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"This article was written by Elana Varon, and a version of it originally appeared on the Adobe-owned site CMO.com. For more information about BrandSpeak, click here.\nAgile management methods, experts say, provide a framework for making better decisions and improving overall productivity.\n\"One focus of agility is understanding the relative value of the initiatives you want to work on and prioritizing them,\" said Barre Hardy, senior director with marketing consultancy CMG Partners. \"A lot of companies are not great at doing that today.\"\nBut there's potential for big improvements to how CMOs manage marketing initiatives, if the results from software development, where the methodology originated, are any guide. A survey by VersionOne of IT organizations that use agile methods found 90% of respondents improved their ability to manage changing priorities, 85% increased productivity, and 84% improved project visibility as well as team morale. (VersionOne sells tools used for agile software development.)\nCMO.com talked to marketers at three companies in different industries about their paths to greater agility. Here's what they said.\n1. Carsurfing\n\n\nWhat the company does: The startup offers an app for finding rides to and from events, such as concerts. People offering or seeking rides enter information about the event they're going to and other relevant details. Carsurfing matches them and helps them make arrangements. Integration with Facebook, so that people can see which events their friends are attending and use the Carsurfing platform to coordinate transportation, is a key feature.\nWhy agile marketing is important: Agile marketing is part of the product development process, said Ben Watson, CMO with marketing software vendor WhatsNexx, who is advising Carsurfing and several other startups.\n\"We're combining marketing, technology, and the creative process into one set of iterations,\" Watson says. \"We're building the look and feel of the website, the customer journey, [and] our knowledge of persona into the product design and content at the same time.\"\nHow the company does agile: Last year, as developers were importing events listed on Facebook into the Carsurfing platform, they noticed a spike in connections related to Burning Man, an annual art festival in Nevada.\n\"We dropped everything and focused on getting people connected on Facebook so they could find their way to Burning Man,\" Watson said. They built a dedicated landing page for Facebook users going to the event. \"In a couple of weeks, we helped to arrange 800 rides on a platform that was barely alpha.\" Carsurfing was able to validate its technology, its ideas about how consumers would use it, and the user interface, simultaneously.\nThe takeaway: Agile marketing is a big change from the traditional marketing approach to a product launch. There's no \"big unveil\" after months of development, Watson said.\nBut by incorporating feedback during the development process, a product is more likely to meet customer expectations, and the marketing is more likely to hit its mark. Thanks to the Internet, \"You can put something in the market and know fairly instantaneously whether it's working or not,\" CMG Partners\u2019 Hardy said, \"and you can test concepts before you go out and spend big dollars on advertising.\"\n2. Teradata Applications\n\n\nWhat the company does: The division of Teradata (formerly Aprimo) sells software to support marketing, including operations management, campaign management and analytics tools.\nWhy agile marketing is important: Like many marketers, CMO Lisa Arthur views agile marketing as synonymous with getting faster and more responsive. She is streamlining processes so her team can respond more quickly to business and customer needs, including tactical activities such as issuing press releases or managing an event.\nHow the company does agile: \"We're in the early phase of adoption because of organizational changes we're still driving,\" Arthur said. One area she has emphasized is to improve communication during a project. Another is to use data more effectively to quickly develop and execute \"microcampaigns\" and interact with customers.\n\"We know from our data that third-party reports can be some of the best information to produce a follow-on conversation,\" she said. Earlier this year, when Teradata Applications secured a leading place in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, an annual ranking of IT vendors and competitors within various market niches, Arthur wanted to be first with the announcement. \"We had a benchmark that we had been slow,\u201D she said.\nGetting ahead of the competition required coordination with Gartner, which produces the research, as well as internal collaboration to create a landing page for the report, write the announcement email, identify who should receive it, and make sure every element was approved.\nArthur and her team automated the workflow and approval process. But they also made sure to define who within Teradata Applications and at Gartner had to be involved and when. \"We improved communication within the expanded ecosystem,\" she said.\nThe takeaway: Improving the agility of the marketing team doesn't always mean using formal agile practices, Hardy said. When CMG Partners interviewed several dozen marketers recently, it found few companies were using agile management methods. But they did say they were taking steps to be more customer-centric, to become more efficient, and to use data more effectively in order to execute projects faster.\n\"Shortening time to insight has been really critical,\" Arthur said. \"How quickly can you synthesize data and take action on it?\"\n3. CafePress\n\n\nWhat the company does: CafePress sells themed gifts and provides custom-design services for people who want to create their own merchandise. Many of the products CafePress sells are related to popular culture and current events. These include items with licensed designs, such as \"Mad Men\" mugs. But most designs are customer-generated. Dozens, for example, riff on the \"Keep Calm\" Internet meme.\nWhy agile marketing important: CafePress wants to engage consumers in conversation and collaborate with them in real-time as they upload their designs. \"When consumers say I need to buy a gift for a friend or a T-shirt to wear to the Star Trek premiere, we want them to come to us first,\" says Jason Falls, CafePress\u2019 vice president for digital strategy. Top search terms on the site early this month included \"Class of 2013\" and \"zombies,\" while \"Hillary 2016\" was popular among people looking for political-themed items. \"Where we can see there are designs around a given topic, we can put those at the forefront of our website\" or use social channels to promote them, Falls says.\nHow the company does agile: Falls joined CafePress last December to build a social media presence for the company. \"I wouldn't say we're doing 'agile' consciously,\" he said. But interacting with consumers in social spaces requires speed and flexibility.\nSo far, like Teradata\u2019s Arthur, Falls has taken steps to improve internal communication. He's also investing in customer service; the company recently assigned a dedicated representative to handle questions or complaints it gets through social channels. \"We've gotten really good at the reactive stuff,\" he said. \"I don't think we've gotten into a sweet spot of having a lot of proactive agile marketing.\"\nOne key to marketing agility, Falls said, is a closer relationship with company lawyers. The legal team needs to be an active participant in marketing decisions. Marketers \"need to know what they can and cannot say,\" he adds. \"But you can't afford a 24-hour legal team response. I think I've done a good job relating why we need a less-than-20-minute turnaround on things.\"\nThe takeaway: You need cross-functional teams or, at least, close collaboration across marketing \u2014 and business \u2014 functions. \"Being truly agile really does require a lot of people's work to come together at one point in time,\" Watson said.\n\"I've never run into a member of a legal team that has resisted something,\" said Falls, who has been a consultant to companies on their social media strategies.\nNevertheless, WhatsNexx\u2019s Watson said, marketers are generally uncomfortable with formal agile methods because the emphasis on collaboration and constant iteration changes how individuals are recognized. \"The advantage of traditional waterfall phases,\" where projects are completed in discrete steps, \"is that they come with a pat on the back.\" Management, Watson added, must find ways \"to recognize people based on their contributions to broader goals, but do it in a way that enforces agility as a desired behavior.\"\nDoes your company utilize agile marketing? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.\nMashable composite: Images via of iStockphoto, PeskyMonkey "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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