Chris Koch

APRIL 9, 2010

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how to get others to blog. For them to be successful, we need to help them establish their voices in a blog. We want readers of our SMEs’ blogs to see them as experts. But you can’t establish that authority by putting a link to their LinkedIn profile on the blog. Stop reading.

SME 100

SME Aggregators Blogger Social Media 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 19, 2010

I’d like to create a guide for how to use social media in B2B that does not involve talking about the specific tools—as least not in the top line. I think it’s important to try to do this if we’re going to get social media integrated with the rest of marketing. Find and track the relevant conversations in social media and online.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

AUGUST 23, 2011

Others say that G+ will rule because of its integration with Google’s other tools like Android, Gmail, Docs, and its media properties like YouTube and Google Music —in other words, the colossus effect that we’ve been waiting (for so long) to take effect. There are only two types of content in social media. Short or long.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Social Networks B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 23, 2011

Others say that G+ will rule because of its integration with Google’s other tools like Android, Gmail, Docs, and its media properties like YouTube and Google Music —in other words, the colossus effect that we’ve been waiting (for so long) to take effect. There are only two types of content in social media. Short or long.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Social Networks B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 12, 2010

Social media experts often chide marketers about control. The experts say that in the new era of social media, marketers need to stop delivering tightly-scripted, one-way messages and start engaging in uncontrolled, transparent conversations with customers and prospects wherever those conversations happen. Oh wait, I forgot.

Social Media 100

Social Media Forrester Media Transparency 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

One of the cornerstones of a social media strategy is having a clear set of corporate social media guidelines or policies. 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. Blog, Space.]

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Guidelines B2B 100

Chris Koch

MAY 6, 2011

Measuring influence is the new obsession in the social media world—adding another layer of anxiety to the dark cloud of existential dread that is marketing ROI. Social media present us as individuals seeking status within a community, which is something that humans have been working at since our days as monkeys. Image via Wikipedia.

Social Media 100

Social Media Social Marketing Work Management Media 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 30, 2009

Who says B2B marketers are lagging in social media? If they are out there, they aren’t reading this blog. Of the top ten posts on my blog this year, only one did not involve social media. I think the social media phenomenon is the most exciting and important thing to hit communications in my lifetime. Here it is.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Social Marketing B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

MAY 20, 2011

Many marketers involved in social media management tell me that they struggle to get their subject matter experts engaged in social media. Create an idea network as the basis for social media. When ideas are an expectation, social media participation is easier. But focusing solely on engagement is the wrong goal.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Media Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 14, 2011

Social media a-lister Chris Brogan, who had a policy of following back everyone who followed him, deleted everybody before finally settling on a few hundred people to follow and shifting his attention to the new social network on the block, G+. I’ve rolled all that up into an approach that I doubt constantly. I don’t seem to be alone.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Twitter Social Networks 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 14, 2011

Social media a-lister Chris Brogan, who had a policy of following back everyone who followed him, deleted everybody before finally settling on a few hundred people to follow and shifting his attention to the new social network on the block, G+. I’ve rolled all that up into an approach that I doubt constantly. I don’t seem to be alone.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Twitter Social Networks 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 25, 2011

Eric Wittlake makes this point in a blog post this week and I heartily agree. But then this got me to thinking, without a commitment to ideas throughout the organization, all these dollars we’re starting to spend on social media will be wasted. What do I mean by an idea organization?

Social Media 100

Social Media Organization Peer-to-peer SME 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. As we put together the questions, we struggled with the issue of social media strategy. Social media is no silver bullet. I resisted treating it as a standalone in the survey.

Social Media 100

Social Media Marketing & Strategy Marketing Strategy B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 22, 2010

I wish I could say that social media leads to sales. So when we think about social media ROI, we need to make a leap of faith. To make ourselves feel a little more comfortable with this idea, we may need to categorize social media with something whose hazy ROI we’re more familiar and comfortable with: PR. Return on media impact.

Social Media 100

Social Media ROI Lead Ranking RSS 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 26, 2009

In my last post, I hope I convinced you why you should establish a personal presence in social media even if your company hasn’t done so yet. That was the why of social media. I’m going to attempt to explain it by humbly offering my own initiation into social media as a guide. Pick blogs to follow.

Social Media 100

Social Media Social Marketing B2B Marketing Personalization 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 25, 2010

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. Reading these got me thinking that we probably need to rethink the concepts of introversion and extroversion in social media marketing. But can I do it on my blog?

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Media Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2010

Social media is raising the bar on customer intimacy. Social media is making that fact plain. We’re all struggling to move from the traditional arm’s-length, temporary campaigns to the always-on, direct relationships inherent in social media management. Social media reduces the incremental cost of content.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Thought Leadership Work Management 100

Chris Koch

MAY 14, 2010

Social media creates the need for marketing to lead within the organization. At least that’s the conclusion we reached at ITSMA recently when we did our social media survey (there’s a free summary if you’re interested). We mean that within the organization the leadership of social media is falling to marketing.

Organic Leads 100

Organic Leads Social Media Social Marketing Organization 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 12, 2009

We’ve all heard a lot of debate lately about whether social media is an evolution or a revolution. Look at it this way and social media inevitably becomes evolution, as social media researcher Josh Chasin convincingly argues here. But I think we lose sight of the revolution by looking at social media in isolation.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Paid Search Agency Viral Marketing 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

There is too much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about social media objectives and strategy these days. We all assume that our organizations are unique and that we must devote great sums of time and money to figuring out what our particular motivation is for social media and how we will carry it out. Now don’t get me wrong.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I think that monitoring social media is one of four key aspects of a social media engagement strategy. Social media monitoring is a way to figure out what’s being said about your brand and reveals opportunities for engaging in conversations with customers and influencers.

Social Media 100

Social Media Tools Media RSS 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 30, 2009

We just wrapped up our ITSMA Annual Marketing Conference this week and the strongest current driving the river of conversation was social media. Specifically, frustration over how to use social media to reach the C-suite. In fact, it’s hard for most of us to imagine these people using social media at all. What do you think?

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Enterprise Management Media 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 21, 2011

Social media have created so much noise that it’s becoming more difficult for the good old white paper to stand out. The social media noise is personal. But let’s look at the social media noise more carefully. Stats show that just 23% of the Fortune 1000 has corporate blogs —not exactly overwhelming.

Social Media 100

Social Media Budget Programs Paper PR 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 28, 2011

Now, awhile back I wrote a post criticizing Forrester’s decision to prevent its analysts from hosting their own personal blogs. If you follow social media, you probably know most of the story already. But Owyang didn’t just post on his own blog; he also posted on a Forrester blog that was created around his business line.

Personalization 100

Personalization Forrester Branding Brand Identity 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 16, 2009

The two subject areas I’m most interested in in my role at ITSMA are B2B marketing in general and social media in particular. I started following people whose blogs I like in those areas and things took off from there. I think blogs are for thinking, not linking. An entrée to the cocktail party.

Twitter 100

Twitter Web 2.0 Social Media Communities 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 23, 2011

A study by Yahoo Research found that 50% of tweets are generated by an “elite” group of 20k users and that those users tend to follow one another rather than branching out—what many refer to as the social media echo chamber. 99% of the time, they’re sharing links to content—blogs, research papers, news stories, etc.—that

Twitter 100

Twitter Broadcasting Social Media Advertising Mediums 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 23, 2011

A study by Yahoo Research found that 50% of tweets are generated by an “elite” group of 20k users and that those users tend to follow one another rather than branching out—what many refer to as the social media echo chamber. 99% of the time, they’re sharing links to content—blogs, research papers, news stories, etc.—that

Twitter 100

Twitter Broadcasting Social Media B2B Marketing 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. Social media offers some new ways for us to build emotional connections with customers by connecting them with other people and their stories. But let’s not get too hung up on social media.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership B2B Marketing Marketing Budget Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

MAY 27, 2010

I met two of my favorite B2B bloggers at the event: Christine Kerley (AKA @ cksays ) who writes CK’s Blog and Jeff Cohen (@ jeffreylcohen ) who, along with Kipp Bodnar writes the Social Media B2B blog. If you’re trying to stay on top of B2B marketing trends, you should be reading both of these blogs.

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing B2B Marketing Mobile Advertising B2B 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 12, 2010

Most journalists have discovered social media as an important research tool. Those people may receive media training, presentation and speaking training, etc. Encourage them to blog. If your subject matter experts don’t want to write, use other types of media to populate the blog such as videos and podcasts.

PR 100

PR Peer-to-peer Press Public Relations 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 22, 2011

Social media management and innovation. ITSMA’s social media research (free excerpt available) shows that marketing is responsible for monitoring social media and for training, governing, and supporting the organization in using social media. This shift in innovation has big implications for marketing.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Social Media 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 4, 2012

You may have noticed that I’ve changed the name of my blog. 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). It disregards social media. I’ve changed it for two reasons. They are joined at the hip.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Social Media Twitter 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 24, 2010

Social media changes sales enablement. But then social media came along and it really did change everything. Salespeople are becoming heavy users of social media, and it takes less than a minute to set up an internal-only micro blogging network, wiki, or online community for them to share their own words with each other.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Wiki Marketing Management Internet Marketing 100

Chris Koch

JULY 10, 2009

As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects. We’re starting to see social media have a positive impact on driving traffic to websites and on lead generation. Social media and lead generation go together. In our recent Web 2.0 for at least that long.

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 5, 2011

Recently, I was preparing a workshop on social media for an ITSMA client. The marketer in charge of the company’s social media effort gave me a clear edict: “Look, I don’t want you focusing on Facebook, okay? We don’t see the value of it for B2B and we want it off the table. The like button is a blunt instrument. What do you think?

Facebook 100

Facebook B2B Marketing B2B Thought Leadership B2B 100

Chris Koch

JULY 22, 2011

Here’s the kind of pressure that social media puts on us: After not posting anything to my blog in nearly six weeks, I feel compelled to offer an explanation. Social media are like a school of sharks; keep moving forward or sink lifelessly to the bottom. Isn’t that sad? Hey, but that’s how it is.

Work Management 100

Work Management Marketing Management Social Media B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 9, 2014

Blogs, social media, and even videos have much more power to offend people. In social media the conflict can become exponentially worse because it can be crowd sourced. However, e-mail is not the only culprit here. Slices the workday into impenetrable chunks.

Distribution 100

Distribution Training Opinions Trust Marketing 100