Five tips for B2B social media marketing
by Matt Owen (@lexx2099) on Econsultancy
While social media has all the engagement buzz right now, the majority of studies are still dealing strictly with the B2C industry, so much so that there’s a serious question mark over the value of B2Bs utilizing SM streams at all. Of course, LinkedIn has its place, but what do B2B services really need to concentrate on if they want to have a viable social media presence? In no particular order, let’s take a look at the value of social media from a B2B point of view.

My Favorite 6 Social Media Sites for B2B Social Media Marketing
by Neal Schaffer (@NealSchaffer) on Customer Think
While everyone knows that Facebook is the default choice for any business-to-consumer (B2C) social media marketing, what social media channels are important for businesses hoping to engage with other businesses (B2B)? How can these types of businesses use social media to engage with their potential clients, gain mindshare and be perceived as a thought leader in their industry, and increase potential clients visiting their website? Here are the six that I would recommend to most businesses. Note that, in order to create a sound social media strategy, you should not limit yourself to these 6 B2B social media channels and should also make sure that each site is appropriate for your particular industry. Creating a social media strategy is about strategic relevance and focus, not comprehensiveness.

Oh, Yes! Tech Buyers In Germany Are Well Into Social Media
by Peter O’Neil on Forrester Blog
Last week, I held my quarterly Forrester Teleconference and discussed my April report on how European tech buyers use social media. Our B2B Social Technographics data shows that German social media activity is really quite heavy: In some categories, the numbers we report show more aggressive behavior than in the US or other countries. After several client meetings where our data was questioned – especially by more experienced marketing executives who themselves are not using social media and expect the same backwardness from their peers – I am now well equipped with backup data that proves our points. So here is what I told the audience about German social media usage by tech buyers.

B2B Social Media – marketing to the company or the individual?
by James Lawton Hill (@JamesLawtonHill) on Social Media Today
If social media is seen as a way to allow individuals to connect and share information with each other you would think this plays straight into the B2C arena. So how do B2B companies take advantage? Following on from a great discussion on the B2B Marketing LinkedIn group, should B2B marketing be aimed at the company or individuals in that company?

Unpacking Klout: True Measure of Influence?
by Valeria Malitoni (@ConversationAge) on Conversation Agent
Klout is a San Francisco-based company that tracks influencers and their impact, or how the network responds, through opinions, links and recommendations on Twitter, soon to integrate Facebook Connect in its calculations. They define influence as the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link. In other words, the online action possible on that network, which is not really true impact.

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Agree to Pre-Plan
In a continuing effort to maintain a high level of quality content, the organizers of SXSW include the following statement that you must agree to before submitting your proposal.

I understand a significant amount of pre-event planning is required to organize a successful panel or presentation at SXSW. If my proposal is selected, I will be able to commit sufficient time to this pre-event planning process

Imagine if businesses instituted statements like this into the workflow process. When submitting a proposal to clients or your boss, there’s a check box that you mark saying you will plan what you are doing and work hard to make it a success. It seems like that implied contract already exists, or you wouldn’t be in the job, however, simple reminders of the importance of planning would sometimes be helpful.

Know Your Audience
When preparing for a panel presentation it is important to know who you are speaking to and the same is true with social media, and any marketing for that matter. Is your B2B audience on Facebook or are they more active on LinkedIn? You wouldn’t tell a room of executives about the latest social media sites that were announced last week, but you might mention the ones that have been around longer. With so many pockets of customers online, you will achieve a different level of silence online than you would in a room with the wrong material.

Overplan
When planning a presentation is it helpful to do background research on the topic to find the latest studies, statistics and opinions. This is a good idea even if you are well-versed in the topic. While the expectation is that you are speaking or moderating a panel that is in your field, sometimes you wind up speaking on tangentially related topics. Especially in these cases it is better to have too much information ready that you don’t need. Social media plans benefit from overplan. The more background understanding you have, the better off you will be. Gather information about customers, competitors, industry experts and trade publications. This will give you a deeper understanding of the marketplace and how to differentiate your company or client on the social web.

Make Your Content Shine
As a panel moderator, one of the most important things to do is make your panelists shine. The more you prepare yourself and prepare your panelists, the easier it will be for them to speak intelligently about the topic. Of course lots of people can speak without much preparation (having done this myself), a panel runs smooth and you get better information with well-briefed panelists. Think about your social media content the same way. Someone has worked hard creating or curating the content, make sure it is presented or distributed in ways that it can be found or consumed. Put it on the right sites where your customers and prospects are. Make sure your site or blog is readable, by both visitors and search engines. And give readers easy ways to share your great content to make them look good too.

