.

Mohanbir Sawhney, McKormick Tribune Professor of Technology at the Kellogg School of Management explains succinctly in this video below, how companies need to change their fundamental attitude towards marketing – from “exposure” to “engagement”.

Engagement Marketing, i.e. getting consumers involved in the evolution of a product or brand becomes critical in the face of two somewhat contradictory trends we are seeing today.

One is the globalization of knowledge and information. With technology becoming a leveling factor, more and more people around the world can access the same things, whether it is music, information, products or opinions. At the same time, we are seeing a great deal of market fragmentation, with smaller and smaller niche markets. By their very ability to serve a long tail of consumers, marketers are discovering niches that didn’t exist before (or at least couldn’t be served profitably).

Globalization with fragmentation means that theoretically, one can reach a wider market than ever before, but practically the market is likely to be choosier than ever. This means that technology product marketers face high chances of failure; engagement marketing helps to mitigate these risks – from getting customers involved in defining the value proposition to co-creating content, events and promotions.

One other way of looking at it is that with the rise of social media, consumers will engage with your product in many different ways, whether you want them to or not. Engagement Marketing will help ensure that you are part of that conversation, rather than standing on its sidelines!

Less openly articulated were the fears that many technologists have: that processes kill innovation, that the market doesn’t know what it wants, that product marketing will “takeover” the product ownership.

In this context – for start-ups, it would be helpful to look at product management as an activity than as a function or specific designation. Product Planning, in particular, starts with the identification of a market-relevant problem, the solving of which is within the firm’s capabilities. This runs contrary to the way many start-ups begin – with a technology or capability or product that they seek to market.

Making this shift from product as starting point to market-problem as starting point is one of the most critical shifts that start-ups need to negotiate. If this shift is made, whether or not a small team has a person called a ‘product manager’ is a moot point.

As Gabriel pointed out in his session, start-ups run on few resources and multi-tasking. Business owners or engineers may play the role of product planner. When the start-up grows into a larger entity with multiple customers, products or geographical markets, roles can evolve into full-fledged planning and marketing teams; the product planning and marketing process will need to be better defined to prevent role conflicts and ensure efficiency.

Until then, what is essential is the eye on the market and a method to understand it. Without this activity, start-ups are likely to end up shooting in the dark and taking their chances.

Judging by the number and variety of questions the audience had for him, product management in practice is definitely challenging and enthusing practitioners in India.

One of the key topics that Gabriel touched upon in his session was the fundamentals of product management as being ‘market-driven’. Interestingly, before getting into the benefits of a market-driven approach, he first discussed two other product delivery strategies – ‘technology driven’ (banks on making a high-tech product and then gaining acceptance) and sales driven (focuses on customizing technology, one customer at a time).

One key learning was that innovation is not really about technology driving products – in fact, most such products, made without regard for market needs, actually fail (usually explained as ‘being ahead of their time’!)

A market-driven product strategy, on the other hand minimizes risk (not eliminates, as Gabriel pointed out to an audience member who wanted a ‘guarantee’!) by creating products that definitely meet a specific need and hence are more likely to be purchased. Some of the other reasons for adopting a market-driven strategy are that markets have become more competitive and fragmented than ever before – leaving little room for trial and error.

In other words, instead of creating a product and just hoping that some features will match what customers want, technology firms really need to wake up to a different way of doing things, where “money becomes a by-product of solving market needs.”

Here at Confianzys, we think of ourselves as product management evangelists and we’re the first to acknowledge that we have a long way to go before Product Management as an effective function becomes part of the DNA of companies in India. Of course, in the last two years of our existence, it’s been a pleasure to work with small and large companies that are putting in place a product management discipline and reaping its benefits.

At the same time, we’ve often heard CEOs and business owners express a desire to gauge the efficacy of the function and improve their Product Management processes. Which is why, we’re glad to be bringing to India, the best possible subject matter expert on the subject: Gabriel Steinhardt, Managing Director of Blackblot, the world’s leading Product Management training organization and author of The Product Manager’s Toolkit.

