Q: Can you tell us your plans with XylemeWords, your newly designed customer newsletter we see here?

Building relationships and establishing ongoing communication with our customer & prospect base is really important to us. We now have a very sizable subscriber list for our quarterly newsletter and we feel obliged to provide our readers with both fresh and useful information.

You know, on average, we all receive anywhere between 5 and 10 newsletters per week. So, we do understand that we have to compete for attention. What we want to do with our redesign of XylemeWords is to make it easy for our readers to navigate through the newsletter and get the main points in less than 1 min. Then, our readers can choose to dive deeper for those pieces that present the most interest or relevance to them.

Q: We see you have introduced a number of social media marketing initiatives recently; how successful have these initiatives been?

Yes, and I cannot hide the fact that we are extremely excited about these initiatives. But let me say that social media programs take time to build momentum, so we can not be in a hurry. We do a lot of listening and very selective talking where we think we can truly add value to the learning community. And, very importantly, we have put in place extremely sophisticated mechanisms to track these programs and measure their effectiveness in our marketing plan overall. You can’t just put a blog out there and say “I’m Web 2.0 enabled.”

For example, Xyleme Voices, our podcast library, was an initiative that literally took off from the get go. I mean we were confident that the industry experts we had approached to participate would create great value to our audience via a short and concise podcast format. And we did plan this format very carefully, so that in a podcast session that averages 10 minutes, there is not only a great depth of information presented, but also the opportunity to provoke individual thinking past what the presenter has to say. And then in a matter of weeks we started getting hundreds of downloads every week and extremely positive online comments from our audience. So this was something that went way beyond our expectations. Our challenge now is to find a way to constructively add a level of interactivity to our podcast library without diluting the value of each session.

Q: That’s interesting. So, in your view, what are the biggest challenges in marketing emerging technology products today?

Firms are relying more on marketing (especially online marketing) not only to educate the marketplace but also to generate new leads, which is a departure from the traditional sales model approach. We also experience a new sense of accountability in our marketing efforts. As the marketing to sales spend ratio changes, companies understandably want to maximize the ROI of their marketing dollars. So, we are always asked to do more with much greater scrutiny on cost, and to play side-by-side with the sales team. And, you know, I think that’s fair. Marketing is indeed a strategic function and has a direct impact on the company’s top line, not only the bottom line.

Q: One last question. What are your key goals for Xyleme in 2008 and beyond?

We had set up a very ambitious marketing plan for 2008 and, so far, it seems to have been successful. We are working really hard and I can say that we are gearing up for some great announcements in the last half of the year and the whole company is getting ready for these. You know Xyleme has been the leader in XML-base learning content management technology and we have clearly been at the forefront of the industry, most recently with our Reusability 2.0 initiatives. I can’t disclose much right now, but there’s a lot more to come in 2008 for Xyleme. So, stay tuned with us.

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