Agile Marketing Resource

Hacking agile marketing methodology: The role of improvisation and invention

Mar 28

on March 28, 2013 at 1:52 am

I just read an inspring post from Andy Pearson who has a company ( White Fuse ) that does web design for charities. Andy talks about how he uses agile methodology and mentionshacking the pure methodology of agile software development to make it fit his companys idiosyncratic needs. He looks at this from theperspectiveof project management, but I clearly see it as being highly applicable to agile marketing as well.

I love the idea of hacking a formal methodology to make it fit your own culture, projects and workload. Indeed, why not? At the heart of the general concept of agility is the freedom and flexibility to improvise and innovate and it seems to me that this sense of freedom should apply as equally to the output/deliverable/outcome of the project at hand as it does to the processes that are employed to get the work done. Innovative methods and improvisational processes lead to fresh and inventive work results.

Within the broad framework of agile marketing methodology there is plenty of room for practitioners to find their own way through the same sort of experimentation that the underlying philosophy of agile methods encourages and promotes. How long should a sprint be? It depends on the project. How often should teams SCRUM? Sometimes meeting on a daily basis is just too often and three stand-up meetings a week are more appropriate. Do what works best for you!

To my way of thinking even theterminologycan be modified and tweaked. Ive spent a lot of my spare time playing guitar in rock and blues bands so I like to think of sprints as jams and SCRUM stand-up meetings as tune-ups . Does changing the jargon change the fundamental value of the method? Of course not, but it can heighten the sense of adventure, discovery and exploration for team (or band using my musical metaphor) members, and that is extremely powerful and valuable.

Dont be afraid to have fun, mash things up and disrupt the dominant paradigm to better suit your particular needs. Isnt doing so a core value of agile marketing?

With agile marketing the rules of the game are such that changing the rules to suit you and your team are well within bounds. This notion of a fast, flexible and methodical, yetmalleable, process can help marketers to break out of the confining strictures of hierarchy that often hinder the employment of agile methods and the work that they aim to produce.

Tags: agile , agile marketing , agile project management , Agile software development , Andy Pearson , hacks , marketing , Methodologies , Methodology , Project management , SCRUM

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Volerro content collaboration tool can help agile marketing teams

Mar 26

on March 26, 2013 at 8:36 pm

Posted In: agile marketing , agile project management , agilemarketing , content curation , tools

Volerro recently launched a cloud-based content collaboration service that could be a useful tool for agile marketing teams.

We think agile is going to be applied throughout business to merge how things get done. said Volerros founder and CEOKevin Lynch.

Volerro offers acustomizeablegraphical interface to simplify development, refinement and distribution of content created collaboratively. The company says that benefits for agile marketers include enhanced team collaboration, ease of rapid content revision, increased focus and flexibility in re-ordering processes as schedule and priorities dictate.

Volerro applies the Kanban concept to organizing and sharing content; rearranging and reordering graphical assets (with comments and annotations) as schedules change. The productsupports most commonly used media formats; MS Office or Adobe docs, images, video or audio files, even webpages. Content can be placed simply by dragging and dropping an URL.

Volerro uses HTML 5, so presumably it will work on iPads and other devices that dont support Flash. The service also includes a daily backup to prevent loss of work due to technical problems or human error.

The company offers a free service plan (limited to three projects) and prices upgrades based on storage capacity from 200 GB to as much as 2 TB. Upgraded subscriptions feature an unlimited number of projects.

Tags: Adobe Systems , Cloud computing , HTML5 , IPad , Kanban , Kevin Lynch , Microsoft Office , Volerro

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Content curation tools aid in developing user stories for agile marketing

Mar 24

on March 24, 2013 at 4:58 pm

Posted In: adaptive marketing , agile marketing , agilemarketing , content curation , user stories

At the center of agile marketing methodology is the user story . User stories and maps or other depictions of the buyers journey are used to fuel, focus and inform agilemarketing projects (sprints), keeping them squarely directed toward customers and their requirements.

A good user story for the purposes of agile marketing must include a highly personalized and well articulated statement of needs, wants, and desires presented with as much clarifying context as possible to the marketing team (which may very well include non-marketing personnel from IT, sales and other departments) so that they can rally around developing, adapting and effectively communicating solutions that are highly relevant and perceived as having value and as being a good fit by customers.

Ive noticed quite a few articles and blog posts recommending the use of mind-mapping tools to document and visualize user stories and Id like to suggest another new class of powerful tools that can help aid in the formation, development and sharing of user stories: content curation tools .

Content curation tools allow agile marketing teams to quickly assemble and share collections of highly focused content that is relevant (eveninspirational) to topics for user stories. These tools (see list below) automatically search for and recommend content from blogs, video collections, presentations, news stories, social networks and other websites into highly visual lists of links and abstracted summary information that can then be manually edited, curated, commented on, saved and shared.

A carefully curated collection of articles, posts and tweets can not only help to document user stories, vividly highlighting expressions and conversations about market needs andcustomerrequirements, but they can also be used as a powerful reality-check mechanism tomethodicallyvalidate value propositions and refine adaptive marketing hypotheses that agile marketing experiments are based on. Specifically aggregated anddeliberatelycurated collectionsof content are an extremely effective way to document and distill real-world information that can be used to polish, refine, focus and sharpen user stories, instilling them with the strongest possible sense of authenticity and genuine relevance.

Give it a try and I think youll agree that content curation tools add tremendous value to the process of authoring effective user stories for agile marketing.