The Chocolate and Peanut Butter of B2B Social Media and Search There has been lots of discussion around B2B social media as a means to build brand awareness. This awareness translates into leads, or sales, by keeping the company’s brand in your mind so that when you make purchase recommendations or decisions, the company comes to mind. This level of brand awareness is not built overnight. What does Google want to do? What is the point of creating blog content and distributing it out across the social web? Now here comes the chocolate and peanut butter part of the post. This means your prospects don’t have to remember the name of your company because Google does it for them. Have you created a social web content strategy that drives traffic back to your site so Google can view your site as relevant to your prospects?
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI | CloudAve You may be familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s a theory Abraham Maslow proposed in 1943, that provides a pecking order of human needs. At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs: breathing, food water, etc. The theory’s structure of moving from tangible/tactical needs to those that are intangible and more impactful is actually well suited for another purpose. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI The decision to purchase an enterprise software application is one that generally demands a variety of different views about benefits. Working our way from the bottom up… Cost Savings Saving money is one of the easier ways for an enterprise decision-maker to justify an investment. Saving money occurs in multiple ways when it comes to software. Another event for store managers focused on cutting costs and improving customer service. You’ve covered the lowest level ROI needs with this one, the benefit that is easiest to see and measure. Revenue Generation Happy customers.
Study: Most Effective B2B Social Media Tactics are IT ‘Lite’ Guest post by Ben Hanna, VP of Marketing for Business.com, the Web’s leading portal for business owners. According to a new study involving more than 1,700 small business leaders, companies marketing to small businesses would be well advised to focus on social media tactics requiring little IT investment, such as webinars, podcasts and establishing a presence on top social networking sites, before pursuing more IT resource intensive initiatives such as creating a company-managed online community. The study, conducted by Business.com, finds that that four of the top five most effective social media tactics for engaging small business decision makers do not require significant IT investment or involvement. The exception – company blogs – should be backed by both a strategic content strategy and the resources necessary to create this content on an ongoing basis before it allocating IT resources to blog creation or management. Photo credit: p_kirn
Social Media Toolkit The barrier for getting started with social media is low, it’s dependent on your involvement level, objectives and goals. The facilitators of the message, our tools, are the key components that make it all work. They are the tools in our digital toolkit that every strategist, marketer and PR professional should already be learning and using. The sole purpose of these tools are to; create, manage and distribute content, build awareness, drive traffic, connect with our customers and hopefully turn a lead into a prospective sale. Tools for your social media toolkit can be broken down into the following categories: Your Black Box – The flight data recorder for the Web The default tool in any toolbox always starts with Analytics. Listening: monitoring the social web and beyond If you’re a PR professional or marketer who uses social media for marketing purposes, you need to be able to listen and monitor your surroundings for conversations about your clients and their respective brands.
10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers This series is supported by the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, where you'll learn the ins-and-outs of social media as part of your overall B2B marketing mix. Register today! Like anything else, social media marketing is easier, more efficient and more effective if the marketer has the right set of tools. While hundreds (if not thousands) of tools and services exist for social media marketing, many are still primarily aimed at either consumers or B2C marketers. Fear not B2B marketers — there are still plenty of great tools out there than can best address the unique needs of the B2B space. We've raided our own toolkits to come up with some of the best tools and services for B2B marketers that want to get the most out of social media. 1. The mac daddy of web-based CRM products hasn't been afraid to embrace social media. One of the best applications for B2B marketers who use Salesforce.com is Salesforce for Twitter. 2. 3. 4. [Disclosure: Syncapse is a Mashable sponsor] 5. 6. 7. 8. truPULSE 9. 10.
Real Time Search & SEO for Your Online Marketing Mix - Onlin Since late 2009 when Google introduced real time search, the concept has gained a lot of attention. Today, real time search is at the top of the priority lists for all the major search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo!. As part of the new technology, Google is combining live updates from sites like Twitter with the latest news headlines and blog posts in search results. For web searchers, real time search means the ability to discover breaking news the minute it’s happening. For marketers, it presents a whole host of opportunities to increase online visibility. 1. With real time search, frequently publishing online content becomes a must. Tweets and Facebook fan page updates: Micro content from social sites now has the ability to appear in search results. 2. Creating a core group of brand advocates is important for a number of reasons. Now add one more benefit to the list: Brand advocates – particularly authoritative ones – can link to your content to help keep in the real time stream. 3.
7 Online Video Tips Every B2B Marketer Should Know Making and distributing good B2B video content takes time. It isn’t a quick process to arrange a video shoot, edit video and then upload it to the social web. This work though can come with a substantial pay-off if as a B2B company you understand how to do the little things to maximize the effectiveness of online video. When it comes to online video several issues exist. Search engines don’t index the content of video well. – This first tip is so simple but so many businesses don’t do it. – This is a tactic that may add a little more time to getting your video published, but is completely worth it. – People have short attention spans when it comes to the web. – More than 90 percent of the videos watched online are watched on YouTube. – Uploading online video, especially if it is high quality or HD, takes a significant amount of time. – Being interesting on video is not as much about knowledge as it is tone and personality. Do you have other B2B video tips?