At a workshop on ‘The Real World of High-Tech Product Management’ at the Nasscom Product Conclave (to be held on 11^th November at 2.30PM), Gabriel will be taking participants through a product management perfomance review and discussing with CEOs, business heads and Product Management practitioners how they can gauge the maturity of product management practices at their workplace. 

If you have been grappling with the various challenges commonly faced by Product Management practitioners in India, such as making your product strategy market-driven or defining roles and responsibilities, it would be a good place to talk best practices and actionable information with others in similar roles.

Continuing our series on writing a business case for new products (parts 1 and 2 here), what I’d like to cover here is how PMs can address corporate goals while unearthing the right problem; in other words, finding not just a problem, but the right problem for your company to solve.

How can PMs stay innovative while weeding out product ideas that don’t fit the corporate vision? For starters, it helps understand how corporate vision is defined. Corporate vision does not directly dictate what products should be explored. Instead, most companies define themselves either in terms of the problems they will help to solve, the customers they will work for or the technologies they will work with or some combination of these.

Winning product ideas will be those that solve a relevant problem for a large enough customer group while fit the company’s vision in terms of the problem space it is in, the customer group it focuses on or the technologies it is adept at. Some examples could be:

• A new problem, which the core customer group has
• A new customer group, but with a similar problem to what the company addresses
• An existing problem, which can be resolved better with new technology

These are the problems that the company wants to solve and has the ability to solve. The larger this intersection, i.e. the closer the problem is to the company’s existing capabilities or to the space that the company sees itself in, it will be more attractive to top management. PMs who identify such areas for new product ideas will find it easier to evangelise their ideas within the company, which is where they have to sell them first.

When building a business case, it is important to identify the market segment(s) for which a particular product is being considered and the rationale behind choosing these. Segmentation is of course part of Marketing 101, but in practice, it is tricky. Market segments can be defined along many criteria such as geography, enterprise size by revenue, buying process (B2B Vs B2C), existing technologies, or even employee strength. Which of these criteria should be applied for a particular product?

Many factors impact which segmentation criteria are applied, including:

• Identifiability (Does the data exist to prove whether members of this segment are homogenous on some parameters?)
• Accessibility (Can marketing/media access this segment based on this criteria?) and
• Correlation to Market/Customer Problem Statement (Do these segment/s exhibit similar problem characteristics which our product expects to solve)
• Correlation to behaviour (How strongly will this criteria predict interest/buying of our product?)
• Correlation to Actual Buyer (Will this problem be seen as strategic or operational by buyers)

In practice, identifiability and accessibility are easier to measure, or at least the data for these is more likely to exist. Which is why, geographical location and revenue size are some of the most common segmentation criteria used.

Correlation to behaviour is much harder to gauge though it is as (or more) critical. Is organizational strength a better predictor of interest in a new productivity tool or is it the size of the IT budget? Start-ups especially do not usually have access to such information. For example, a start-up offering desktop based productivity tools may segment the market by revenue size, and decide to target companies with revenues of over $10 million. However, the size of the customer’s training/improvement budgets in proportion to revenues may actually determine better whether they will see the value of such tools.

The absence of concrete information should not however let companies totally exclude correlation to behaviour when identifying market segments. Preliminary research and customer dialogue should be used to identify which criteria are truly relevant to that buyer behaviour and what in his/her perspective would be ‘Value’ for that group. The specific customer data on the criteria (in this case mentioned above, the size of the training budget) can then be collected as part of customer management activities, once the product is actually launched.

Without understanding the nature of a problem, the business case will not be objective or realistic. Most problems tend to be of two kinds – a customer problem, which is to do with an unmet customer need or a product problem, which is to do with a product that is not solving a problem in the best possible way.  Because some markets have both kinds of problems, it may be hard pinpointing which one a particular product development effort is targeted at.