Reward Your Audience
A presentation needs to have good information for the audience. That is what the audience is expecting, but if you exceed those expectations and provide that information in a clearly organized format with practical, actionable items and resources, the audience will be more engaged and feel like their time was well spent. A closing summary with final takeaways is a great way to end a session, as well as a blog post, because people remember the last thing they hear or read much better than the entire experience (see below, wink).

Social Media B2B Takeaway: Spend enough time planning your social media efforts so you know your audience, make your content stand out and reward your customers and prospects with valuable information that they remember.

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Be Creative

At first, not having social media apps or location-based social gaming available for the BlackBerry drove me to read everything I could and absorb as much as possible. Without any available apps, I had to explore creative ways to monitor social media, get involved and stay with the goings-on in the evolving electronic marketing world. Sometimes this meant lugging my laptop to more places than I would have wanted, but you do what you must. In this sense, I learned to not let system limitations hold me back. Instead, I took a deeper look at our organization’s systems and the various social networks we were involved in, and found ways to track our social campaigns and traffic to our sites. I learned to not rely on my mobile device for notifications, and have a much better understanding of our systems, their capabilities, and their shortcomings because of it.

Be Ambitious/Passionate

Here is where the BlackBerry influence may be a little weaker. This is a personal quality or characteristic that I feel is vital to the success of any electronic marketing manager. In an environment this dynamic and ever-evolving if you do not eat, sleep, breathe and live the electronic world you will always be one step behind. I remember the initial struggle I had with social media and Twitter because it was not easily accessible (we are talking November 2007). And that is where as a BlackBerry user you are the 5 foot, 100 pound defensive end trying to walk onto a national powerhouse football team. No one is going to make it easy for you, and your iPhone counterparts will always have a leg up. You must have the heart and drive to go that extra mile to be successful.

Know Your Customer

This is a fundamental key success factor for any marketing professional. We all have such unique demographics of customers that I would never try to generalize any kind of advice on why you can or cannot accurately know your customer because of the platform you use. I will say though, with the ever increasing amount of traffic coming from iPhone and iPad users, can you truly say as a BlackBerry user that you can speak toward the user experience your customers have when they come to your website? How about what your tweets look like on their iPhone Twitter clients? How about Droid? It’s not easy. I have borrowed friends’ iPhones to test new pages or designs on our sites. I’ve even gone as far as driving to Best Buy on my lunch hour to test our site on an iPad.

That being said, my design mentality always has me thinking about design elements and user experiences. What troubles me the most is the environmental influences that lead us to feel more comfortable about one thing over another. We should not only take into account how things render on individual devices, but also how common elements in design lead iPhone users to certain expectations and preferences, while Droid and BlackBerry users may have completely different ones. So, as a BlackBerry user, do I truly know what my mobile users want?

Be Persistent and Persevere

So despite my negative portrayal of the BlackBerry platform and its limitations for electronic marketing managers, there is hope. We all have a network of resources at the tip of our fingers. Get to know the devices in your company. Know that you can walk down the hall and have a user test on this device or on that platform. Know that you can shoot a certain colleague a note to meet over lunch in return for a quick test of that new promotion. Simple. Easy. Cheap. My company president would be proud. Take advantage of features from email service providers that render your email marketing messages in various email clients and on various devices. Make sure your provider has this. It is critical.

Pay attention to your analytics. As a marketer for a high-ticket, once-a-year purchase item for B2B clients, mobile traffic to the sites I manage is sparse. I do, however, know that I expect to see a certain number of iPhone/iPad visits each month and I watch for trends in their traffic. If I see high exits or low site time on a particular page for mobile visitors, I’ll reach out to my networks and test to see if I can determine the problem. Get to know your mobile customers from a distance through analytics and, when combined with some first-hand testing on those various devices, you’ll be in pretty good shape.

Do I believe you can truly be a successful electronic marketing manager as a BlackBerry user…Yes. Do I think it is easy…No!!!

I believe BlackBerry users are highly handicapped by the platform when it comes to truly understanding the electronic marketing environment. We are a minority of the mobile web traffic on the internet and an even smaller minority in the social media world. The lack of apps available for us to fully participate in the social media community is binding and relegates us to outsiders in lots of social media events and conversations If you disagree, try attending an all day social media event and running out of battery with a BlackBerry.

Have you struggled in your marketing position with only a BlackBerry? Let me know in the comments below.

JT Moore is the Electronic Marketing Manager at ASPE, Inc., a national leader in providing skills-based training solutions for the Information Technology, Systems/Software Development Lifecycle, and Financial markets. Follow him on Twitter at @j_t_moore.

