Enterprise marketing management and the vastness of online marketing

Enterprise marketing management (EMM) software is, to a marketer-technologist such as myself, the Holy Grail of 21st century marketing. Like enterprise resource planning (ERP) for operations, its aim is to provide a holistic, integrated view of an organization’s entire marketing universe — an overarching umbrella that enables everyone from the distributed front-line up to the CMO to manage and optimize hundreds or thousands of parallel marketing initiatives across all of the firm’s channels.

It’s a breathtaking proposition in its scope.

It was also a heck of a lot easier to conceive of 10 years ago, when the “online marketing” channel simply meant a company’s brochure-ware web site with a “request info” form. Trade shows, direct mail, advertising, parter programs, etc., were a lot to coordinate, but they were all relatively finite and well-bounded. The marketing world largely revolved around campaigns, each with a defined beginning and end.

The online world, however, has refused to stay in a nice, little box.

Instead, online has exploded into millions of microchannels, with few boundaries, in constant motion, with people sloshing freely among them — often under little or no direct control of the marketer. Beginnings are fuzzy, endings are fuzzier yet. If old marketing was dealing with chess pieces on a board, new marketing is like a chessboard in which new squares and pieces are being added exponentially in all directions all the time. And, oh, the pieces are made of water.

In the online space, structured campaigns are giving way to a vast marketplace of ideas — a kaleidoscope of microcampaigns — that flash into existence, opportunistically, at a frenetic pace, and then evolve and fade with a radioactive half-life, continuing to emit memes, sparking new reactions, in unpredictable ways. These ideas come not only from every nook of the organization — so much for the official marketing department hierarchy — but also from customers, prospects, bloggers, partners, competitors, and energy-drink-saturated teenagers with YouTube accounts.

To the untrained eye, it looks a lot like chaos.

Continues @ http://www.chiefmartec.com