Traditional Software Vendors Go Marketing 2.0

As a part-time analyst, I receive a lot of email from vendors plugging their latest product, service, webinar, white paper or whatever. An interesting trend that I’m seeing is the “marketing 2.0” approach that some of the vendors are taking: not just blogging (which is being done with some degree of success by most vendors), but podcasts and video podcasts on iTunes, and videos on YouTube.

The truly innovative part of this is not the platform — iTunes or YouTube — but that they’ve moved these materials out from behind a registration wall to allow anyone to consume them in the way that they choose. This also includes materials on the vendors’ sites that they move out from behind the wall for open access, such as product information and customer case studies.

This changes the dynamic between the vendor and their prospective customer, putting the customer into a better position to find information on vendors of interest without having to endure the inevitable telesales call and ongoing Bacn that results from registration on a vendor site. It also allows for different models of consumption, specifically subscription through iTunes or a feed reader, which allows the customers to choose when and how they want to view the information. In other words, the customer is now in charge of the early pre-sales cycle, and this makes a few vendors a bit uncomfortable.

I blogged about some specific examples of this in the BPM market yesterday on my own blog, and received some interesting comments: two people, one from Lombardi and the other formerly of Oracle BEA, defended the practice of the vendor registration wall as a valuable source of leads, whereas one person from Intalio agreed with me:

I would even go further. To me it isn’t just about companies making it easy for you to find the information *they* want you to access. It is about companies opening up and exposing their warts to the disinfectant of sunshine. Obviously companies don’t want to come right out and broadcast their top ten disasters, but having open forums where customers discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly goes a long way to building trust with customers.

I’m not a search expert, but I have to guess that moving materials out from behind a registration wall also makes them more visible to Google and other search engines, thereby greatly increasing serendipitous discovery. And isn’t visibility the whole point of marketing materials?