April, 2010. Published by Dianna Huff. Volume 10, Number 4. Welcome! Which comes first – Web design (the pretty pictures and colors) or copy? Should the copy influence the design or design influence copy? These are good questions – and the answers really depend on the business and its message. She is wonderful!” Thanks guys! Laura Soussan.

“Does anyone have a template for social media rules and responsibilities for corporate teams?&# is a question posted more than once on the LinkedIn B2B Social Media Group. Inbound and Social Marketing Manager Barbra Gago of Genius.com published a new e-book on this very topic. Leveraging your staff. Sample policies. Rules and responsibilities.

Like many people, I have a computer hard drive crammed with files: documents, audio, video, PowerPoint presentations — you name it, I have it. When it was time to replace my aging PC a couple of months ago, I got price quotes for a blazing fast Windows 7 machine that came with mega huge storage. hate it with a passion.

Had to take my car in for its service this morning and while paying, chatted up the service rep by telling him why I like their waiting room: It’s clean, you get free coffee and it has WiFi. The rep said, “Oh, is the WiFi working today? We get slammed by people when the router is down — people really want it.&#. I asked.

May, 2010. Published by Dianna Huff. Volume 10, Number 5. Welcome! For months now I've been mulling over how social media and the Internet have changed marketing as we know it. find myself asking, "Does everything I do with regard to marketing have to directly result in leads? Enjoy! Regards, Dianna Huff. know I do! It's all rather stifling.

Nancy Lublin, the founder of Dress for Success and the CEO of DoSomething , wrote a thought-provoking article, “ Let’s Hear it for the Little Guys ,&# for the April issue of Fast Company. In it she talks about why we should focus on the followers of visionary thought leaders. “I think we’ve got it all wrong,&# she writes.

I'm a big proponent of marketing measurement and careful analysis, but it's worth a cautionary tale as sometimes measurements can lead one astray. The more finely tuned your messages are to the interests of the buyers, the more they can cause analysis confusion if not approached correctly. The core of great B2B marketing communications is relevance.

I was recently visiting a software firm named Saba in the Bay Area when a marketing vice president asked me a question: “ You can design a lead nurturing campaign to walk someone through a process when you are selling a single product or service. But we have many products and services. “ Glad you asked, Susie. Good question.

Age of Conversation is back.  Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton have again rounded up over 170 marketing experts to take a deep dive (or 171 quick dives) into the changing nature of social media, branding and marketing (of course, content marketing is included as well).   What could be better? You can buy Age of Conversation here now.

I had a small epiphany the other day when someone recommended that one of my clients needed a marketing measurement project. As author of The Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit and a frequent speaker on the topic, I was surprised to find I didn’t like the idea. This got me to thinking. By coincidence – or was it? My analogy is a speedometer.

Social Media is everywhere today. However, if you’re in a B2B market and you want to find prospective clients, Social Media may not be the best way to spend your time and money. There are more cost effective ways to reach B2B buyers online, such as search. What Social Media is Good For. B2B Social Media Users. So Now What? Tweet This!

Lead Generation is thought to be key, to the survival of any B2B Company, a reason why B2B companies across the world, spend billions of precious dollars and resources on finding Leads – they buy, they capture, they generate, they do everything possible to keep their sales funnels’ filled with Leads. What is Lead generation? The opportunity to sell.

Your company website can serve as far more than a marketing and PR vehicle—it should be a genuine sales tool as well. Guest post by Ken Thoreson, recognized sales management thought leader and managing director of the Acumen Management Group Ltd., This exercise is best done in a face-to-face sales call. An Interactive Experience. Digg this!

I recently listened to the founder of the Geek Squad at the Carlson School of Management’s Annual Entrepreneur Dinner, and a quote that is still stuck in my head is this: Advertising is the Toll that your firm pays for not having a memorable experience. At first, I thought this was quite harsh, but as you look into it, he has a point.

Last year, I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. It started with a simple goal: to create a group to discuss and share ideas that focus on the many aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting, social media and more. can’t wait to see what another year will bring.