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Facetime Video Conferencing
This is the feature that everyone is talking about on the new iPhone4 and mobile video conferencing, called Facetime, even though it’s just over wifi, is a great feature. Also both parties need the iPhone 4 for this work. Video call your office from a client site and don’t just talk, but show your face. Switch to the back camera and show your product engineer how the client is using your product and the service issues they are experiencing. Share printed documents or photos in real time while you talk about them. And communicating with your office with your face, and not just your voice, is a stronger way to get your message across.

Mobile Video Editing
Another benefit of the iPhone 4 is the continued expansion of mobile video. Not only are the quality and features of video better than the previous generation of iPhone, but it includes a mobile version of iMovie, Apple’s easy to use video editing software. Now those short trade show videos and customer testimonials can be edited and uploaded before you even return to the office.

Better Organization
Rather than a random display of apps (or chronological or alphabetical), the new iPhone 4 allows you to organize apps in folders. These can be organized by topic, or can be customized. You can put your business or productivity apps together and keep your games or other leisure apps in another folder. You can also keep all your social media tools together for easy access.

Multi-tasking
This is one of those updates that is a long time coming in the operating system, but helpful for the marketer on the go. Switch between tasks easily and the apps remember your place, whether it’s viewing documents while writing emails, or checking your CRM system, while updating Twitter and listening to your favorite station on Pandora.

What are the features of the new iPhone 4 that would make you consider getting one?

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As consumers and companies are searching for a B2B solution, a majority of their research is done online. They search Google, read blogs, reviews and interact with their online network looking for the information they need. As B2B businesses, our job is to a) be found when they are looking and b) provide information that lowers their risk and addresses their pain-points so they realize they should do business with us.

As the social media revolution charges on, here are four major points on how all of this has changed how we market our businesses.

Re-learning how we do things and have always done things – Social media has taught us how to question the way many of us have marketed ourselves in the past. Social media provides almost instant feedback to our content. We can hear firsthand what things people relate to and what things they do not. We can assess this data and react to it.

Marketing can be done effectively from inside an organization – With advances in technology and the way people communicate, we as businesses have regained some control over our own marketing. Marketing no longer means a perfect brochure, a polished press release, static website or an outsourced television spot. Marketing means interacting in real time with your network online with your blog, posts, updates, tweets, eBooks, podcasts, online videos and more. All of which can be produced in-house if you have the appropriate skills and tools.

With power comes risk – With regaining power over our own marketing comes more risk and responsibility. If your business is going to take over a good portion of its marketing, you need to be prepared for this changing landscape. If you are depending on more online marketing with your company blog, Twitter account or Facebook page, then you need to carefully consider all of the content, comments and reactions to that content. If your employees are going to help you market your business with social media, you need to lower your risk by properly educating them on how you want these tools used and the risks associated with them. This education could be done in conversation, with social media seminars and workshops, or a full review of your companies’ policy on social media use.

Education and Customer Service is Marketing – Marketing comes in many different forms. As we discussed above, it isn’t so much a polished message but it can be lots of different things. Marketing can now be more about educating potential customers or using social media for customer service than about the carefully crafted message. Listening and responding to users needs is much more powerful than the best crafted marketing message.

These points are just scratching the surface on what social media and social technology has done for B2B marketing. I think as the social media landscape matures, we will see even more advances in how we market our companies, show return for our online efforts and help us connect with new potential customers. What other fundamental changes have you seen in your marketing landscape due to the new ways your customers are looking for information?

Amanda O’Brien is VP of Marketing at Hall Web Services, one of Maine’s largest web development firms. Follow her on Twitter at @amanda_pants

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The good thing about the short URL in the printed piece was that second part, after the service name, was customized with a company abbreviation. This is a good bit of branding, and makes it easier for customers to type in the URL, since this appears on a printed piece. The bad part of the short URL was that they used tinyURL. This was one of the original short URL services and all it does is create a re-direct. As new services were developed, they added more features, most notably, click tracking. This important metric shows the number of times a link was clicked. Services like bit.ly also display all tweets that included any short URL linking to the post or page and the time of the clicks. The number of tweets, or retweets, is another metric worth tracking if you are trying to get readers to share your content. It helps you understand what content gets shared the most.

Since metrics tools measure in different ways and have their own idiosyncrasies, it is good to have multiple sources for the same information. When you compare clicks from your short URL program to page views in Google Analytics, for example, the number of clicks is always higher. There are a variety of reasons for this on both sides of the equation. Sometimes clicks from Twitter clients are counted because the program opens the short URL and shows the full URL, even though the user did not click on it. And Google Analytics only counts views from browsers with javascript running. There are other reasons Google Analytics numbers are usually lower than other sources.

