{"id":2570,"date":"2008-06-19T05:24:11","date_gmt":"2008-06-19T12:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/19\/how-will-you-stand-out-from-the-crowd\/"},"modified":"2008-06-19T05:25:24","modified_gmt":"2008-06-19T12:25:24","slug":"how-will-you-stand-out-from-the-crowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/19\/how-will-you-stand-out-from-the-crowd\/","title":{"rendered":"How Will You Stand Out From The Crowd?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When many things are equal: your features, your customers, your products, your product roadmap, it&#8217;s often hard to differentiate.<\/p>\n<p>Often, I&#8217;m getting pitched during briefings by White Label Social Network vendors they&#8217;ll often advance to a quadrant slide (almost always in the first quarter of the deck) and their almost always on the right hand top quadrant, using parameters they&#8217;ve selected. I&#8217;ll frequently ask them to tell me &#8216;how they are different&#8217;, only then, does the conversation get interesting.  Of course, I already see stratification in this industry, with differentiation on product offerings.<\/p>\n<p>This is <em>not <\/em>an endorsement for Jive Software, I&#8217;m simply commenting on the marketing efforts that they deploy to stand out from the very crowded marketplace (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/12\/list-of-white-label-social-networking-platforms\/\">80-100 competitors, with more on the way<\/a>).  It&#8217;s also only a reflection of my perspective, I&#8217;ve not done a formal survey to brands to ask them what they think.  <\/p>\n<p>With that said, if you take a look at how Jive has been marketing themselves, they clearly stand out.  Their VP of Marketing blogs, he &#8216;s part of the conversation in <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/SamLawrence\">Twitter<\/a>, and he tells stories that are intended to relate (whether they do or not is unknown) to corporate clients using <a href=\"http:\/\/gobigalways.com\/anatomy-of-the-enterprise-octopus\/\">imagery, storytelling, and icons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But does it work? Maybe it gets attention, maybe it starts a conversation with those that are pained, but it doesn&#8217;t necessarily impact the product, service, and delivery of products.  One thing is for sure, it&#8217;s significant enough to get me to tell you all about it.<\/p>\n<p>When your market is one sea of gray, and underneath the corporate color scheme you&#8217;re all very similar, what are you going to do to standout?  This applies to not just your company, but you as a future colleague or employee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When many things are equal: your features, your customers, your products, your product roadmap, it&rsquo;s often hard to differentiate. Often, I&rsquo;m getting pitched during briefings by White Label Social Network vendors they&rsquo;ll often advance to a quadrant slide (almost always in the first quarter of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/19\/how-will-you-stand-out-from-the-crowd\/\" class=\"more-link\"><span>Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How Will You Stand Out From The Crowd?<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-media","category-web-marketing","category-white-label-social-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}