Wikibon Blog

A New Way to Automate Marketing Content Creation

I first met Brad O’Neill in 2007. I was told I should meet with him because he was one of the brightest people around. We had a number of mutual contacts from Brad’s days at Storage Networks, Inc. and as an analyst at the Teneja group and because I was just getting Wikibon off the ground I expected it would be a useful meeting.

We met in NYC and shared parts of our respective business plans with each other. He explained the problem he was trying to solve which was pretty easy to understand. Companies have great customers but for a variety of reasons they can’t get most of them to be references. Let’s face it, vendors never have enough references. So Brad’s idea was to allow the seller to anonymize their client names and solicit references and proof points specific to their products and services. Brad and his co-founder Steve Norall then set out to build a service to automate the process. They call this Marketing Content Automation software. It’s brilliant.

In short, TechValidate combines research processes, software and client lists to create a self-service model that automates the process of creating marketing content. A TechValidate client can create a simple survey that goes out to its customer base and automatically solicit references. The end customer – Joseph A. Blow at say, Goldman Sachs, becomes IT Manager at Large Investment Bank. The customer’s identity is protected, the Techvalidate process assures that the person is a real customer and the vendor gets a good reference.

I spoke with a couple of marketing execs that are using the service: Kirby Wadsworth who heads marketing at F5 and Craig Nunes, VP of Marketing at 3PAR. They both love it. Kirby told me that people sometimes ask him if the fact that a customer is anonymous creates a credibility problem and he said not at all. He said that when you pull a dozen or so anonymous references with proof points that are all saying the same thing, it takes the issue right off the table for prospects. Nunes agreed.

In addition to the cleverness of the business plan and Brad and Steve’s excellent execution so far, there are two reasons I love this concept: 1) it totally compresses the elapsed time of generating marketing content. The TechValidate process end-to-end creates content in days or hours. Compare that to hiring a writer or analyst firm to create a case study– it might take months; 2) it’s authentic. Customers provide the information directly into the TechValidate system. Nothing in the middle. No re-writing, obfuscating, word-smithing, etc.

Do your own homework on the service but if you’re struggling with references and need some customer proof points, TechValidate might be something worth investigating. Some added thoughts on this. I’d make sure you understand how your customer data is being protected and how it can be used and re-used. Make sure you’re comfortable with the terms; don’t just jump in blindly. Also you should understand how you can use the data– it shouldn’t be restrictive. You may want to extract and re-purpose it and not get nickeled and dimed to make derivative works on the data. Be smart and ask the right questions on re-use before you sign up. As a general rule of thumb with any software as a service I think it’s important to establish up front your rights and how easy or difficult it is to extract your data when you need to. I’m sure TechValidate has answers to all these questions but be sure to probe so you don’t get unpleasantly surprised down the road.

I caught up with Brad at the BDEvent last week in Palo Alto. Here’s a short video of him explaining TechValidate.