For example, one problem Google identified was that despite the success of Googledocs, there is still a sizable chunk of users uncomfortable with web-based documents, while seeking the benefits of such collaboration. Perhaps Google defined this as a customer problem and not a product problem, which is why they acquired Docverse, a plugin that enables users to sync documents with an online service. Docverse is a solution to help users bridge the distance between desktop and web-based documents. If Google had defined this as a product problem, perhaps they would have spent much effort making googledocs work for desktop (which defeats its very concept!)

One good learning from this example is that when some customer segments have a problem understanding or using a product that is otherwise working well, the business case may not support rolling out a variant for this audience or tinkering with the product. Instead, customer problems could have other solutions such as additional training or help on using the product or working with partners who can bridge the gap. (Googledocs also does this by highlighting a number of third-party apps).

In other words, not every customer problem involves a new product opportunity. Some customer problems are short-lived and will not justify a new product while others involve too few customers to be worthwhile. That of course is a question of sizing the market opportunity and a subject for another post!

Are we saying then, that customer centricity is over-rated? That, in fact, Voice of Customer (VoC) is not needed on the product roadmap?

Well, like all complex questions, the answer is yes and no.

No, because the customer voice cannot be eliminated from the process. Without adequate knowledge of how customers will evaluate, use and buy, there is full scope for the development to go awry.

Yes, because there are cases where the customer voice can be the death of Innovation. Let’s look at some of these cases.

Talking to the wrong customer. Every customer may have an equal wallet size, but not every customer can participate well in the development process. When the product is at design or prototype stages, it takes a knowledgeable customer (one who is likely to be an early adopter and has a strong need for the product) to be able to offer meaningful feedback. Talking to a poorly informed customer, who is likely to follow the early adopters rather than make his own decisions, can actually give you misleading feedback.

Focusing on the wrong things. Get customers involved to see if the product solves a specific and important benefit for them. Is it easy to use? Is it solving their problems faster/more conveniently? Don’t let customers focus on peripheral issues such as ‘competition has more colours.’  If they do, ignore it. That is a surefire way to fritter away your time on ‘nice to haves’ rather than ‘need to haves’.

Talking to too many customers. Whom is this product really meant for? The teenager looking to be ‘cool’ and show off his latest gadget or the frequent flier who needs to be connected all the time? Get a fix on who the customer for this product is. Feedback from too many different kinds of customers can mean that you keep adding features until the product does no one thing really well.

Not filtering feedback. Sure, all customers want the best product at the lowest possible price. That doesn’t mean you should take the customer voice literally. Pricing, in particular, is one area that cannot be gauged purely from customer feedback. Use a range of measures to aid your decision-making, and try to adopt a value-based pricing approach.

The customer voice is a powerful weapon for companies to use in the product development process, but like every powerful weapon, it has to be wielded with restraint.

For marketers, seasonal products (and the FIFA World Cup is one, being a once in 4 years event), are both a dream and a nightmare. During their season, there is nothing to beat them –indeed, sometimes there aren’t enough of them to go around. Once season ends though, they are of little use. 

Technology products are often impacted by seasonality – even if they are not seasonal products themselves. How so? After all, many tech products may be one time purchases by institutional users.

Yet, the increasing demand from users for SAAS models and pricing means that product companies can no longer hope to sell with a fat margin and sit back. If a dairy product manufacturer finds their sales dipping due to a scare on a particular ingredient, its technology vendor who manages the billing system will find its revenues dipping too.  Technology vendors are only becoming more closely integrated with their customers.  

Technology vendors who cater to such industries where products come into demand during a specific time (such as fashion, retail, agricultural and travel industries) need to forecast correctly and deal with such highs and lows.

The tactics adopted may vary depending on the company’s overall strategy and business plan. Some companies may choose to spread risk by diversifying to other, less seasonal products. Some may choose to focus on after-market products and service offerings that can make up for the loss of revenue. Yet others may re-work pricing strategies and include a license or other one-time fee that takes seasonality into account.

Whatever the strategy you adopt, if your company is looking to launch in a market that hinges on occasional events or distinct buying seasons, you can’t afford to ignore seasonality.