How Pragmatic Marketing’s online presence went from a few simple pages to a thought-leadership, content-rich community for market-driven technology companies. Or, how I had something to say but nowhere to say it!

By Steve Johnson

[April, 2007] As years go by, it gets harder to remember the evolution of the internet from technologist's hobby to what it is today. In the mid-90s we were all struggling to find our "web voice" -- what should we publish on the web site? And how should we say it?

Back in those days, I remember in one training seminar remarking on a company's web site and the brave decision to post their strategic initiatives so prominently. The Vice President of Marketing disappeared in a flash. Apparently she didn't know they even had a web site! One of the developers had used the company's annual report and notes from a recent all-hands meeting to create the company site. The site was quickly taken offline.

As I recall, in my last corporate job, the only strategic marketing objective in 1993 was to get the URL for my company. Unfortunately the name was already reserved but when I dug further, I found that one of my developers had reserved the name and was just waiting for me to notice.

The first site (1997)

A decade ago, web sites were simple; a few pages of product information, an About Us page, and contact information. Such was the case for Pragmatic Marketing. Our web site at www.pragmaticmarketing.com contained a few simple pages including basic information about our seminars, and how to buy them. Today, our web site is the focal point for our thought leadership in product management and product marketing for technology companies and receives nearly one million page views a year from several hundred thousand people in over 150 countries around the world. While it still contains product information (our seminars) and About Us pages, it now contains hundreds of reference articles, all issues of our newsletter and print magazine, and many links to other sites. Perhaps most important, in these times of search engine placement, we have thousands of incoming links--others who reference our pages.

Adding content (2000)

We grew our web presence in tandem with the rest of the industry, exploring what did and didn't work -- working with incredibly basic utilities. Our current content-rich site started with a single article: the Product Management Triad. One of the topics we discuss in our Practical Product Management seminar is the idea of two or three product managers working as a team on a strategic product. After many training sessions, I'd get an e-mail from someone in the class wanting more information about the implementation of this concept. I replied three or four times, in effect, writing an article from scratch each time. It occurred to me that I should write it once, correctly and completely, and just insert the article in my e-mail. After receiving any inquiry more than once, I decided to write an article on the topic and over time created a few dozen "standard" articles. My ongoing rants and experiences about The Strategic Role of Product Management, Distinctive Competence, Brands & Branding, and the Futility of Product Demos at Trade Shows.

Rather than insert these articles into an e-mail however, I thought it would be easier to put them out on the web somewhere. Craig Stull, CEO of Pragmatic Marketing, acquired the URL for productmarketing.com and initially we planned to just redirect it to our corporate site. Instead, Craig decided that I should use it as a repository for my series of articles, and rather than sending an article enclosed in the e-mail, I could just point people to the web site. "Thanks for your inquiry. I have an article on this subject. Here's the link."

A few months later, we looked at searches performed on our site and saw a fairly frequent request for 'product manager job description.' We figured that Google was getting similar searches. So I wrote a product management job description specifically so that the article would be found by the search engines. I guess this was our first step in search engine optimization. In 2006, that job description article was viewed over 30,000 times and continues to be a very popular entry-point to our site.

In 1999, I realized that my knowledge about product manager and marketer compensation was becoming out-of-date. Executives would ask me about the average salary and bonus for and my information was no longer current. So I opened an account with WebSurveyor^®, created a survey asking about compensation as well as other product management activities and began an annual tradition that has gained us international exposure. Over the subsequent years, we have asked many different questions and today it has grown to become the industry benchmark for describing a technology product manager’s life. From how much e-mail sent and received to how many meetings attended in a week to the ratio of product managers to other roles in the organization like developers, it has become a much anticipated report for product managers, marketers, recruiters and executives.

