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. ITSMA research shows that buyers want the whole menu of content—not just a white paper here or a video there.

Paper 100

Paper Social Media Social Marketing B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 7, 2011

ITSMA research shows that 66% of buyers seek information themselves rather than waiting to hear from providers. They seek that information through search: 79% of c-level executives do at least three searches per day. They are more likely to encounter our content through search than through the social media channels themselves.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 7, 2011

ITSMA research shows that 66% of buyers seek information themselves rather than waiting to hear from providers. They seek that information through search: 79% of c-level executives do at least three searches per day. They are more likely to encounter our content through search than through the social media channels themselves.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Media Peer-to-peer 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

OCTOBER 12, 2009

We’re all looking for the revolution to happen within the tools, but where the revolution is occurring is in the content that feeds those tools. In tracking B2B marketing through Twitter, I find a ton of great content being shared through blogs whose creators have already swamped the output of trade magazines. Sounds nuts, right?

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Paid Search Agency Viral 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. It is a natural way to drive traffic back to your site for registration—as long as you have great content to offer. nature of social media means that we should err on the side of less information.

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 4, 2012

Mostly what we do with thought leadership is educate and inform. I also dislike another term that seems to be gaining ground these days: content marketing. Content” sounds so achingly dull and bland. What customers are looking for are good ideas, not content. It’s a set up for failure. Truly great ideas are rare.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Social Media Twitter 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 19, 2010

Social media are repositories for discussions and content on every possible topic. Gather information by asking questions. Asking for information helps deepen social media relationships. If you can link to a survey and promise respondents some level of access to your findings, you can create a powerful source of information.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 24, 2010

Salespeople remained dependent on marketers for information. If they don’t it’s because they don’t see the link between sharing information and fatter bonus checks. Sharing information in a way that doesn’t overly sap productivity (hard to do before social media came along) raises all boats. Salespeople mostly ignored them.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Wiki Marketing Management Internet Marketing 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

We need to create a mix of these two types of thought leadership content to maintain strong relationships with their target audiences. What’s unspoken here is that you need to develop thought leadership that is appropriate to each stage of the buying process so that buyers (and salespeople) can get the right information at the right time.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

We need to create a mix of these two types of thought leadership content to maintain strong relationships with their target audiences. What’s unspoken here is that you need to develop thought leadership that is appropriate to each stage of the buying process so that buyers (and salespeople) can get the right information at the right time.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 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). Web/mobile content. Fan bases aren’t just becoming more global – they’re also becoming more mobile.

Planning 100

Planning Paid Search Agency Work Management Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 30, 2010

We can’t simply create an application that links to static website content, for example. Mobile doesn’t magically make static content exciting. The classic B2B mobile applications have been internally focused, giving maintenance people access to service information while they are out in the field. Continuity.

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing Mobile Advertising Paid Search Agency Wiki 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 while marketers can create some social media content, they can (and should) rely on their subject matter experts (SMEs) to create most of the stuff that’s going to build trust and relationships with customers.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership RSS Enterprise Management Thought Leadership 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

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

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

I agree (journalism’s future will be determined by its ability to create a business model that pays better than the current one: giving away content for free and charging way too little for ads), but I think he missed the more important disruptive power that platforms like BrandVoice really do have: to disintermediate traditional marketing.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 18, 2012

The posts won’t be controversial so much for the content itself (although I hope that that happens eventually) as for the way I’m presenting it. This week, I posted the first of what may prove to be a series of controversial blog posts on the SAP community network (known to members as SCN). You can read the entire post here.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Communities Transparency 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

That means social media are extensions of our content development and dissemination processes. By creating content that offers relevant, timely, and useful ideas and education for buyers at all stages of the buying process, we create the incentives for buyers to engage with us in conversation and community. The rest is promotion.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 21, 2011

All through 2010, marketers have been telling us that they are having a harder time getting their content noticed. The characteristic that stands out is that these channels are all more personal than more traditional content. The social media noise is personal. But let’s look at the social media noise more carefully.