Here are more short URL tools, including ones that do more things, but include URL shortening as a feature.

So in the end, if you are using a short URL service, whether in print or on the web, make sure you use one that tracks clicks or other relevant data, because otherwise you are wasting an opportunity to better measure your results.

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Social Media: Transforming Company Culture
(from @merylkevans)
Effective business-to-business (B2B) social media is not just the latest “pretty face” in public relations (PR). It’s also transformational technology with the potential to help company departments work better together — operating in a united yet decentralized environment. Social media provides each area of the company with the power to interact with the outside world.

A Problem Affecting Twitter’s B2B Marketing Adoption (It Ain’t Easy)
(from @b2bbloggers)
Over the past couple of months as we’ve been working with clients at Make Good Media, we noticed a social media trend I thought I would share. It has to do with Twitter. As an active, daily user of Twitter, it is fairly easy to overlook this trend. But repeatedly, we’ve heard the following, “At first, Twitter is really hard to understand, quite confusing, and frankly I don’t get it.” Some have even gone so far as to say, “I’m ready to give up.”
Note: This is the beginning of a Twitter series and they are asking for feedback. If you have specific questions or issues surrounding the use of Twitter for B2B, leave them in the comments on their post.

B2B Social Media – Are we really making a connection?
(from Joan Damico @copywriter4u)
More B2B companies are tweeting, blogging and posting news, but I’m curious… are we really communicating or are we still using a bullhorn disguised as social media?

More Reasons to Like Posterous, especially in a B2B setting
(from Kate Brodock @just_kate)
I recently wrote about using Posterous as a tool for social media marketing, and I wanted to take some time to comment on why it’s a great tool specifically for the B2B space. Three of the nine reasons I had given really stand out to me.

Bonus List
Here’s a resource to find more B2B blogs that you can ever imagine existed. Thanks to Galen De Young at Proteus Marketing (and their interns) for compiling this list of 231 blogs: The Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs. You are sure to find some interesting blogs to add to your feed reader. You are using a feed reader, right?

Let us know in the comments if you have been inspired by other recent posts about B2B social media.

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As this blog post points out, the two segments have different cultures, mindsets and compensation structures. Although sales staff may not understand the ins and outs of marketing strategies, timelines and budgets, they were at least familiar with more traditional approaches such as public relations, customer service and advertising, and understood these methods have proven returns for their overall sales goals.

As B2B communicators begin to use social media to support lead generation, it’s important to provide tangible measurements and examples of how sites such as Facebook, company and industry blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn can build new customer relationships, foster existing connections and, ultimately, move product out the door.

Here are four ways to begin to bridge the gap between B2B social media and B2B sales teams:

1. Create regular social media updates

Your sales force is constantly seeking information about new prospects, market news and sales forecasts, leaving little time to catch up on the latest social media news, scan competitors’ blogs or do a Twitter search on an upcoming tradeshow. A regular newsflash – sent weekly or monthly – can keep the sales team up to speed on general and industry social media news and up to date on internal and competitor updates.

Not sure what to include? Recap breaking social media news from the previous week (such as Twitter Ads or Facebook’s new “Like” feature) that could impact internal social media efforts; round-up blog posts from industry thought leaders; link to transcripts of applicable Twitter chats; point out changes and updates to competitors’ social media sites; highlight a post on the company blog that received more attention than usual; and suggest new blogs and Twitter accounts that could help the team learn more about sales, the industry or social media in general.

2. Leverage existing communication tools

If your PR staff is doing its job, your sales team has discovered communication tools that pull double-duty by satisfying brand awareness and supporting lead generation at the same time. Perhaps you’re already sending out a quarterly e-newsletter to influencers, providing special offers to new customers or hosting a monthly networking event for industry members to meet and mingle, and the sales team has seen measurable results.

Find ways to integrate social media efforts into the communication tactics your sales team has already bought into: In the e-newsletter, drive readers back to your blog for more information on a new product. Post those special offers on Twitter and Facebook. Record and tag videos and photos from networking events on Flickr and YouTube, which provides another touch point for sales to reach out to potential customers.

3. Track leads that come from social media

Your B2B sales staff is already tracking the source leads in your CRM system. The sophistication of this system depends on the size of your company, but it is still important to know whether leads are from your Web site, tradeshows, advertisements, referrals or press releases. Similarly, it’s also important to track when leads stem from social media efforts.

