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. This is especially true for services companies, who don’t have concrete products that can do the branding for them.). They enjoy getting to know the blogger over time.

Blogger 100

Blogger Wikipedia Work Management Social Media 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 29, 2009

Even if we believe deeply in the power of social media, we all have that gnawing feeling deep in our guts that says that there’s little reason for a busy, intelligent person to want to receive frequent updates about our brands when those brands produce complex services and products with two-year sales cycles. The research confirms it.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management B2B Marketing B2B Thought Leadership Marketing Management 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

This person must be relatively senior in stature and visible across all functions, serving as an internal partner to connect disparate groups around a customer-centric strategy. Whoever heads up customer experience should oversee an effort to ask every frontline employee what’s impeding their ability to deliver excellent service.

De-duplication 100

De-duplication Paid Search Agency Companies Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

JULY 22, 2011

Any time anyone delivers a service to me now, I immediately start thinking about how the service is “being positioned,” and whether the “value proposition makes sense.” Sure, healthcare knows how to sell drugs, but in terms of preparing the customer for the experience of service delivery, fuggedaboudit. I’m a goner.

Work Management 100

Work Management Marketing Management Social Media B2B Marketing 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. But now that mobile phones have become computers that happen to ring, they have become irresistible. What does it mean?

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing B2B Marketing B2B Storytelling 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 23, 2009

For example, what if your brand or offering uses a generic term like “Service Oriented Architecture”? Since many of the monitoring tools are new, most are available as Software as a Service (SaaS) over the internet, which makes it easy for marketers to try them out. But things can quickly get complicated from there. Assign a response.

Social Media 100

Social Media Tools Media RSS 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2010

We tend to think of intimacy as being personal—something for the salespeople. Most of this is content we were going to produce anyway. Social media lets us spread out the cost while also increasing the frequency of touches. Unspoken intimacy. But we can do it by reliably delivering valuable content. Magazines have been doing it for years.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Thought Leadership Work Management 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 13, 2010

Following the trail of bread crumbs leads us to a caring, thoughtful person. 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. Our customers aren’t going to do a United breaks guitars on us.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media SME B2B 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 2, 2010

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. Even making a cat more like a person works.) This may be the ultimate question in B2B, especially as we struggle to integrate social media into the overall marketing mix.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership B2B Marketing Marketing Budget Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2010

For example, in the three categories I’ve looked at so far (there are six categories altogether), we have one company using analytics to predict customer buying patterns (and this ain’t diapers or laundry detergent, ladies and gents—we’re talking six-figure jumbles of complex products and services here). Awaken personal aspirations.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

MARCH 4, 2011

Publishers are left with a trickle of revenue and B2B companies discover just how uninterested a generic online audience is in their products and services. This longing for personalization isn’t just heard in the context of thought leadership, however. It’s a no win for everybody except the ad agencies.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Advertising Agencies B2B Marketing Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

Our group’s mandate is to research the business issues that SAP’s customers and prospects care about and write exclusively about those issues—not our products and services. This Is Making Me Think – Hard… The melding of business, IT, and personal life. As a practitioner of idea marketing at SAP, that’s music to my ears.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 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.

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 11, 2011

Or if this person is going to be a technologist, he or she must have a serious grounding in analytics. We need to use analytics to quantify and manage how fast we move prospects through the buying process and to increase loyalty and trust after they’ve bought from us. B2C companies have these “wonks” today.

Analytics 100

Analytics Paid Search Agency Marketing Management Loyalty 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2012

This is cross-posted on the SAP Services blog]: Mobile applications are a little like vacation snapshots: They are informative, sometimes fun—beautiful, even—but they don’t tell a full story on their own. Mobility should be corporate owned, personally enabled. My destination? New Jersey. See if these ideas do anything for you.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Lock-In Marketing Management Paper 100

Chris Koch

MAY 13, 2011

I take a perverse pleasure in reading my Twitter DMs, 99% of which are of the automated variety, looking for the heartfelt sentiment that goes out to me and thousands of other close personal friends every day from people I’ve started following. Thanks. “[ ] uses TrueTwit validation service. Not if you’re auto DMing me. “We

Twitter 100

Twitter Validation CAN-SPAM Facebook 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. Do you call that ROI? Describing what you do is thought leadership.

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 20, 2009

Our latest annual survey of 355 buyers of complex IT solutions, How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2009: The Importance of Personalization, Epiphanies, and Social Media, shows that the door to the C-suite is opening up. IT and business buyers are flocking to social media more rapidly than anyone would have imagined even a few years ago.

Social Media 100

Social Media Social Marketing B2B Marketing Work Management 100