Buzz Marketing for Technology

JUNE 30, 2010

In a recent speech by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research at the ITSMA Marketing Leadership forum it occurred to me that customer acquisition is no longer an “end state” for marketers its somewhere in the middle. Let me explain …. Many marketers focus their efforts on the customer acquisition angle which has the benefit of measurability and thus the accountability for ROI.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

NOVEMBER 10, 2010

You often hear about the concept of mapping content to the sales funnel (especially in B2B Marketing) but it’s not so common in practice. I will self confess that I have ignored this one for a while. The other version of this is the mapping of content to your buyer types and this too is one I have ignored for a while … until now! Ok so I took a look at my sales funnel and started to take the content my team produces and map it against the funnel – for simplicity sake I like to use Awareness to C

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

NOVEMBER 10, 2010

You often hear about the concept of mapping content to the sales funnel (especially in B2B Marketing) but it’s not so common in practice. I will self confess that I have ignored this one for a while. The other version of this is the mapping of content to your buyer types and this too is one I have ignored for a while … until now! Ok so I took a look at my sales funnel and started to take the content my team produces and map it against the funnel – for simplicity sake I like to use Awareness to C

Types 255

Types Content Case Study Press Release 255

Buzz Marketing for Technology

JANUARY 21, 2010

Ok ok – based on the great response I got from my readers on my last blog post The 4 C’s of B2B Marketing I thought I would try to apply the same principle to Social Media Marketing. Frankly, I have been brewing this post for a while now and its time to let it loose. It combines a few things you might have read about into one new concept around social media – the 4 P’s of Social Media marketing.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

AUGUST 18, 2010

So I ran across some interesting stats last week when I picked up a tweet from Jeff Bullas on the 15 essential social media facts and figures for B2B Marketing. Seems as if more B2B Marketers are engaged in Social Media then B2C marketers (actually data point from the article – 81 % of B2B companies have accounts on social media sites compared to 67% of B2C) which leads me to think Social Media has gone mainstream in B2B.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

Last year I wrote about how the balance of content has shifted. Bottom line is there is more content being produced by Users than by Publishers these days. Which means Publishers (or Marketers) are now the “white noise” in comparison to User Generated Content. Our messages are being drowned out by user generated content. This struck me recently at a concert I attended in Madison Square Garden where everyone around me was either texting, taking pictures or video taping (using their smartphone) th

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

NOVEMBER 17, 2010

Everyday I provide support on the social web to customers. For the last 18 months we have solved hundreds of issues both small and large for customers around the globe, some as quickly as 15min others as long as 24 hours. But what’s becoming clear to me is that real time communications is essential in this new multi channel world where you better be listening for your customers and delighting them with Social Customer Service.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

APRIL 8, 2010

Let’s face it at this point social media has gone mainstream. Customers are not only surfing the web looking for information but more and more they are relying on social media to get their information. Your customers can seamlessly move from web to social to call center to your front door. But do you treat them the same in each channel? Do the owners of each channel interact with each other?

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

SEPTEMBER 15, 2010

It’s no secret that the number of publications has declined over the last few years. The impact of that can be felt in B2C as well as B2B Marketing. There are fewer numbers of print publications remaining and every company’s marketing department wants to garner more traditional press. But it’s a zero sum game and we are all fighting over the same shrinking slice of pie!

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

SEPTEMBER 29, 2010

At a recent BlogWell event I got a chance to hear Robert Raines from Chevron present his Social Media program and how he reports their activity into the Boardroom. It all starts with the Pulse Report that Chevron had produced by Edelman (their PR firm) using their Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool. They identified around 60 Million conversations (per year) across blogs, microblogs such as Twitter, discussion forums and social networks like Facebook and other enabling technologies such

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

AUGUST 11, 2010

Whether you’re on the Facebook home page, reading comments on a friends’ Walls, or playing your favorite Facebook game, you have probably noticed at least one advertisement running on the right hand side on the page. These ads are available to anyone with an advertising budget, from $1 to $1 billion. And many large advertisers, such as Pepsi, Proctor & Gamble, and Wal-Mart are running ads on Facebook, but so are many small businesses.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

APRIL 27, 2010

One of the biggest challenges for organizations today is managing the flow of information about their brands, products, and services that occurs in social media channels, including microblogs (such as Twitter), social networking sites (such as Facebook), blogs, and online forums. More than ever, consumers use social media to spread the word about the brands they like and perhaps more importantly, don’t like.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

