Chris Koch

DECEMBER 29, 2009

Honestly, why do we think that sophisticated B2B buyers are going to follow our brands on Twitter or become our fans on Facebook? That would seem enough to end the debate about B2B social media participation right there. Actually, B2B buyers would probably love that but we’d lose millions and get fired.). The answer is we don’t.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management B2B Marketing B2B Thought Leadership Marketing Management 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 2, 2010

This may be the ultimate question in B2B, especially as we struggle to integrate social media into the overall marketing mix. Let’s face it, even if it was possible to curl up in front of the fire with a glass of wine and our B2B products and services, no one would do it. It’s the same in B2B. Twitter , LinkedIn, etc.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership B2B Marketing Marketing Budget Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 26, 2010

The number of B2B buyers who are ready to buy as soon as they engage with our marketing is small—and social media will make it even smaller. The trust leads to a more personal relationship and hopefully, a purchase. Before Nurturing a New B2B Lead, Ask the Golden Question (thecustomercollective.com). What do you think?

Social Media 100

Social Media Lead Generation B2B Thought Leadership Generation 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 13, 2010

Following the trail of bread crumbs leads us to a caring, thoughtful person. So what can we take away from all this as B2B marketing professionals? The trajectory of Slater’s postings look a lot like the things that customers say about our complex B2B products and services, which have a much longer arc of relationship than B2C.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media B2B SME 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 11, 2009

There’s something about having this little device in our pocket that makes it so much more personal— dear, even—than any phone or laptop. And nowhere is the visual more dramatic than on your personal mobile device. For B2B marketers, this means that video and interactivity are something we need to be thinking about and doing now.

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing B2B Marketing B2B Storytelling 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

A Step Toward Better B2B Marketing. This Is Making Me Think – Hard… The melding of business, IT, and personal life. And some of it is, to my taste anyway, pure link bait (links that we’re sending to Forbes rather than SAP). But hey, I’m a known crank. I give us a B- overall—not bad for a product company. Favorite Voices.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 25, 2009

Social media will demand involvement that is much more personal. That’s why it’s important for us to start building our expertise in social media today, even if social media isn’t yet at the top of our marketing agenda (and our research shows that among B2B marketers, it is not). Social media is a social—not a business—phenomenon.

Social Media 100

Social Media Paid Search Agency Social Marketing B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 25, 2010

Two interesting posts this week on how our personalities affect our online behavior. First, Paul Dunay (did I mention that Paul is my favorite B2B blogger yet today?) expresses shock that he turned out to be an extrovert on the Myers-Briggs personality test and wonders if you need to be an extrovert to be in social media.

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Media Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

I’ve been working with my colleagues at ITSMA on another survey on social media for B2B marketers that I hope you’ll take by going here. B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. The trust leads to a more personal relationship and hopefully, a purchase. Tweet This Post.

Social Media 100

Social Media Marketing Strategy Marketing & Strategy B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 30, 2010

I’m going to be moderating a panel on this question (among others) at next week’s MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum in Boston. I’m sure that there will be opportunities and reasons for B2B to advertise on these things eventually, but that’s the easy part. I think that’s how we have to view mobile apps for B2B marketing.

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing Mobile Advertising Paid Search Agency Wiki 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 2, 2011

HP questioned Facebookers about their work styles and matched them to an “IT personality.” It drove them to a microsite featuring a hand-picked group of HP experts (such as these HP cloud experts) with the same “personality.” Marketing automation vendor Eloqua released a SlideShare entitled 10 ways to “solve” Facebook for B2B.

Social Media 100

Social Media Campaigns B2B Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 2, 2011

HP questioned Facebookers about their work styles and matched them to an “IT personality.” It drove them to a microsite featuring a hand-picked group of HP experts (such as these HP cloud experts) with the same “personality.” Marketing automation vendor Eloqua released a SlideShare entitled 10 ways to “solve” Facebook for B2B.

