How well will the hard-hitting and competitive print ads from Oracle make the transition to the world of online media and user-generated content? media. media wikis Tags: podcasts blogs social media Web 2.0 You may have caught Kate Maddox of BtoB Online covering the recent Business Marketing Association conference. According to Kate, the candor of Judith Sim, VP-CMO of Oracle, during her keynote at the BMA conference was quite surprising. Judith stated that Oracle has increased its return on marketing despite declining budgets. That budget is 1.7% MORE >>

Today I attended Forrester' s Webinar "Defining Your B2B Social Media Strategy" with Vice President and Principal Analyst, Laura Ramos, and Vice President of Tech Industry Consulting, Dan Klein. The seminar was chock full of interesting facts on social media usage by B2B marketers and by B2B decision-makers. For both B2B vendors and the buyers of those solutions, social media is considered a second tier marketing medium. Another attendee and I leveraged the WebEx chat to ask questions on how the usage of social media varied by the size of the organization. MORE >>

After my last posting on small business and social media, Chris Brogan was kind enough to tweet my blog and attract some savvy writers. Q: Robert Lesser: It appears that smaller B2B companies are more successful with their social media marketing than large B2B marketers. Anecdotally, we have seen social media and online tactics favor smaller companies in general because small companies are more agile, less constrained by legacy, and able to "look bigger" than they are in the digital realm (emphasis provided). Is this showing up in the data? If yes, why? MORE >>

You can almost see the collective hand wringing and hear the teeth gnashing as angst-ridden B2B marketers are being pressed by their organizations for proof on the value of social media. The premise of this blog, Acquiring Minds , is that social media, as with other online media, provide B2B marketers with a stellar opportunity to generate qualified leads and to impact ROI. It almost seems heretical to sabotage social media by attempting to generate leads. The discourse on social media or Web 2.0 Tell me - how are you using social media for lead generation? MORE >>

My last post discussed why the nature of social media need not be compromised by pursuing lead generation through these new media. Today, let's turn to some examples of how B2B marketers are embracing social media for this purpose. few weeks ago, McKinsey & Company released the results of their latest survey on social media: Building the Web 2.0 The buzz on this report included a post from Peter Kim, a fellow Social Media Today blogger. media targeting internal parties versus 87% who interfaced with customers. tools for customer acquisition. Bingo! MORE >>