So here is a little fact that really scares me – User Generated Content has surpassed that of publisher content which means we marketers (or publishers) are the “white noise” to the User Generated Content “signal” they produce. So let’s dive into that for a moment …. At a recent concert I was attending at Madison Square Garden – the most popular thing to do at the concert was not dancing (good thing in case you have seen me dance) but it was video taping, text messaging, and generally shar

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MARCH 18, 2010

In the last post we covered how to create a Social Media Lead Flow. And once you have identified the conversations where you think a sales opportunity may be occurring you need to feed that into your listening platform so you can flag those opportunities when they come in. But what if you don’t have a listening platform? There is a growing number of listening platforms devoted to Social Media – everything from highly customized services that are managed for you, to free tools you can manag

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

APRIL 6, 2010

When you think of lead nurturing platforms you typically think of firms like Eloqua, Marketo, Aprimo, LeadLife, Market2Lead, Silverpop, even Salesforce.com is getting into the lead nurturing space. But Facebook? Lead nurturing starts by taking many touch points and pulling them all together into one spot so you can see patterns of activity across your customer base and get a true profile of what they are doing.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JULY 28, 2010

If you ask the members of my leadership team – they will tell you I keep talking about how I think we have B2B Marketing backward. Let me explain …. We focus a lot of energy on the acquisition part of marketing looking for new customers and getting them up the awareness to consideration to purchase cycle. The results being most of the time we get ambivalent buyers into the top of our funnel and we have to work hard to close them in order to prove value to the organization and contribute to growt

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MARCH 4, 2010

I want to roll the clock back a few weeks to the announcement of an initiative by Facebook called – Project Titan. At the time that I saw it and tweeted about it (of course) it really hadn’t hit me just how important this could be to any business. What seemed like a pretty basic message about an upgrade message of their current email system which is rather archaic (you know, the one that makes you delete messages one by one!

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

AUGUST 25, 2010

According to a study conducted by Gartner , the first quarter of 2010 witnessed a whopping 707 percent increase in Android sales. As a result, the sales of the Google Android OS-based smartphones have surpassed the sales of the Microsoft Windows Mobile-based handsets around the world. And this month I saw a stat that said the sales of Google Android phones in the U.S. are rising so quickly, that they have outsold Apple handsets for the first time on record and it got me thinking.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

A while back I created a post called – There is no “campaign&# in Social Media because when marketers use the word “campaign,” it tends to suggest an initiative to get a message out to a targeted group of constituents. It also implies there will be a beginning and, somewhere down the road, an ending. And I still believe that is the case … And despite a number of comments I got about that post both positive and negative – I think I stopped short of really nailing the issue

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JANUARY 14, 2010

In a recent BusinessWeek article featuring Tony Hsieh from Zappos – they closed with a quote from Tony “Sharing is how we build our brand.&# And I couldn’t help but agree. Whether you are a CMO’s of a B2C or B2B Marketing team the key in this next decade is sharing and the key to sharing is Content! Some people call it Content Marketing (Junta42) some people call it Inbound Marketing (HubSpot) but the meaning is basically the same.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JANUARY 5, 2010

At the end of the last decade we saw Amazon snap up Zappos for $928 Million. Combining two of the most customer focused organizations I am aware of on the web and making one of the most powerful customer centric companies out there. Social media has forever changed the balance of nature in favor of the customer. Zappos was a beacon at the vanguard of how to communicate with customers socially which is why I believe they were so attractive to Amazon.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

DECEMBER 29, 2010

Far and away one of the best blog posts I wrote this year was on the new 4′c of B2B Marketing – it was read over 15,000 times and 3X more popular than the next most read blog post of the year. This inspired me to do a quick 10 Best Posts of 2010 as we slide into the New Year. I hope you enjoy it … 4 C’s of B2B Marketing – We’ve all heard about the four P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Placement, Promotion.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JUNE 15, 2010

Great question which I found myself asking last night after I reviewed my recent Myers Briggs score. I found it interesting that my score came in as ENTJ. For those of you who aren’t aware of the Myers Briggs test it asks you a bunch of questions from multiple angles to rate you on 4 basic scales: your Favorite World (Introvert/Extrovert), Information (Sensing/Institution), Decisions (Thinking/Feeling) and Structure (Judging or Perceiving).

