Recently, I was asked by a former ITSMA client to help put together a plan for a thought leadership program for a B2B technology company that sells both products and services. It forced me to think about all the components necessary to build and sustain a thought leadership strategy. Here are my thoughts on the big pieces. Please tell me what I’ve gotten wrong or left out. Research the need. Most people start with strategy. But starting with strategy assumes a need that may not be there. Doing research first allows you to set goals using reliable, objective data. What do you think? MORE >>

Like many, I’m a late convert to Twitter. avoided it for defensive reasons. I’m one of those boring people that eats the same thing for lunch almost every day. So I figured I wouldn’t have much to twitter about. also figured that Twitter would appeal mostly to young people interested in flirting with one another in 140 characters or less. But then I tried it and I realized that the hidden power of Twitter is in another kind of human appetite: learning. Twitter doesn’t just add another one of those annoying Web 2.0 Follow to learn. Think about it. You can just listen. MORE >>

What that means in English is if you subscribed to my blog before November, 2009 you will have to subscribe again at my new site: ([link]. If you subscribed to my blog in November 2009 or later, nothing will change and you don’t have to do anything. Here’s why this sucks. have to shut down the original carcass of my blog at wordpress.com because it has been dead for more than a year now and it’s starting to stink. noticed the other day that it comes up right next to my new website in Google search when you’re looking for my blog. But I hope you will stay. MORE >>

One of the cornerstones of a social media strategy is having a clear set of corporate social media guidelines or policies. The best documents don’t just tell employees what not to do; they also tell them what they should be doing to further the marketing goals of the company. Here are some recommendations based on a cross-section of social media policies from B2B companies, including social media policy examples from some leading B2B companies. Thanks to Kent Huffman for giving me a great starting point for this post): Invite employees into the process. This [Choose. Blog, Space.] Intel. MORE >>

I’ve been working on a report for ITSMA clients this week about analytics and it got me thinking about the proverbial bigger picture of B2B marketing. We know from our research that we in marketing don’t do much with analytics—i.e., using data to determine and predict customer buying patterns. Only 50% of marketers in our survey said they had analytics programs, and of these, few were focused on predicting behavior; most were simply reporting past behavior. Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale. But we need to start doing that. Lead scoring. MORE >>