Social Media B2B

Every Thursday night or Friday morning I begin looking for several posts from the week that I want to share in a Friday post. I review my Twitter search stream for posts that have been tweeted multiple times, but I also search my RSS reader for posts that provide good content and my come from less popular sources. Unless they publish something groundbreaking, or is exceptionally helpful, there’s no need to share posts from the most popular social media blogs. You should be seeing any relevant content from them already.

But the other layer I add onto this search is a theme. This is my focus that lets me weed through hundreds (thousands?) of posts for five that I like and provide some value to you, our readers. I will admit that I am sometime too picky about minor things, but a well-written post on a relevant topic usually wins. I have had trouble picking posts for this week, as evidenced by the fact that it is Saturday afternoon. And the reason is that I did not have a theme to guide me and keep me focused. Sometimes I have one in mind and sometimes they come to me when I start seeing what people have published in the past week. And this week I came with nothing and nothing appeared to me.

So before we get the posts below, here’s an analogy about social media plans, and the inspiration for the post titile. No matter what aspect of your social media planning you are working on, make sure to have a plan to guide you. Developing a strategy? Do it with your goals in mind. Creating content? Make sure your topics (or themes) are set to keep you focused. And now here are some posts I found. Don’t worry, I already have a theme for next week, and several posts selected on that theme.

Did You Know You’re Competing With Apple?
from Touchpoint Insights
And in the last few years, we’ve seen that the ways customers interact with and think of companies – and the experiences they expect in return – is changing. In some cases, dramatically. Yes, technology is a big piece of this change. But a bigger, interrelated piece is around customer expectations.
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10 Tweetable Lessons in Marketing Analytics and ROI
from Marketo
Recently, I’ve been traveling the country, meeting with over 70 marketing executives to discuss best practices in marketing analytics and measuring and improving marketing ROI. I’ve learned quite a bit in the course of these discussions, and found that the following lessons came up again and again. In the spirit of making them easy to share, I’ve boiled each one down to 140 characters or less.
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Who Uses Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, & MySpace? 4thQ & 1stQ Stats and Analysis
from Social Media Today
The last two quarters have seen some interesting trends in the big four Social Media services. The most obvious is the leveling off of growth of Facebook and Twitter, but of greatest interest is the clarification of who is using the Social Media tools.
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New LinkedIn Plugins for Companies to Use Now
from Tech Affect
LinkedIn has been on a blistering pace in the past year with a bunch of new updates. Recently, the professional networking site did it again, offering a new set of plugins for use by companies. It’s as if they’re preparing for something big.
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It’s Time To Turn Your Social Business Gaze Inward
from Sirius Decisions blog
Organizations work hard to better interact with external constituents such as customers, partners and prospects but they generally spend far less time doing so for the audiences within their walls. Leveraging social media as collaboration and knowledge management tools within the organization is woefully under-utilized but necessary to emphasize dialogue and sharing between staff rather than relying on one-way communications that typify many internal communications channels.
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If you have any thoughts about focus, or recent posts to share, the comments are yours.

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen or on Google+.