Those people may receive media training, presentation and speaking training, etc. Thanks for the great comments on last week’s post, “Is the Era of PR Over.&# Okay, so if the traditional model for PR is failing, what do we do instead? Most journalists have discovered social media as an important research tool. And research shows that even the stodgiest C-level executive does at least three web searches per day. m not saying we fire all PR people. Every company needs a guard dog or two to be around in case of a PR disaster. Outreach. Gatekeeper. Placement. Visibility. Facilitation. MORE >>

It all leads back to the mother ship in the end—via reports and presentations that are better and more fully informed than they would have been. 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. That’s why a change in the policies of perhaps the leading voice for social media, Forrester , has bigger implications than it may seem. MORE >>

Then make a plan for hitting those topics in as many different types of content as possible (blog posts, conference presentations, videos, etc.) One of the biggest challenges for B2B social media marketers isn’t creating content, it’s helping others create content. Marketing is the default head of social media management in most companies. 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. It’s no surprise. Filter research. MORE >>

On the other hand, if you’re only trying to reach the techies, jargon may be expected, as marketer Jed Sundwall points out in this excellent presentation, Finding Your Social Media Voice. When people ask about how to use social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, I suspect that they are really asking about how they should sound in those tools. After all, the tools themselves are dead simple. You need a second hand on your watch to track how long it takes to set up a Twitter account, for example. But developing a social media voice is a more complicated proposition. Relevant. MORE >>

By picking some individual stars and promoting the hell out of them, we present a more intimate face to all buyers—not just the ones who know us. At ITSMA , we’ve been busy preparing for our annual State of the Marketing Profession briefing next Tuesday. It’s where we introduce some of the top findings from our annual budget survey of marketers. But we don’t like to just parrot the numbers from the survey. So we spend weeks leading up to the briefing arguing about what the numbers actually mean and what marketers should do. The social media noise is personal. Marketers as paparazzi. MORE >>