Social Media 100

Social Media Campaigns B2B Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 23, 2012

If you’re a corporate marketer like me, no doubt you’ve been put in the situation I faced this week: you have a white paper that an external content person created for the company and now you need to make that content social. This person responded with a good question: How would you like it to read and sound? Too serious, in my mind.

Paper 100

Paper Social Media Social Marketing B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 11, 2011

There’s lots of talk out there these days about the need for a technology guru within the B2B marketing department. Or if this person is going to be a technologist, he or she must have a serious grounding in analytics. Paul Dunay makes the case for one in this post, and Scott Brinker has been beating the drum for this for some time.

Analytics 100

Analytics Paid Search Agency Marketing Management Loyalty 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 4, 2012

I won’t be focusing on B2B marketing in the broadest sense anymore; I’ll be narrowing things to idea marketing (and the role that social media play in it). I don’t know of another marketing term that gets so much hate mail.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Social Media Twitter 100

Chris Koch

JULY 22, 2011

All of which is a lead-in to this week’s entry, which is what we as B2B marketers can learn from health-care marketing. Many of us in B2B can be proud of how we educate our customers and prospects on the business issues they face—from current regulatory changes to future “sea changes.” I think we do this pretty well in B2B.

Work Management 100

Work Management Marketing Management Social Media B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 16, 2009

To someone her age, the concept of following immediately conjures up the issue of personal relationships—who you hate and who you like—and status—who is popular and who isn’t. And it’s in this sense that Twitter is a goldmine for B2B marketers. It’s the first step to creating a personal social media platform.

Twitter 100

Twitter Web 2.0 Social Media Communities 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 9, 2010

If your SME is a person who loves to collect information, then becoming an aggregator is a route to trust. People know that they can count on this person to provide or link to the most insightful information in the topic area—no matter where it first appeared. Aggregator. Let’s get a conversation going. Tweet This Post.

SME 100

SME Aggregators Blogger Social Media 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2010

Awaken personal aspirations. Most of us say we want to have dinner with Abe Lincoln because when we see his unmistakable face it creates a waking dream in us about the kind of person we’d like to be (and how far we still have to go). Create emotion. They say that true art is that which makes us feel something—anything—strongly.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

JULY 28, 2010

And the brand or the issue that the brand wants to promote (say cloud computing, for example) remains the focal point of the blog rather than a particular personality. Tags: Blogging Brand, Reputation, and Positioning B2B marketing Blog Brand Brand Management marketing Social Media. They enjoy getting to know the blogger over time.

Blogger 100

Blogger Wikipedia Work Management Social Media 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 26, 2010

One of the biggest challenges for B2B social media marketers isn’t creating content, it’s helping others create content. And target that content to all of the stages of the buying process so that anyone encountering your content will find something that speaks to them personally. How to use social media for B2B (christopherakoch.com).

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership RSS Enterprise Management Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 6, 2009

Like most marketers, I spend most of my time desperately seeking to understand my target audience (B2B marketers) and delivering content that they find relevant and engaging. We have five different categories for the awards that cover important areas of focus for B2B marketers. It’s a struggle. How do you quantify the need?

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Budget Programs Business 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 5, 2009

If the crisis is seen as being morally averse, or causes harm in ways that seem ethically and morally averse to the average person, it will affect the pace and depth of losses. Customers have a tendency to “forgive” brands that take more steps to resolve a crisis than the average person can envision or may even think necessary.