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MARCH 2, 2010

A recent Cone Inc.’s Social Media in Business study found that 60 percent of consumers believe they are already interacting with companies on the social Web. Nearly all participants — 93 percent — believe all companies should have a presence in social media. And 85 percent believe companies should not just present information via social media, but use it to interact and become more engaged with them.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JUNE 9, 2010

At the recent ITSMA Marketing Leadership forum I was stunned by a presentation given by Sean Geehan CEO of the Geehan Group author of the upcoming book the B2B Executive Playbook. The big eye opener for me was – B2B marketers are always tasked with getting net new customers when in reality their existing customer base is their most important source of revenue and referrals.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MARCH 16, 2010

Word spreads quickly in Social Media – sometimes more quickly than you can keep up with. You must keep a constant eye on mentions of your brand, your products and your services in order to survive in this market landscape. In the last post we covered Social Media Listening for B2B Marketing and while providing outstanding customer support is always a good choice when it comes to building a business case that will stand up in the boardroom, another very fertile area to consider is creating

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MARCH 11, 2010

One of the biggest challenges for organizations today is managing the flow of information about their brands, products, and services that occurs in social media channels, including microblogs (such as Twitter), social networking sites (such as Facebook), blogs, and online forums. More than ever, customers are using social media to spread the word about the brands they like and perhaps more importantly, don’t like.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JANUARY 26, 2010

At a recent dinner with a buddy of mine from Microsoft (who helped launch Bing) – I learned a lot more about the search market and a very important trend that can effect the future of B2B Marketing. When you think about the search behavior of the average person online – we are mostly conditioned to search in very routine ways like pulling up a Google search page, using the toolbar in your browser etc.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MARCH 30, 2010

I am a big fan of David Meerman Scott’s work and I am in the middle of re-reading his book the New Rules of Marketing and PR 2nd edition ! In the book he stresses the importance of having a “buyer persona” and his definition a buyer persona is a “distinct group of potential customers expressed as an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach”.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JANUARY 12, 2010

Ok so what does a humpback whale have to do with marketing? Check out this campaign from Greenpeace for the answer. Greenpeace was hoping to raise the awareness about humpback whales that were being threatened by the Japanese Fisheries Agency’s plan to kill 50 humpback whales. They started with an online competition to name the humpback whales that Greenpeace were tracking via satellite in the Pacific.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

APRIL 21, 2010

There is a big difference between data and insights. Technology may have given us access now to endless amounts of data from every corner of the world. But the real challenge is making sense of all this seemingly disconnected data. Data by itself is generally valueless which is why for the most part it takes human gray matter applied to the data to make it into actionable insights.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MARCH 9, 2010

In my new advisory role for the member s of MENG I have been getting a bunch of questions from the members that are making great fodder for blog posts. One question has popped up a few times to I thought it was worthy of some research and comparative analysis to give you a very clear answer. The question is – What is the appropriate level of budget to support social media for a B2B company?

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JUNE 17, 2010

By now I am sure you have heard of the movie Bucket List. In real life we all have one and some bucket lists may be longer than others. On my list (for those of you who know me well) are many opportunities and ideas enabled by my love for sailing. So naturally sailing in a race from Newport RI to Bermuda is on my list. So this year I decided to join in one of the world’s classic ocean race.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JULY 21, 2010

Ok I know we all talk a good game about Closed Loop Marketing and I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble here but frankly we aren’t there yet. Yes we forced the loop to close with some great technologies over the last few years. CRM systems, MRM systems, Lead Nurturing systems and the list goes on. But do we really have an all in one Closed Loop market system that does it all?

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

JANUARY 28, 2010

According to Wikipedia – Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

For some reason there is a lot of confusion about the word Content lately. Back in the late 90s when the internet was just heating up we all heard alot about how “Content is King&#. But these days for B2B Marketers I think we need to take it a step further and say that “Content is Media&#. If you have been following my thoughts on the 4 C’s of Marketing – it all starts with content.

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Buzz Marketing for Technology

MAY 11, 2010

I have been in talks with a few companies lately about their social media efforts especially when it comes to supporting customers using social media ( the topic of my new book ). And I have noticed a difference between the successful ones and the not so successful ones. It comes down to one basic organizational difference …. At the highest level there is really 2 ways to organize your social media efforts: Centralized or Decentralized.

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