What we learned at the Customer Reference Forum

This post offers Lorie’s thoughts on attending the 2009 Customer Reference Forum (CRF) in Berkeley, California.

I attended the CRF last month, and I got into a lot of great discussions around reference content. It made me wish that we had been able to formally present the case study-related findings from our 2008 B2B Collateral Survey, because I know that a lot of the attendees would have found that information useful. Ah, well—next year, right? 

At one point, I snagged Bill Lee, president of the Forum, and talked to him about the need to develop metrics around what makes good reference content: what makes it influential? What makes a good case study from the perspective of copy points, style, etc.? These must have a bearing on the impact of the reference, right? 

Bill agreed that those metrics would provide a lot of value, so I’m going to circle back with him to engage in the development of another survey. I also managed to get a presentation spot at the Silicon Valley CRF SIG’s annual conference—stay tuned, as I’m presenting our current data and kicking off that discussion the first week of April.

The conference also featured some really interesting discussions around content. Rhett Livengood, Director of Worldwide Marketing at Intel (check out their fantastic Communities page here), shared his positive experiences with cutting and pasting reference content like case studies into industry blogs. Rhett said that Intel had gotten a higher number of look-backs from those postings than from paid sponsorships on business sites. This is great news! We think that if the topic is relevant to the discussion, all of your marketing content can be leveraged in social media—just remember that it’s about taking part in an objective technology discussion and not about pumping your product.

Finally, we had a group discussion to ask Patty Morrison (former CIO at Motorola, Office Depot, Quaker Oats, and GE Industrial Systems) about how to gain a CTO’s cooperation in the reference process. I turned the tables a bit and asked about what kind of reference content CTOs found influential: discussion of business value/solutions or a deep dive into specific technology implementations? Patty was adamant that business solutions were what CTOs cared about, since they were tasked with solving business problems and supporting strategies for growth. 

Stay tuned as we develop metrics around influential reference content—if we have anything to do with it, we’ll be on the presenters’ panel at CRF next year.