Social Media 100

Social Media Budget Programs Paper PR 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

If those pieces are missing, thought leadership will be left to marketing, where it will either mutate into thinly veiled sales content or die out altogether. Marketing can manage a thought leadership program and disseminate content, but it cannot be expected to supply the ideas that form the basis of the content.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing Paper 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

If those pieces are missing, thought leadership will be left to marketing, where it will either mutate into thinly veiled sales content or die out altogether. Marketing can manage a thought leadership program and disseminate content, but it cannot be expected to supply the ideas that form the basis of the content.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 30, 2009

There are two rivers of content at conferences. One is the river of planned content—the conference theme, the presentations, etc.; 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

APRIL 17, 2009

Marketing can reuse the information it discovers about a strategic account with other customers in that vertical. Using that information, the marketers worked with the sales team to develop an account plan. But the research investment has a useful life beyond one specific account.

Planning 100

Planning Process Work Management Verticals 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 5, 2010

Nobody reads your content. They dug deeper and created original content. Press releases are not substitutes for real content. The process of getting subject matter experts placed in publications or other third-party content channels is awful for everyone involved. They do their research on the web.

PR 100

PR Press Paid Search Agency Lead Ranking 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 26, 2009

You’re better off getting a dedicated tool that lets you manage the flow of information. It’s a great source of content and for people that I may want to follow. You can “mass follow” my followers to instantly build up your network, or pick through the contacts individually (their bio information is included).

Social Media 100

Social Media Social Marketing B2B Marketing Personalization 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

Employees should be encouraged to become part of the community by doing research and linking to other relevant content—not just their own. Social media is supposed to be fun, informal, conversational and open. Encourage openness, honesty and transparency. Encourage community through sharing and attribution. Separate opinion from fact.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Guidelines B2B 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 18, 2009

It’d be great if your target influencers follow you back (so you can engage them with your messages and begin to build a deeper relationship), but if they don’t, you can still gather valuable information. And the viral model acts as a nice front end for building a deeper relationship through the permission model.

Social Media 100

Social Media Viral Marketing Tools Media 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 18, 2009

It’d be great if your target influencers follow you back (so you can engage them with your messages and begin to build a deeper relationship), but if they don’t, you can still gather valuable information. And the viral model acts as a nice front end for building a deeper relationship through the permission model.

Social Media 100

Social Media Viral Marketing Tools Media 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

ITSMA research shows that there are other ways to reach these people that are much more effective than social media, such as small, thought leadership-based events, content-rich websites that are optimized for search, and robust reference programs, to name a few. After all, that’s how we’ve always done it.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

ITSMA research shows that there are other ways to reach these people that are much more effective than social media, such as small, thought leadership-based events, content-rich websites that are optimized for search, and robust reference programs, to name a few. After all, that’s how we’ve always done it.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 22, 2010

The only effective argument I’ve heard recently is that we embed calls to action in social media that drive readers to a landing page where we capture their information and start nurturing them as leads. Aside from the corporate, a blog is the mother ship of social media interaction and content. We just have a hard time proving it.

Social Media 100

Social Media ROI Lead Ranking RSS 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Gartner’s definition of thought leadership marketing is this: “The giving—for free or at a nominal charge—of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.”.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Gartner Planning 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Mobile is just a content channel. We’re dismissing mobile because we can’t see ways to pump content through phones to buyers. Buyers don’t like looking at content on smart phones. Optimize your content for phones. This is a typical comment: “I’ve got plenty of content. Do you call that ROI? General Marketing.

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 3, 2010

We need to understand their experiences and offer content that fits their needs. Rarely do those links lead to paid content. Those who make their content freely available will have many more readers than those who don’t. Those who make their content freely available will have many more readers than those who don’t.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

AUGUST 3, 2010

Here are some of the qualities that social media voices should have: (More) Informal. Sure, social media are more informal by default, but informal doesn’t mean you should sound like an idiot. Rarely do those links lead to paid content. I humbly offer these guidelines in the spirit of the B2B marketing guild. Grammatical.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

MAY 5, 2014

Because these bricks are information, they can be shared and recombined in numerous ways, says Lemley. But increasingly, high-cost products “will be islands of IP-driven content in a sea of content created without the need for IP.” (See, But it will get easier. Honda predicts that it will sell more robots than cars in 2020.

Copyright 100

Copyright Distribution Youtube Internet Marketing 100