New Marketing Summit: Web 2.0 and the Dow Jones

Session: Bringing Web 2.0 Marketing to Dow Jones - Alan Scott, CMO of Dow Jones

Chris: How did you get involved in marketing

Alan: I was in the B2B side of Dow Jones and I was a wise-ass sales executive who walked around saying marketing didn’t have their act together.  Well, they put me into marketing.

Chris: What’s your marketing philosophy?

Alan: Sales teaches you that you have to sell someone in order to live, and they have to buy to be successful.  It’s a crystal clear value proposition.  You have to have it completely clear.

Chris: How did you come to some of the social media decisions you’ve made?

Alan: It’s a matter of participation.  At one point it was direct mail, then moved to blogging and then beyond.  What I look for in making decisions is that it’s well thought out.  Have they sat down and said, I’m trying to tackle a certain part of the population, and there’s a clear value proposition.  Can you convince me that it’s worth a try?  I don’t expect a concrete ROI, but a concrete business value proposition.

Chris: What criteria do use to allocate resources to a social media program and what metrics do you look for to measure it?

Alan: There are certain markets we want to attack, and it’s focused.  Within our group, we decide our business goals, and we turn that into a branded investment strategy, on terms of how we look, where we’re found, etc.  Then we figure out our messaging strategy, who and how we’re talking to people.  Then we layer across that the functional advertising and PR, and then create go-to-market plans.  It gives you the ability to have transparency in our marketing mix, and we can use both pull and push methods of reaching people.  With the new marketing, you can measure all of this stuff, and there’s significant insight into what’s working and what’s not.  I look at how I want to attack the market place, I don’t necessarily have a budget for social media.  Each marketing strategy for each segment is different and they all definitely use social media.  We budget on how we can effectively market to our target.

Chris: How do I reach a CMO to sell something?

Alan: Two things.  First, it’s not true that you have to get to the CMO to sell something.  I’ve got people in my organization that will respond to business props before I will, and often I won’t even be in the process.

Chris: Will Factiva start tracking more online and social media outlets?

Alan: Yes, we’ll add that and continue adding that over time.  It’s very important.

Chris: What don’t you want to know from vendors when you do get into these conversations?

Alan: Unless it’s real, I don’t care about the ROI. Someone told you have to have an ROI, and I don’t think you do.

Chris: How does the Dow deal with the digital divide and connecting globally?

Alan: In terms of the business, about 40% of ours is outside of the US, and there are people all over the world marketing all over the world.

Audience Question: I just want to clarify that whhat you do is really continue with your marketing strategy, whether traditional or not, and you incorporate new media aspects?

Alan: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Audience Question: Can we get a widget to track the Dow on Facebook?

Alan: Ha!  Yeah, we’re working on it.

Audience Questions: What are you doing to woo digital natives to work for you?

Alan: Oh, not enough.  We’re an old company.  We’re getting close to 50/50 revenues in terms of online and print, but in a lot of ways we’re still pretty old school.  We’ve had a lot of recent discussions about how we can attract Generation Y and Generation X.  We’re really trying to foster an environment that works with them.

Chris: How do you pitch your CMO on social media?

Alan: Where I said yes to take a chance is when someone said “I understand we’re trying to sell something to someone.  Here’s who that person is, here’s how this connects to that person, and here’s how it can be converted into a sale.”

Chris: Have you had the situation where someone internally really messed up with blogging and you’ve gotten criticized for the decision to allow it?

Alan: Luckily not, but had happened, I would have said, “Sorry I screwed up.”

Final Thought: It’s all