Question

Topic: Our Forum

The Seemingly Imbalanced State Of Our Forum

Posted by steven.alker on 3/3/2019 at 3:36 PM ET 500 Points
Hi Fellow Experts

Most of you will be aware that I had to take a break from the KHE for some years and Shelly and the team have kindly restored my Expert Points.

When I returned, I was surprised to see that the forum had become a lot less involved in the more complex and difficult areas of marketing. It appeared now to be dominated by trite questions about Taglines, Straplines, Company Names, and Slogans. It seems at first second and third glances to have become a place which wants to deprive small advertising agencies of their business.

Now, these items are important - get them wrong and you can appear foolish or get sued by the owner of an innocent suggestion made here and adopted by the questioner.

However, in modern marketing, this subject consists only about 5% of the whole of the marketing mix as covered by MarketingProfs. Questions about the right, e-Marketing, Strategy, CRM or the right way to approach metrics are far more important to the modern marketing function, along with SEO. Getting a professional firm to answer these more complex questions can incur a hefty charge - days of work to give someone a clue at $1,600/day. That is where we used to be so helpful. Questions about a tagline can be dealt with for $45 and a company name for $500 (Because the legality needs checking, stupid!!)(And the meaning in other languages, if you don't want to christen your new Car "Donkey Shit", in Spanish - Rolls Royce!!)

I am not attempting to be exhaustive or get the order right, but a number one priority in the world of modern marketing ain't Taglines.

However, as the scientist, Rutherford observed, "Qualitative is a poor form of Quantitative"

So I looked at the forum statistics to come up with numbers - from the advanced search page. Now this place has never been a good place to post tables of numbers, but I will do my best. I have listed all the forum topics in the order I wrote them down. Then I have listed the number of questions asked since 2004 (There will be some discrepancies because topic headings have changed over the years, but that is of little significance: They still all add up to 49,495 with is close to the headline figure quoted on the KHE page)

Somehow, the item of 5% relevance has achieved top listing. Other items of great importance are way down the listings by questions asked in the KHE. How has this happened?

I would like to ask my colleagues to look at the figures I will print below and rank them in their own order of importance - their importance to Marketing as a whole and to Marketing as presented by MarketingProfs. The two really should be the same, so don't bother to come up with two sets of rankings.

To make this easy, I have numbered the topics 1-16 and would like to ask you to rank them, 1-16 again in the order that you see them being of importance to modern marketing in 2019. (Just copy and paste my table and put in your own rankings)I certainly would not put Taglines/Names up at No 1 which is where it sits when ranked by questions asked.

In my Operational Research (OR) work, I use Optimisation via Linear Programming (LP) to Optimise a company's offerings subject to its profitability and the constraints in making or supplying that product. It can be ruthless and will wipe out an entire group of products because it is simply not profitable to make or sell them (Applies to services as well, including the MarketingProfs Management Model). The CEO of the company then has a choice: Make and supply the product and make less profit, Kill the product, or let it wither on the vine through lack of promotion and care and attention. The latter is often chosen to avoid marketplace disruption.

From an OR perspective, it looks like someone like me has been into MarketingProfs HQ and the latter is happening to the KHE. Death by trivia.

Well, to keep Lord Rutherford Happy, Here are the figures, if they survive the text interface!! Bear with me if I need to edit.

Oh, one last point. It would be good to see, and useful to MarketingProfs Management to look at, the time series for each forum topic heading from 2004 through to 2018, topic by topic and year by year. I suspect that it will show a snowballing balooning of tagline questions whilst the really important areas are neglected.

Topic Posts Position by Importance.
1 Taglines/Names 13336 16
2 Advertising 5733 5
3 Strategy 5377 2
4 Student Questions 5189 10
5 Other 2774 15
6 Branding 2689 6
7 E-Marketing 2567 2
8 Research/Matrics 1761 1
9 Career/Training 1612 7
10 Website Critique 1321 8
11 Customer Behaviour 944 3
12 Copywriting 740 9
13 SEO/SEM 590 4
14 Social media 372 2 (eq)
15 Just for Fun 274 12
16 Our Forum 216 9
Total 45495

OK, YOur turn:

Using a score from 1 to 16, let me know in what order you would prioritize these topics and if Taglines/Names is not No 1, then how on earth did we let the forum make it the most popular area of questions asked?

Right, that's me probably banned as a troublemaker!!!

Sincerely


Steve
CEO www.iSimutron.com
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  • Posted by steven.alker on 3/3/2019 at 3:55 PM Author
    Oh dear as expected the table is all jumbled. I will try again here where the entry form respects the comment form size for size:

    Topic Posts Position by Importance.
    1 Taglines/Names 13336 16
    2 Advertising 5733 5
    3 Strategy 5377 2
    4 Student Questions 5189 10
    5 Other 2774 15
    6 Branding 2689 6
    7 E-Marketing 2567 2
    8 Research/Matrics 1761 1
    9 Career/Training 1612 7
    10 Website Critique 1321 8
    11 Customer Behaviour 944 3
    12 Copywriting 740 9
    13 SEO/SEM 590 4
    14 Social media 372 2 (eq)
    15 Just for Fun 274 12
    16 Our Forum 216 9
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 3/4/2019 at 9:54 AM Accepted
    Steve - My hunch about the questions is a shifting demographic, that's likely replicated in other areas of expertise across the internet: the early users were more established business owners and found a community of willing experts. Over time, more people decided to launch their own companies, and the questions reflect the new business owners' DIY issues. The established business owners went elsewhere to look for answers (perhaps to LinkedIn or mentoring groups). While the experts on our Forum see the long view of marketing, the people who are asking for help are dealing with what they view as their immediate problem (and hoping to figure out the rest as-they-go). That's why many of the times when people ask questions, the experts tend to dig for more depth of issues to teach/inform/share the longer view needs.

