We just moved from Beverly to closer to downtown Boston into an amazing space in Somerville, MA.   We are sitting right on the Mystic River, 4th floor,  on top of retail shops, a T- Stop etc.  It is great space.

Of course, once we moved in, I had to immediately get my marketing operations center running again. Without it, I felt isolated from what was really going on in my marketing world — the part I couldn’t see in front of me.

What is a marketing operations center?  High volume B2B marketing these days is highly operational.  It is fast paced, it is volume.  You need a control room to monitor what is happening or you risk flying your marketing plane into the ground.   It is easy to do since there are so many parts.  The marketing operations center (MOC), is a place to display the most important information you want in front of the entire team in real time.

In general, it looks to me as though 6 monitors large monitors do the trick.  I try to drive them off one PC for ease of administration.  We use our Northeastern University intern as the MOC administrator.  Six monitors, one PC, lots of video card drivers, and a subscription to LOGMEIN allows anyone from the team to log into the MOC and change things around.

So what do we display?

Well it varies based on time of day and sometimes time of week.  Some screens change more often than others, other screens never change.  But here is a typical line up of what to show on the various screens:

• The home page – yes the home page.  Our team is very empowered to change items and get things done.   They change tiles and banners on the home page all the time.  I personally want to see what is going on there.
• Real time traffic – we use Getclicky to get us real time traffic stats across our sites.  We might have three GetClicky monitors on a single screen. We compare today vs. 7 days ago. This gives you instant visibility is something is running differently today vs. the same time last week.
• Website performance – AlertSite UXM – we monitor the site performance from a user perspective using AlertSite’s global monitoring network to help us detect site issues not only with our stuff, but also the various API integrations like Salesforce, Marketo and others that can break the site.
• Results – googledocs shows us the days results displaying the past several weeks by days.  Its easy to spot something being off if the numbers change dramatically for the same day the prior week.
• Twiiterfall – nice vertical display of tweets – I usually monitor those being sent by us.  The market managers monitor their own spaces.  I want to see how we are engaging.
• Live events – be it a webinar underway or a trade show, we are always trying to stream, stream, stream.  I want to see the live stream and so do other people in the office.
• Monday – weekly metrics – on Monday, we replace the daily metrics screen with weekly metrics so we can see week over week performance
• Special traffic drill downs – for special launches and events, we might fire one monitor up just to watch traffic on that monitor.

The MOC is critical to reminding marketers that they can’t see the world they are influencing, but it is out there.  Live stats help remind everyone of what is really happening.

What does your MOC look like?