Sending the newsletter (2001)

The website is great when people come to you, but what if they don't? We have thousands of satisfied customers and we have their e-mail addresses. Why not send them a note once in a while? I started embargoing articles until I could put them in a newsletter. I figured our customers should get first-access to new content. So I wrote new articles, put the schedule of upcoming seminars in the sidebar, and started e-mailing the newsletter every month. Or at least I planned to! In reality, it was sent between 8 and 12 times per year, depending on my training schedule and having something new to say.

It's amazing how electronic content wants to be connected. When I put out the first newsletter, I wanted to let those who hadn't received it know that the new article was online, so I updated the home page of productmarketing.com to point to the newsletter and to the article. And accidentally started blogging.

I blog therefore I am (2002)

Bill Blaze in "Night Shift": I'm an idea man Chuck, I get ideas, sometimes I get so many ideas that I can't even fight them off! I invented wash 'n' dries… although they already had them."

I "invented" blogging in October 2002. As I wrote new articles, found cool places on the web, or discovered pretty much anything that I thought might be interesting to product managers, I posted a quick note online. Over the next few months, the site became the place for me to post anything new. I decided early on to keep blog posts brief, limiting the post to a short commentary with links to other content on our site or elsewhere. The search engines really liked the site because it had lots of ever-changing content. Nowadays the site is even more popular with the search engines because of the vast number of inbound links, in addition to the rich and fresh original content we create.

Our electronic world discovers paper (2003)

We have used direct mail from the very first day of the business in 1993. We put together our "juggler" brochure: a problem-oriented piece that focused on the problems for the buyer (at the time, this was typically the Vice President of Marketing). "Are your product managers too focused on the tactical?" "Do they rely on the sales force for product enhancements?" and so on. We ran the same basic piece for years. But in 2001 we started seeing people drop off the mailing list.

Invariably we have found success by running marketing programs that are the opposite of industry conventional wisdom. When the whole marketing world was eschewing print and putting everything online in .pdf files, we created a glossy print magazine. In a brainstorming session, we decided to create a magazine that wrapped our brochure with the rich content already available on the web site. The early issues focused on specific boxes in the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. Our fourth issue included a revised Framework with descriptions of what had changed and why. Another issue focused on the connections between different activities on the Framework. Each issue combined new content created specifically for it with old articles from the web site.

And a funny thing happened. Where once people called to say, "Stop mailing me your darn brochure," they started requesting to be added to our mailing list for the magazine. People tell us that it's a great piece to throw into the backpack before getting on a plane. The magazine and web site gave us a format for continuing education for folks who had attended one of our seminars. And of course, those who hadn't attended would find good content and say, "Hey, I wonder if these guys do training?"

Today, the contributions from the magazine come not only from Pragmatic Marketing employees, partners, and industry consultants but also from "real people"--people like Stacey Mentzel, who wrote about how she got an extreme programming project under control, and Mark Tiedeman, who described the best practices in product presentations. Now, in 2007, we have 70,000 subscribers and, in an ironic twist, about 2,000 people per month download the PDF version of the magazine!

Expanding into a community (2007)

Oh how the tools have changed since 1997. I started managing the web site using Microsoft FrontPage. All the tech-savvy people I knew just smiled at my innocence. "Real men use Dreamweaver," they seemed to say. Sure FrontPage did some things with webbots and other non-standard approaches but it met my needs just fine.

Then in 2005, we switched to a service provider that required me to change from FrontPage to Dreamweaver. (Okay, really what happened was that I switched to a Mac and FrontPage was not an option). Using FrontPage was pretty much like using Word but with Dreamweaver, you actually have to know HTML. There were some cases where I would create a page in FrontPage, e-mail the HTML to my Mac, and then paste it into Dreamweaver. TABLES! Arrgghh. Server side includes are great but what the heck is unicode? Do I need it or them? Over the next few months I learned more about the innards of the web than I ever cared to know. In the end, I manually edited each page on the web site at least once and often quite a few times.

Now, it is time for another upgrade and we are converting from hand-rolled HTML to a full content management system. Looks like I'll be editing all the pages again unless those server-side includes convert nicely!