Are you a B2B marketer that uses Free Trials to try and motivate website visitors to engage? am but it rarely works. First, I think using Free Trials for B2B Lead Generation is a good idea, especially for on-demand software companies, because most people want to try something before they pay for it. Time is money. Effort is lots of money. doubt it.

Summary: Genoo provides a simple Web site, demand generation and social marketing for $199 per month. It’s not the most sophisticated system or the prettiest, but some small businesses may find it's just what they need. Genoo offers a small-business-oriented Web marketing system at a small-business-friendly price of $199 per month. So far so good.

Does your workplace have a social media policy?  Thousands of companies do and you can view some of them here at Social Media Governance.    I picked a few at random – first Ball State University  (since I just came back from a college graduation).  It is three pages long, large type, easy to read, nice bullets.

This chart is taken from the B2B Marketing Skills Survey , a study that examines the challenges facing marketers and how their position is evolving in the enterprise. In this chart you’ll notice that 44% of marketer’s surveyed said their compensation is tied to sales. 44% of Marketer's say Their Compensation is tied to Sales.

I always love it when we look at something we all know, like webinars, and we think we’re experts – we know it all. But then someone shocks us by using a fresh approach to make them vastly better. Jim Burns at Avitage has done this with his blog article, 7 Ways to Take Your Webinars to the Next Level.

Open Enrollment Starts May 12th. We at the Connected Marketer have been eager to announce the Marketing Automation Academy. Its the only free online learning program designed to develop your knowledge of marketing automation through integrated marketing programs that truly make you successful. ??We’ll Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin.

Social Media is arguably one of the hottest topics in marketing today, and every company tries to do at least some Social Media. But does it help with demand generation and lead generation? Social Media. Microblogging (Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn status updates). Generic social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook). Traffic Generation. List Building.

Over the past year or two, we’ve done our share of advocating that B2Bs begin utilizing social media;  and we’ve consistently recommended starting with a company blog, for those who haven’t already done so. So we were plenty dismayed to learn from Jennifer Laycock’s post in Search Engine Guide that the recent mad rush toward social-network [.].

Simple, interactive, and well designed. For all tips, see the Top Tips for Using Social Media presentation or click the image below to start the presentation. Sophos Social Media Security Tips. Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin. Share this on Facebook. Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon. Share this on del.icio.us. Digg this!

Remember when we used to say that “people&# are the power behind the social web? Can we can honestly claim that any more?  The social web has rapidly become just another a mass-marketing channel like TV or magazines, dominated by the mega-brands. Think about the videos going viral these days.  What was the biggest hit of the year?  Mafia Wars.

B2B Marketer Skills Survey. Today we unveiled the results of the first annual B2B Marketer Skills Survey , a study that examines the challenges facing marketers and how their position is evolving in the enterprise. In partnership with BtoB Magazine, we took our questions to our peers and over 500 of you responded. Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin.

April 2010. Five Big Shifts in Social Media Marketing - Webbiquity , April 19, 2010 Social media reflects a larger trend toward buyer empowerment that has changed not only the practice but the underlying philosophies of marketing over the past several years. LinkedIn Adds the Ability to Follow Companies , April 30, 2010.

I caught up with the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project Lee Rainie after his presentation at the University of Minnesota Social Networks Research and Creative Collaborative. Hitting on a single topic in marketing, social media and business communications. Quick and to the point.

Today a lot of B2B companies are opting for  marketing automation solutions. Makes good business sense, why lose out on those possible sales opportunities when you are doing everything possible to drive traffic to your website. But there is a serious problem, with the perception that is associated with using a marketing automation solution.

Ardath Albee is a B2B Marketing Strategist and the CEO of her firm, Marketing Interactions , Inc. She applies over 20 years of business management and marketing experience to help companies with complex sales use eMarketing strategies to generate more and better sales opportunities. Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin. Share this on Facebook.

How-to Build a Socially Armed Team (eBook). Social Team eBook. This short eBook will help point you in the right direction of where to start, what to think about and how to get organized when building a socially armed team. This ebook will walk you through the steps of preparing, planning and team building. Quick Tips: B2B Lead Generation.