9 Tools to Help Live-Stream Your Newsroom “We’d like to write blog posts, but don’t have time.” That’s the oft-heard lament in newsrooms. More and more traditional journalists recognize the benefits of blogging and social media, but many just can’t figure out how to add them to their existing workload. I have a solution that seems to work in our newsroom. So now, for example, brainstorming can be done with a wiki-like tool, and notes from a meeting or background research can become a blog post. I call this approach “live-streaming the newsroom.” Below is an overview of the tools we used and discussed during the workshop. Tools for (Almost) Instantaneous Blogging Mindmaps In preparing the project, I published a MindMeister mindmap that charted out various social media tools. Mindset All the above mentioned tools only become game changers in the newsroom if journalists stop thinking that they should only publish a nearly perfect, finished product. How do you integrate social media into the workflow of the newsroom? Related
B2B social media spend to increase to $4.8 billion by 2014 | Social media agency London | FreshNetworks blog According to a recent report by emarketer, business-to-business (B2B) spending on social media is set to increase dramatically over the next few years. Outsell, a company who provides business intelligence for publishers and information providers, estimates that B2B marketing on social networks will grow by 43.3% in 2010. Perhaps even more interesting is Forrester Research’s prediction that B2B firms will spend $4.8 billion on social media marketing by 2014 – an increase of $2.3 billion in comparison to 2009 spend. Emarketer’s Evelyn Jung, author of a new report called “B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up”, believes that B2B marketers will realise they can use social media to generate quality leads and to position themselves as thought leaders in their industries. Currently B2B marketers tend to spend their money on customer communities, podcasts and blogs.
Army sees benefits in social-media presence -- Government Comput Army sees benefits in social-media presence Online social-networking tools play role in Army's communications strategy Social-networking tools are playing an increasingly important part of the U.S. Army’s strategy for communicating with the public, despite the inherent security risks, according to Lt. Those security risks continue to be the subject of considerable debate within the Defense Department, but the U.S. Chief among them, Arata said, is the ability to project a presence on social-networking sites and “provide the official Army voice,” he said. Arata, who spoke about the use of Web 2.0 tools in government at the 2009 American Council of Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s Executive Leadership Conference Monday, said as many as 500 people were speaking on behalf of the Army on various social-networking sites. “We need to be out there,” he said. However, he cautioned, it’s important for agencies to have a clear social-media strategy.
12 Ways to Leverage Your LinkedIn Profile for a B2B Company LinkedIn is considered by many to be the professional social network, but since it is based around people and their individual profiles, many don’t realize the benefit their B2B company can get with a well-crafted, active personal profile. Users can develop and strengthen business relationships, receive industry information, demonstrate thought leadership and improve search results for their company website and blogs. The following points below can help you transform your profile into one that supports your company’s online marketing efforts. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. In addition to discussion topics, people post and comment on news articles and blog posts (maybe even this one). 12.
Be Your Own Guru Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson I spent the better part of the first 40-years of my life looking for a guru, that person who would just blow me away with her or his prescience, kindness, compassion, vision and guidance. The one who would give me the answers. Who would tell me what to do to get to that place where I finally felt like I had “made it.” So many others I knew had found one and their lives seemed so much better, more directed and purposeful for it, but that never happened to me. I would attend lectures, teachings, seminars, trainings and retreats and, inevitably, end up leaving early because some combination of information, integrity, pace or delivery did not resonate. It finally dawned upon me… The person I was looking for was the one I would need to become. That’s not to say I don’t seek out teachers and desire to learn. Because, in the end, no one else can stand in my shoes. Like Helen Keller said,
11 Documents To Get Your Business Started In B2B Social Media When we think of the social web and media sharing, we often think of sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr. However, a diverse group of sites have formed around almost all media types to help people share and store what they have created online. Two of my favorite services that often fly under the radar are Scribd and Docstoc. In the way that YouTube helps people share videos, these two services help people and businesses share documents. If you are about to draft a new type of document both of these services can be very helpful to show examples of how other individuals and organizations have done it. For today’s post, I have pulled a wide variety of documents that could be helpful to B2B companies getting started with social media. 1. 3. 4. 5. 6. 8. 9. 5 Social Media Marketing Best Practices for B2B 5 Social Media Marketing Best Practices for B2B – 10. 4 Factors To Assess When Planning Your B2B Social Media StrategyFour factors to assess when planning your B2B social – 11.
Top 10 Hurdles to Becoming a B2B Thought Leader…and the Secrets As I write this post, there are over 280 people who claim to be “thought leaders” in their Twitter biography. It’s certainly a popular label, but I’m pretty certain they haven’t all earned the title. Why? In the 20 years I’ve spent helping clients develop content, I’ve noticed a critical (though perhaps blindingly obvious) fact. It’s pretty hard to become a thought leader. The hurdles include: But you can jump over these hurdles. Have you encountered another hurdle for this list? To reach Elizabeth: