Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

Consultant Fred Reichheld didn’t invent the concept of customer loyalty, but by identifying the marker for it, he changed how many companies approach managing customer loyalty. They identify a current trend, say a regulatory change, and offer perspective on what the trend means and how companies should react.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

Consultant Fred Reichheld didn’t invent the concept of customer loyalty, but by identifying the marker for it, he changed how many companies approach managing customer loyalty. They identify a current trend, say a regulatory change, and offer perspective on what the trend means and how companies should react.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 10, 2009

See what you think of my answers: How did thought leadership initiatives in companies begin? Other companies have adopted pieces of the academic research publishing model for their own thought leadership marketing. Thus, thought leadership is applicable to any industry with interest in competitive information and process improvement.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Work Management 100

Chris Koch

MAY 21, 2010

If you go to Facebook and look at your profile, your immediate reaction is going to be that it’s asking for too much information. The question that we’re asking Facebook is the question that we should be asking ourselves in our marketing: Do we really need all this information? The expectation on Twitter is that 99.9%

Privacy 100

Privacy B2B Marketing Lead Ranking B2B 100

Chris Koch

MAY 19, 2014

MakerBot , a manufacturer of desktop 3D printers priced at the level of a decent laptop, is the best known of companies producing a product that has already been raised to PC-level stature in terms of its potential impact on business and society. What Caused the F-Bomb. Viral How-Tos. Not that Pettis was a bad teacher.

Conference 100

Conference Education Viral Marketing Class 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 12, 2010

Another prominent Forrester social media analyst, Josh Bernoff, who was a co-author of perhaps the most influential book about social media to date, Groundswell , puts it succinctly in his blog post about the controversy: “If you’re creating content for a content company, that company ought to host your blog.”. Oh wait, I forgot.

Social Media 100

Social Media Forrester Media Transparency 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 8, 2011

The great thing about the experience was that this company is already doing social media. This company has established a highly visible presence in social media—indeed, it has won an award for it. We could all use some way to gauge our progress, especially in large, dispersed companies and marketing organizations.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Paid Search Agency PR 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 19, 2010

First, here’s what we do as part of monitoring: Track conversations about your company. You need to know what’s being said about your company online. Trouble is, we’re finding in our research that most companies stop here. Gather information by asking questions. Pretty obvious, right? Develop a target audience.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 24, 2010

These words, mostly in the form of brochures, specification sheets, and boilerplate PowerPoint slides, helped salespeople—especially those new to the company—get a conversation going with prospects. Salespeople remained dependent on marketers for information. Sales enablement used to mean brochures. But then the internet came along.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Wiki Marketing Management Internet Marketing 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 18, 2009

Giving up control of what is being said about your company is difficult for most marketers. When buyers engage their most important sources of information—their peers—most of those conversations (90%, according to a study by Walter J. The most trusted information source for buyers has always been each other. What do you think?

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Social Marketing B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

The guy who manages the platform at Forbes, Lewis Dvorkin, (if he also created the platform he’s a freakin’ genius) recently wrote about its power to disrupt traditional journalism , citing my new employer, SAP, as one of the companies that sometimes get more hits for the stuff it posts than Forbes’ own journalism. My Current Project.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 18, 2011

Meanwhile, trust in “credentialed experts” and “company technical specialists” is rising—we’re getting so desperate we even want to hear from the CEO. Usually, that means experience that is deeper than the target audience has, or breadth of experience working across multiple companies or industries, or all of the above. Storytelling.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Thought Leadership Social Media Storytelling 100

Chris Koch

MAY 15, 2012

But I don’t have access to that kind of information. Every B2B company has subject matter experts (SMEs) who are working with customers to solve problems and have deep backgrounds in customers’ processes, industries, and functions. Besides creating idea networks, B2B companies also have to become publishers.

FAQ 100

FAQ Custom Publishing B2B Sales Work Management 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 17, 2009

For a company’s most important (i.e., Marketing can reuse the information it discovers about a strategic account with other customers in that vertical. Marketers researched the company and its markets, talked with the sales account team, and interviewed several store employees and customers.

Planning 100

Planning Process Work Management Verticals 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

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.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Guidelines B2B 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 22, 2010

Yet buyers are hungrier than ever for this kind of information and insight. They want to become as informed as possible about current trends and their buying options before they ever speak to a salesperson. What is stopping your company from creating an automated lead management process? That’s not possible manually.

Lead Management 100

Lead Management Marketing Management Automation Marketing Automation Services 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. That means lists and top tens and bullet points and lots of informative subheads. No long narratives.

Paper 100

Paper Social Media Social Marketing B2B 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. Given the potential for lead generation through social media, the question then becomes how much information should we try to get from people coming to us through social media? In our recent Web 2.0

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 4, 2012

Second, I’m changing the name because I’m going to make it my personal mission to end the use of the term thought leadership to describe this method of marketing B2B companies. Mostly what we do with thought leadership is educate and inform. 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

MAY 1, 2009

Marketing needs this information to create thought leadership and marketing materials designed to reach many different clients at once. Salespeople may have this kind of broader perspective, but more than likely they don’t have time to gather it. Because it is a deeper, more thorough version of what they already are doing to make the sale.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Cross-Selling B2B Sales Thought Leadership 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. This makes sense when you consider what our IT buyers have been telling us for years: that their peers are by far their most preferred and trusted choice for information during the buying process.

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Enterprise Management Media 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

For many companies, this translates into a wait-and-see approach to social media. For these companies, there is little reason to twitter into the wind. We could control the public conversation because our audience had few public outlets for giving or receiving information. I think that’s the right decision—up to a point.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

For many companies, this translates into a wait-and-see approach to social media. For these companies, there is little reason to twitter into the wind. We could control the public conversation because our audience had few public outlets for giving or receiving information. I think that’s the right decision—up to a point.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 11, 2011

Most companies do not yet have closed-loop lead management processes supported by systems, for example. B2C companies have these “wonks” today. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but I wonder about the long-term need for a marketing technologist. In the short term, I think marketing has a lot of catching up to do in terms of technology.

Analytics 100

Analytics Paid Search Agency Marketing Management Loyalty 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Social media tools are imperfect for informing people. Twitter is literally an endless stream of information, much of it repetitive. The tools are imperfect for informing us. It sounds crazy, but at some point (if not already) many people are getting most of their information through these social media channels.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Paid Search Agency Viral Marketing 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 5, 2010

Unless the company they work for is a startup or otherwise desperate for attention, these people tend to be ground down by the risk management aspect of their jobs over time. Much like IT people, they don’t hear much from anyone inside their companies unless something goes wrong. These are the internal corporate PR representatives.

PR 100

PR Press Paid Search Agency Lead Ranking 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 30, 2010

The classic B2B mobile applications have been internally focused, giving maintenance people access to service information while they are out in the field. One possibility is to use location at your events so that attendees can find each other or share schedules and information. Continuity.

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing Mobile Advertising Paid Search Agency Wiki 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 5, 2010

One company’s mobile application is tied to a wiki-based sales enablement website that lets salespeople generate actions and updates and get updated information from the road. Will content appear in the application that needs to be acted upon immediately?

Wiki 100

Wiki Urgency Marketing Mobile Marketing Content 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 29, 2010

For example, there is no way that the typical Webinar is worth as much as an in-depth research report, yet we make buyers give us the same amount of information for both—we charge them the same price. For example, research shows that Europeans value their privacy more than Americans—meaning that their information may cost you more.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Thought Leadership Mobile Advertising 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 29, 2010

For example, there is no way that the typical Webinar is worth as much as an in-depth research report, yet we make buyers give us the same amount of information for both—we charge them the same price. For example, research shows that Europeans value their privacy more than Americans—meaning that their information may cost you more.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Thought Leadership Mobile Advertising 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2009

Use the Chatham House rule: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”. Limit the number of members—no more than 25 at each meeting.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Practices Thought Leadership Best Practices 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 3, 2014

I would expect that most other similarly ill-informed, old-fart American Boomers who were raised on other sports like me might say the same thing (Stones fans, don’t look for a “London” team to root for because it doesn’t exist). “A Sales of family season ticket plans increased from fewer than 500 in 2009 to more than 7,500 in 2012.

Planning 100

Planning Paid Search Agency Work Management Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2009

Use the Chatham House rule: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”. Limit the number of members—no more than 25 at each meeting.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Thought Leadership Practices Best Practices 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

In the course of hundreds of interviews with companies over my career, the “yes but we’re different” mantra was a familiar refrain. There is only one objective in social media and it is common across all companies—even across the infamous divide between B2B and B2C: Create learning networks. Not in our businesses, though.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 2, 2010

And you never get any interesting assignments if you aren’t able to communicate information through a narrative structure—a story with a number of star characters and a beginning, middle, and end. This company understands my pain. Those two things are built into the process. It’s the same in B2B. These guys are smart.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership B2B Marketing Marketing Budget Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 13, 2010

The information from a social site like this changes how journalists can write about a huge company like HP. Here are a few thoughts: We must monitor what’s being said about our companies online. So what can we take away from all this as B2B marketing professionals?

Social Media 100

Social Media Media SME B2B 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 26, 2010

Marketing is the default head of social media management in most companies. Companies have strategies and goals. so that buyers can consume the information in any form they choose. One of the biggest challenges for B2B social media marketers isn’t creating content, it’s helping others create content.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership RSS Enterprise Management Thought Leadership 100