Both are winners of the 2009 ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards —the 2010 Awards deadline is June and anyone can enter). Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 1: Design & Development (readwriteweb.com). For marketers considering creating mobile device apps, the bar has been set very high. These are hard acts to follow. Location.

Related Resources Methodology 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour I recently wrote about the 8 critical success factors for lead generation 2.0. The unofficial #9 came into my inbox earlier today – effectiveness. Simply put, make the most of what you have. just got a copy of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal.

As we’ve said here before, we keep posting about email marketing because of its singular importance to our B2B clients …most of whom use it fairly heavily for lead nurturing (if not generation). Say you have 5 or 6 relatively independent things you want to say about a certain topic, that would culminate in a particular [.].

Blog Traffic Made Easy. Great for: Getting started in blogging especially if you plan to set up a WordPress blog. link]. This is one lean, mean ebook! Excuse me, “article.” The author, John Robinson doesn’t like the word “ebook.” John’s personal trick for driving traffic is a great idea I never would have thought of on my own. link]. link]. Read it.

Internet marketing touches on topics far and wide. Many of those topics require a simple explanation.  Often, I’ve found myself saying “I should write down those directions.”. Source code is a valuable source of information in competition research. This quick guide shows you how to view the source code of a web page.  Only took 2 years!).

At the end of November, I hired my lil-bro to burn all my CD’s to a hard drive. He’s really good at this kind of stuff and needed the bucks so it seemed like a good idea. Burning all my CD’s to a hard drive has two benefits: 1) I can make a few bucks selling them after the fact and 2) I won’t have to look at them collecting dust in my living room.

The hardest part of building an online audience is getting in front of new people. Tapping the existing audiences of websites, bloggers and experts is probably the easiest way to get in front of new people. That’s why I’m constantly telling prospects and clients “You need to figure out where your target markets hang out online and be there.” 

Continental Airlines has changed their policy regarding headsets on most planes. Before, you paid $3 for the headset while the programming was free. Most flyers hated buying the headsets. After a while, everyone remembered to bring their own. Continental saw headset revenues plummet. Fast forward to today. Headsets are always free.

Registration is free but due to limited seating pre-registration is required by May 6th 2010.  When: May 7th 2010 8:00am – 6:00pm. Since the birth of e-commerce we have used the famous.com or.net to build billion dollar companies and since the dot com boom and now Web 2.0 there has been a significant investment in branding. Tweet This!

There seems to be a bit of schizophrenia in B2B marketing these days. The excitement and interest in social media, and all it can do, is palpable. However, the number of companies that are making significant hard dollar investments in social media as a marketing initiative is not as large as one might expect. Why is this?

We recently ran across an interesting survey of 500 small business owners nationwide, conducted by Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. Of [.].

As investment in B2B marketing bounces back in 2010, I predict we’ll see a good return to revenue growth. I’m pleased to bring you a series of interviews with thought leaders in B2B Sales and Marketing. This time we interviewed the marketing leader for one of the fastest growing software firms in the world, Marketo. What would they be?

One of the biggest mistakes companies can make is to try and be all things to all people, going after all possible customers out of fear to miss out on revenue opportunities. Among all possible prospects, some companies are a better fit for a vendor's solution and have more to gain by purchasing it than other customers. Check it out

In part 4 of the lead generation checklist, we take a look at a critical component of lead generation efforts: a universal lead definition. This will get sales and marketing on the same page to share a common understanding and treatment of the leads in your funnel.

As you might remember, the first article in the "Reengineering the White Paper" series by The Bloom Group was about how to develop compelling content. Great white papers are not so because the writing is great – they are great because the core ideas are.)

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know how dedicated we are at Junta42 to get consistent, relevant research to help you do your jobs better. So, I'm again asking for your help and need five minutes of your time. Please complete the survey now by going to this link!     Thanks for your help

It’s that time of the year again – MarketingSherpa is sending out a call for speakers for their 7th annual B2B Marketing Summit, which will take place in October in both Boston and San Francisco. Lead nurturing. Lead scoring. International demand generation. to-B email. Paid search advertising and SEO. Content development. Social media marketing.