Paid Search Agency 100

Paid Search Agency Companies Work Management Ethics 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 16, 2009

Earlier this year I surveyed B2B marketers about their approaches to corporate blogging. Bloggers will feel more irresponsible taking flights of fancy on their corporate-sponsored blogs than on their own personal blogs. Their strategies take two basic approaches. Content inflexibility. What do you think? Tweet This Post.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Blogger Thought Leadership Word of Mouth 100

Chris Koch

MAY 15, 2009

sessions are with marketers from big B2B technology companies and I often experience deep cynicism, even anger, from people who question whether web 2.0 taking off generally, and ITSMA research showing increased uptake by their peers in B2B. Most of my web 2.0 has any value for marketing. I present the usual stats showing web 2.0

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 Peer-to-peer Paid Search Agency Stats 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 30, 2009

Most of ITSMA’s clients are B2B marketers from big technology companies that sell big, complex products, services, and solutions. We just wrapped up our ITSMA Annual Marketing Conference this week and the strongest current driving the river of conversation was social media. CEOs Use Social Media More than Other Buyers.

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Enterprise Management Media 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 15, 2010

He wasn’t a marketer, but he had been sent by a marketer, who hadn’t bothered to accompany him or even send an agency PR person for translation and kind supplication. Big, stony-faced and intimidating, with a lapsed football player’s gut and a big school ring buried into one of his fingers. This guy was a salesman. Buyers become approachable.

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2010

We know that in B2B, customers and prospects respond best to ideas, news, research, and how-to—not sales pitches. We tend to think of intimacy as being personal—something for the salespeople. I think so because social media is starting to give us a way to scale intimacy. We can do it with content. Unspoken intimacy.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Thought Leadership Work Management 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

Assuming that you’ve done the necessary research to understand your target audience, that change can be on a personal, organizational, or industry level. Among those who parse ideas, most split the pie in half between two types of ideas: Aspirational. These are the ideas that prompt buyers to think about change.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

Assuming that you’ve done the necessary research to understand your target audience, that change can be on a personal, organizational, or industry level. Among those who parse ideas, most split the pie in half between two types of ideas: Aspirational. These are the ideas that prompt buyers to think about change.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 18, 2011

Hope to meet you live, in-person soon! We need to create talking points for salespeople to use when communicating to customers and prospects, and we need to find ways to integrate salespeople into the content development and dissemination processes from the start. How do you link content to revenue? Please give me your thoughts.

Work Management 100

Work Management Thought Leadership Marketing Management Paper 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 18, 2011

Based on these interviews and on my own experience working with thought leaders, I’ve started a list of key characteristics (please add your own attributes to this list): What are the personal attributes of a thought leader? Relevant experience. But they can’t merely seem like a peer; they need to be perceived as an expert.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Thought Leadership Social Media Storytelling 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 3, 2010

I humbly offer these guidelines in the spirit of the B2B marketing guild. Indeed, the more personal nature of the communications makes good skills even more important because all the misdeeds can be easily tracked back to their source. In B2B, it’s likely to be diverse, at least in terms of ages and backgrounds. Grammatical.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media B2B Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 3, 2010

I humbly offer these guidelines in the spirit of the B2B marketing guild. Indeed, the more personal nature of the communications makes good skills even more important because all the misdeeds can be easily tracked back to their source. In B2B, it’s likely to be diverse, at least in terms of ages and backgrounds. Grammatical.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media B2B Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 28, 2010

For expensive, complex B2B products and services, social media can improve relationships with customers and increase awareness. Creating a temporary virtual community in the run up to an event to inform and liven up in-person meetings at the event. Social media has ROI. Do you call that ROI? But it ain’t thought leadership.

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 20, 2009

We’re all getting constant advice—hectoring, even—about how we need to make social media a key part of our B2B marketing strategies right now. While I believe that these two threads are accurate, I haven’t seen compelling data to back them up—at least as it relates to B2B. How strong do you think the arguments are? Customer factors.

Social Media 100

Social Media Social Marketing B2B Marketing Work Management 100

Chris Koch

JULY 29, 2011

It’s ironic, but there is a person who could have responded to this controversy in a very interesting way. That static, institutional explanation of the healthcare survey on McKinsey’s website is like a billboard flashing “We don’t get social media!”.

Social Media 100

Social Media Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Companies 100