    As to the % of importance of each topic, the answer for me is "it depends". While the big picture of strategy is vital (no use running a race if you don't know the race course), so are the execution of all the various specific actions: copywriting, research, branding, SEO/SEM, advertising, website, social media, behavior, and tagline/names.
  • Posted by steven.alker on 3/4/2019 at 10:29 AM Author
    Thanks Jay.

    That is a pretty sound analysis and it is similar to my own thinking.

    However!

    The content of MarketingProfs and the Pro facilities is vibrant, up-to-date and often challenging. Some of the articles and papers need several readings before I take on board all the points.

    So if the site and the company as a whole have moved to writing content which, frankly, a large percentage of readers will need some additional help with, why, these days are they not coming to the forum?

    I cannot believe that a technical paper on a vital aspect of marketing, in half of the more numerical topics will be 100% understood as it applies to their company. Surely it would make sense if the main site were to refer queries and discussion to the KHE?

    My fear is that without the drive and the desire of the MarketingProfs management to push people towards the KHE, then the KHE will become an irrelevance. Oh, and it will deprive small ad agencies of their bread and butter income whilst supplying questioners with potentially legally and market flawed suggestions.

    At least in the earlier days, if you spouted nonsense here, you got politely shredded by the experts. These days the majority of questions are so asinine, that there is nothing of any substance to get wrong in an answer!

    I continue to believe in the ongoing value and merit of the KHE, but given the drift (And recently an avalanche) away from the values of MarketingProfs main site and thus, serious topics, I think that only an intervention by management can redirect site members back to the KHE for some real discussions.

    Lastly, being a member of some other sites, there isn't much which can match the technical content of the early KHE. Except for the CIM forum. There, they have maintained a high level of discussion which is open to all members and it is well used. Visitors can read and by getting a guest sign in, can also post answers, but not questions. The OR Society of which I am a member is also starting a forum, so there is still strong merit in the concept.

    Our's needs curating in its direction and content.
  • Posted by steven.alker on 3/5/2019 at 5:25 AM Author
    Jay

    About people finding other places and forums (Or is that fora as in Quora?) to go to. What I find incomprehensible but entirely believable, was that MarketingProfs management allowed the site, and the site content and paying membership, to be built by the KHE and then seemingly to let the KHE drift off into a sort of nonentity land. I mean, just look at the answers to recent questions and the lack of answers for anything requiring insight. Lack of answers to this for example. Do the members no longer care?

    Sure, the experts at the time, and I am still in contact with many of them, gave their advice for free, whilst MarketingProfs charged for membership and courses to answer at least part of those self-same questions, so it could be seen as cannibalising the paying membership. It need not have been so.

    That could have been avoided, if the MP Management had decided to keep the forum vibrant as a high-end solutions venue, whilst inserting pointers to their own Pro courses and papers amongst the answers, which would answer questions in full that would have produced revenues, but they didn't.

    That would not have detracted from the value of the KHE and it would have provided a free source of new paying members. It could have been a bit like the way Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google AdWords function. You talk about something and sponsored content pops up, but on a smaller scale.

    I know that several of the old experts felt that they were being used to grow the site and were never acknowledged, even in a small way, such as a free Pro membership for answering lots of questions.

    So if the experts and the high-end askers of questions have gone elsewhere, where have they gone? Some will have gone Pro at MarketingProfs, but that does not help you to answer specific questions which require deep or technical knowledge. I suspect that they have migrated to Quora, where, as a contributing member, I have seen the Marketing section balloon to 14 Million users over the last 3 years (That's me - all numbers, statistics, and their possible meaning - I couldn't do a Tagline if you paid me and wouldn't want to!!) I got involved last year and I have been asked to join their panel. ATM, most of what I do is maths, but their marketing section is needing some direction.

    A recent Gartner(?) report cited Quora as the place to go to for tech, maths, and science-related adverts. Better than Google AdWords and less expensive. Better than LinkedIn and unless you are selling dietary products or hearing aids, better than Facebook. I have used Facebook for hearing aids and it was very successful, if expensive. £30 / click, but then my client closed one in 6 inquiries for a £3,800 pair of hearing aids. That's £180 advertising cost per sale with a margin of £2200 to pay for it. Not a bad way to make a lot of money!!

    MarketingProfs could have gone down this route. Do you think that it is too late to reset the clock?

    Having done my analysis above, and guessed at the OR position for the site as a whole, I am almost certain that the KHE has been hung out to dry as far as serious topics are concerned. It's not the demographics of the membership as a whole, which is driving it towards trivia, but the lack of nurturing which has seen high-end experts and askers of questions, melt away.

    If I had done a simplex optimization of the MarketingProfs portfolio, assets and constraints 8 years ago, I would have nailed an opportunity. Asked to do it now, and I would suspect that I would have to conclude that the KHE is a burden and needs to "Go, gently into that dark night". And we should not "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" (With apologies to Dylan Thomas)
  • Posted by mgoodman on 3/13/2019 at 6:29 PM Accepted
    I usually just take whatever question is asked and use it as a gentle reminder that not everyone really understands what marketing is. By teaching them a little, many are awakened, find an answer to their question, and become better at running their businesses. Occasionally I even end up with a consulting gig too.

    Not ideal, but we have to play the hand we're dealt.
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