Ardath Albee is a B2B Marketing Strategist and the CEO of her firm, Marketing Interactions , Inc. She applies over 20 years of business management and marketing experience to help companies with complex sales use eMarketing strategies to generate more and better sales opportunities. Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin. Share this on Facebook.

Along with many other observers, we’ve noted for some time how online vehicles are changing the shape of B2B marketing:  e.g., shifting budgets/spending from traditional to online modes and changing how and when B2Bs engage with their prospects. But according to a dynamite post by Jon Miller over at Marketo, our thinking hasn’t gone nearly far [.].

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced its definitive decision to buy Jigsaw , the business data provider for $142 Million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase-price. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011.

Once someone  has read your email , how do you get them to take action? One technique is personalization. Personalization is not just about mail merge, like inserting the recipients name in the salutation. Who to Send To? Send Personalized Messages. When you start collecting additional information, new personalization options will become possible.

Hire, Train, and Retain Top Talent #4 of 6—Tools for Interviewing. This video blog is designed to improve your success in hiring high performance sales teams. In this video I cover assessments, Interviewing Scorecards, Case Studies, Group Interviews’ and using presentations to validate sales skills. Acumen Management Group Ltd. Acumen Mgmt.

I recently tripped over an intriguing article on Extinction of the Expert by Denise Gershbein, a creative director at frog design. sense an infinite recursion here – are the “experts in different fields” themselves people who integrate other experts, or are they domain experts in the conventional sense? Now, anyone can find it in an hour.

In a recent meeting of the Sales Association, I sat down with the sponsor, Oracle, who told me about an earlier meeting with a large group of VPs of Sales. He said they all suffer from the same problem — a lack of sales-ready leads. In the tough and difficult market of today, that is a very real challenge for businesses. What are they to do?

Yesterday at ad:tech I sat in on an interesting session on “mergers & acquisitions.” Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, an investor in advertising technology start-ups discussed how marketers, publishers and investors are all being affected by this rapidly growing space. But what is engaging content? Gus Tai. Tweet This! Digg this!

Salesforce today announced a definitive agreement to buy Jigsaw, a provider of business information and data services that uniquely leverages crowd-sourcing to build and maintain its database. Note: Jigsaw is also a Marketo customer and partner.). What do you think? How will this acquisition affect your B2B marketing and sales efforts?

These are the so called potential leads. But a website visitor only becomes a qualified Lead when there is enough information available on a visitor’s identity and his intentions. And such information can be found by adopting any of these two methods -. It is the second method which I wish to discuss in this post.

I was worried that all this social media transparency would bring down helpful PR tactics in media relations. Among those tactics, speaking on deep background so as not to be quoted or even described in some way by general title. Hey i’m not knocking the tactic, it is however, used for good and evil. That’s a tricky one.

We just completed our ITSMA survey on social media. ll be reporting some of the major findings here and at ITSMA.com over the coming weeks. But one finding sticks out. Marketing owns social media management. That’s right. It’s our job. 68% of our respondents said yes. Will social become a silo within marketing? Today, we do a lot less of that stuff.

It’s only a few weeks away now, and it’s sure to be one of the best 2010 conferences exclusively focused on B2B Marketing. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to register for MarketingProfs Business-to Business Forum 2010. It’s in Boston on May 3-5. There are more than seventy speakers. 35 individual sessions. Four concurrent [.].

Email is a favored B2B marketing tactic, relied upon by many of our clients.  For that reason, we try to track and pass along the latest expert thinking on the subject …for example, our recent post “7 tips for improving your email marketing effectiveness.”  Given the ever-increasing hazards of overflowing in-boxes and spam filtering, it [.].

If you’ve been hearing about lead nurturing, and you’re still unsure about it, this short presentation should help shed some light. It reviews what lead nurturing is, and some compelling reasons you should be nurturing your leads. Enjoy. Please add any additional thoughts or tips that you’ve found to work well. Tweet This!