Make sure your organization’s sales team can note when a lead comes in from the company blog, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Close the loop by routing this information back to the PR and marketing team, especially if those leads result in sales, so the data can inform future social media efforts. It may sound simple, but this small step will begin to show B2B salespeople the sales impact of social media.

4. Provide monthly analytics reports to sales team

Just like B2B social media pros use weekly and monthly analytics to measure sentiment and create content strategies, salespeople have specific numbers and measurements that will help shape their own goals.

Find out what information would be helpful to them. Do they want to see blog visitors broken down by location? Would knowing the ages of Facebook fans help them better target their B2B sales efforts? What page within the website receives the most traffic from Twitter, and should it be beefed up with a lead generation form? Knowing the measurements your B2B sales team is interested in will help you provide them with more targeted numbers.

What techniques have helped you communicate social media’s value to your salespeople?

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B2B companies now have the ability to purchase Twitter search terms to gain more visibility for their tweets. It appears that only existing tweets can be promoted, and Twitter states that if those Promoted Tweets do not resonate with users, that is if people don’t click or retweet, the tweets will be removed. So this is like Google Ad Words for Twitter Search, but with the company trying to encourage the community aspect of the site and ensure their advertisers are providing value. This first roll-out features tweets from a handful of companies like Starbucks and Best Buy, so we can see the Promoted Tweets in action, but we do not have access to the back end to learn more about the process of placing them.

Here are some suggestions for things that marketers can now on Twitter once Promoted Tweets are opened up to any business.

1. Gain More Impressions
Most tweets have a short lifespan. They are seen by your followers who happen to be checking Twitter when your tweet comes through. And that is a smaller percentage than you may realize. Using hashtags and @mentions to specific followers will raise the number of people who are exposed to your tweet. By purchasing certain keywords, your tweet is exposed to more people than would otherwise see it, including people who don’t even follow you or your conversations.

2. Expand the Reach of Your Keywords
One of the keys to marketing on the web, and one of the big benefits of social media, is the use of keywords to drive traffic back to your targeted sites. By purchasing those keywords and associating them with Promoted Tweets that include links back to your site, you expand the reach of your keywords through Twitter search.

3. Test Your Tweets
Since Twitter has said that Promoted Tweets must resonate with users, this will allow marketers to test tweets to determine that resonance. This is similar to testing different ads in Google Ad Words. The only difference is that Twitter has said they will remove non-resonating ads, while Google will continue to take your money if people click on them.

4. Sponsor Hashtags
Hashtags are used on Twitter to connect conversations across topics and events. While you can add the relevant hashtags to your tweets to become part of the conversation, if you buy the hashtags for your Promoted Tweets, that puts your tweets in front of more people searching for those terms. Until Twitter reveals the back end of this system or releases some rules, I don’t know if this is possible. There may be certain terms that are blocked from use, like Twitter or tweet. These sorts of things will determine whether Twitter remains an open system, or moves more towards a closed system.

5. Increase Speed of Message
Depending on the responsiveness of the Promoted Tweets system, you can broadcast a message quickly to both your followers and to those searching for the purchased keywords. Expanding reach is one thing, but being able to make an impact quickly is even better.

Like so many things in social media, this is rolling out in phases. Depending on what the response to Promoted Tweets is, Twitter has suggested that this system will push sponsored tweets to users’ tweet streams, as well as third party applications. It will be interesting to see how that system gets implemented and continues to leverage keyword search.

Have you thought about how you will use Promoted Tweets for your B2B company?

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What does Google want to do?
It wants to return the most relevant search results to every person. While previous Google search algorithms were based on things like the popularity of a page, as determined by its page rank, or the number incoming links a page had, Google’s more recent determination of relevance takes a person’s web surfing history much more into account.

What is the point of creating blog content and distributing it out across the social web?
The point is to provide relevant and valuable content to your prospects and customers through your social profiles to drive them back to your blog or web site. This means that a social media presence creates visits to your site.

Now here comes the chocolate and peanut butter part of the post.
Because your prospects and customers visited your company website, Google now sees the site as relevant, and is more likely to include the site in search results. So when they begin the purchasing process for your products or services, you can see what will happen, especially since more than 80% of B2B purchasing begins with search. Your prospects enter in their search terms and your site comes up as a top result, because Google views it as relevant to that person.

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?

By the way, there is a candy called Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that in its advertising used to show someone eating chocolate and someone eating peanut butter, and they always managed to bump into each other getting peanut butter on the chocolate, or getting chocolate in the peanut butter, depending on your perspective. And it turned out that they were better together than on their own. Let me know if you think I stretched the analogy too far.

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