Summary: major consumer-oriented marketing automation vendors have all added some type of social media capabilities. But some focus on monitoring conversations while others help marketers send more messages. Be sure you know which you're getting. On Monday, marketing automation vendors SAS and Unica both announced new social media capabilities.

Marketing is a very broad term and includes a lot of different activities and channels, like advertising, PR, Social Media engagements, SEO, SEM, etc.  These activities achieve two objectives for any company – Brand awareness and/or Lead generation.

I’m not a fan of Solution Headlines, like the one for this post, but I know why they work. There are all kinds of headlines. In fact, I think there are more blogs written about blog headlines than most any other topic about blogs. The other countries ahead of us are South Korea, Mexico, and Italy. ROI is to management as a blanket is to Linus.

We’ve blogged before about inbound marketing – “pull” marketing tactics such as search, blog and social media – being the wave of the future in terms of how your B2B’s prospects want to work with you. We’ve also been pretty sure it’s also less expensive… but now there’s proof, according to research data from HubSpot, summarized [.].

In just 30 minutes, 3 white paper downloads. How to Find New Customers What do they know? link].

How’s your company doing in lead generation. Answer just 8 questions and find out. link].

We enjoy a good debate here at The Content Factor, and we're watching one play out on the Demand Gen Report Blog. read more.

Chris Koch wrote an excellent blog post, "There is No Social Media Strategy, Only Marketing Strategy," in which he states: read more.

A year ago, I was a B2B marketing manager in a muddle. had, at my fingertips, some powerful tools to share my company's message with the world. But I had nothing new to say. read more.

Congratulations to client Manhattan Associates for winning an AMY at last night's American Marketing Association awards dinner. The win was for "Zero Dissapointment Retail," Manhattan's unique offering and clever campaign that helps retailers offer a seamless cross-channel (Web, mail, store, call center) shopping experience to their customers.

There’s a chronic disconnect between the motivations of B2B marketers and their prospects. Until marketers fix it, they will contending with their prospects instead of influencing them. Does your marketing organization suffer from this disconnect? To find out, take a look at your marketing plan for the upcoming quarter.

B2B Marketing Directors are particularly busy these days. While the economy shows signs of improving, they are skeptical and cautious. They will believe there's an upturn when their budgets and headcounts go back up. Until then, they are running as fast as they can on the tightest resources. read more.

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator which makes it a success metric.  KPIs are usually set to evaluate the success and progress towards long-term organizational goals. KPIs are frequently used to value hard to measure activities (like social media) or the benefits of value, leadership, engagement or customer service. Social Reach Indicators.

Next week I'll be speaking at Chris Brogan's New Marketing Experience in San Francisco. In a recent post, @chrisbrogan talks about the event: " One thing that’s different with my events than with other events: Every sponsor and exhibitor and speaker is someone we think has something to offer you. We appreciate their voice in our experiences.

Recently had a long chat with the Chief Marketing Officer of a $100MM software firm, who said those very words to me. laudable goal, no doubt. Many CMOs and CEOs say the same thing. Everyone wants to be THE best. But it also caused me to do some deep thinking. If so many have a goal of being world-class, why do so many come up short? CEO for more).

InsideSales , a great company with a handy automated dialer technology, conducted an anonymous contest of 472 Salesforce customers and AppExchange partners to see how promptly and thoroughly these companies followed up on web-based leads. The overall results were sobering. calls or email attempts before they gave up. 29 minutes, and 55 seconds.

Next week I'll be speaking at Chris Brogan's New Marketing Experience in San Francisco. In a recent post, @chrisbrogan talks about the event: " One thing that’s different with my events than with other events: Every sponsor and exhibitor and speaker is someone we think has something to offer you. We appreciate their voice in our experiences.

We are excited to release the eighth installment of the Junta42 Top Content Marketing blogs list. We started with 81 blogs in 2007. For this release, we individually reviewed more than 350 blogs on the basis of content marketing excellence ( click here for an explanation of how we review ). Convince and Convert. Conversation Agent. Web Ink Now.

It’s one thing to rise within a small Midwestern company to international recognition, it’s another to return to the Midwest and create a new dynamic environment for others to thrive. Hotpaper was purchased and O’Brien returned to the Midwest setting up OBI Creative in Omaha.

We’ve blogged several times before on the perception that there’s some sort of forced choice between search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click advertising (PPC) – see for example “Why do I need both SEO and PPC?” – and of course we’ve always debunked the premise, and have urged B2Bs to do both whenever [.].

Just returned from Southview Design Landscape Contractors business partner breakfast. One of the presenters was a fellow named Ronn Lehmann. Ronn is an “outside crackpot&# (some people call them consultants) who specializes in culture. For customers, for suppliers, and also for each other. Things that are critical to sustainability and growth.

Time 21:13. Corporate America is getting comfortable with social media. Not every company, and surely not in every situation, but a year after the spike of Facebook and Twitter, and 18 months after social media contributed to the election of a President, social media is finding a spot in the processes of many Fortune 500 companies.

This short eBook will help point you in the right direction of where to start, what to think about and how to get organized when building a socially armed team. This ebook will walk you through the steps of preparing, planning and team building. It covers the roles and responsibilities, as well as how you should train team members. Tweet This!

Two very important aspects of lead scoring that is often overlooked by most who use this process, is its role in defining the lead nurturing process and developing a more customized lead screening system.

According to Direct Marketing Association, '2007 Response Rate Trends Report - Email produced the highest response rates (4.09%) for those companies whose primary objective was to generate leads. These figures clearly indicate that email.

The Sales and Marketing disconnect is a reason of concern for most B2B companies. These two divisions which need to compliment each other's effort often end up being at logger heads, with each under estimating the efforts of the other.

For an online company, marketing does not end with a detailed campaign management program alone. The real marketing challenge lies in creating content strategies that will ensure readability and sustain interest in the company or product.

Being able to find the intent of a website visitor will act as a boon for B2b companies. Actions can be taken in real-time and will save companies a lot of time and resources Social media revolutionized.

While company to company focus will vary between quality and quantity, the key to maximizing your lead generation pipeline actually lies in striking a healthy balance between both.

About two years ago, we started building an airplane called LeadForce1. We coined the term "LeadForce1" to symbolize our vision of delivering the fastest route to success in online lead generation for B2B focused enterprises. We are finally ready to take the wraps off this beautiful jet today.

The websites have undergone a major change, going beyond the static online brochure of the organization they used to be, they have emerged as a experiential hub for their visitors - with dynamic content and design that focus on the interests of the visitor giving every visitor a very customized experience.

A more informed and evolved customer is slowly changing the way companies market their products - customization and customer centric approach is the future trend. How soon you get across to a customer with the information he is seeking is going to be key to the success of any company and its website.

At the recent IDC Directions 2010 conference - there was a lot of buzz about the Sales and Marketing disconnect in organizations and one of the phrases that caught my attention was - 'Sales is from Mars and Marketing from Venus'. Thinking deeper on this I realized that, maybe the title of John Gray's.

By now, everyone is pretty clear on the importance of keywords to both organic traffic generation and pay per click advertising. 

Inbound marketing is all about getting found, online. Rather than pushing messages out through traditional media outlets, like trade shows, billboards or direct mail, inbound marketing focuses on getting found by customers through social media, blogs and search engines. Inbound is About Getting Found. Why is inbound marketing becoming more popular?

March  2010. Great stuff in the world of B2B Marketing for March 2010.  We’ve hit a new low: The shittiest social media marketing plan ever - grow - Practical Marketing Solutions , March 10, 2010 A local news and media company is getting into the social media consulting business.  March 5, 2010. March 12, 2010.

Okay, there's the rest of today left to Q1 of 2010. I consider my job as CEO to also include the role of CSO, or Chief Sales Officer. work very closely with our sales team and our VP of Marketing to ensure we are an ever improving, world class, Sales & Marketing organization. theme I have been focused on lately has been accountability.