Buzz Highlights from this week ...

Why IT is from Mars & Marketing is from Venus
With all the new Web 2.0 applications popping up all over this has to be a big issue in any organization
(tags: web2.0)

What Good is Second Life?
Drew raises some great points and observations for anyone considering Second Life
(tags: Second Life)

Is Google Alerts Better Than RSS?
Using Google alerts can enhance your feed reader by helping you monitor terms and companies you are interested in
(tags: RSS)

Using Twitter To Create & Inform Communities
Twitter is here to stay and beginning to take root as a tactic marketers may want to integrate into their marketing mix, Todd Defern explores how to use Twitter to create communities
(tags: Twitter)

Linking Abuse Or Linking Awareness
Andy Beard sets the record straight for how to use links - sometime link love is more like link abuse
(tags: Linking)

 

New Rules of Marketing and PR a podcast with David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott is the publisher of the blog webinknow and a three-time author. His latest book is The New Rules of Marketing and PR, published this year by Wiley.

David's new book covers a lot of ground for marketers who are new to social media tools like blogs, podcasts, etc. It also has lots of ideas for folks who may be more advanced in social media. Personally, I found myself intrigued with the new uses of PR in the marketing mix and wanted to explore that further with David.

Be warned. What he says may shock you …



Link to Original Audio Source

About David

David Meerman Scott is an online thought leader and viral marketing strategist and the author of the number one best selling PR and marketing book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly. The programs he has developed have won numerous awards and are responsible for selling over one billion dollars in products and services worldwide. He has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in more than 20 countries on four continents. Check out his blog at www.WebInkNow.com.

 

Is your brand floating in a Sea of Sameness?

Quite frankly, many brands are. So don’t be surprised to discover the answer is yes.

Forget technology for just a moment. Look at really basic consumer things like pizza shops, ice cream shops or even grocery stores. How’s that for a sea of sameness?

You could argue that pizza shops, ice cream shops and grocers are all kept alive by local patrons who go there for convenience. But you need to look one level down. Grocers like Whole Foods or Trader Joes operate very different models. One basks in the high end, while the other corners the low end. Same industry, yes – but a completely different model!

So what does this mean for technology companies? While we all live in the same industry, certain areas continue to subdivide.

Take search technology. Compare Google with Blinkxx and Spock. We all know what Google does. Blinkxx is the Google of video. And Spock is the Google of people!

Some marketing and advertising executives may think we live in a sea of sameness. But I believe when you get down to the field level of the brand, the waters can be completely different.

 

Buzz Marketing highlights: week of 9/17

How to Get Your Company Listed on Wikipedia, Part II: Damage Control
Excellent article that you may want to keep as reference material for the future. Like the Yellow Pages we should all eventually have a listing of our companies on Wikipedia and correction of factual errors will be important
(tags: Wiki, Wikipedia, Wikis)

Tips For Creating More Engaging Taglines and Slogans
Patrick Schaber nails the worst tagline of all time - frankly I am just glad I didn't write it!
(tags: Advertising)

Lead management is far from an easy task
Brian Carroll gives you the 6 major stages of an effective lead management
(tags: Lead Management)

Blogger Relations: Good Intentions, Bad Execution, Lessons Learned
Todd Defren gives some valuable lessons learned in Blogger relations
(tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blogosphere)

Top 3 Terms to Remember for B2B Blogging
Douglas Karr boils blogging down to just 3 words that you need to abide by
(tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blogosphere)

 

A podcast with the InformationWeek “Power Trio” discussing New Media

Publishing InformationWeek or any major publication has to be a daunting task. But as more and more companies begin to think of themselves as publishers, you should be watching what the major publishers are doing with new media.

That’s why I assembled a team I call the InformationWeek “Power Trio,” who could help me (and you) understand the challenges new media poses and how to get the most out of it…



Link to Original Audio Source

Who is the InformationWeek “Power Trio”?

Bob Evans is senior vice president and editorial director for CMP's Business Technology Group, which includes InformationWeek, TechWeb, Interop, Web 2.0 Expo, Black Hat, and other online and face-to-face products. He is responsible for content strategy and execution across the group's event, online, and print platforms. Evans was editor-in-chief of InformationWeek until 2005. During his tenure, InformationWeek became the undisputed leader in the business-technology field in revenue, readership, circulation, market share, and market authority. He is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and is a frequent speaker at industry events and on college campuses.

Stephen Wellman is editorial director of E-mail Newsletters for the TechWeb Network of CMP Technology. In addition, he serves as editor of Over The Air, InformationWeek's blog dedicated to business mobility and wireless technology. Wellman also serves as editor-in-chief for Grok on Google, the only email newsletter that chronicles the Web's leading agent of change. He is a well-known journalist, industry analyst, and editor with extensive experience in email newsletters and other forms of online content.

Tom Smith is editor in chief of the TechWeb Network. He oversees content strategy and traffic-driving initiatives for broad IT sites including InformationWeek.com and Networkcomputing.com, as well as more topically focused sites including Intelligent Enterprise and Dark Reading. Under his leadership, key sites in the network have posted double digit traffic growth for several years running, and the network's blogging strategy has expanded dramatically. He has launched numerous new products in the network and has a particular interest in the ways online publishing affords a more interactive relationship with readers. He previously worked for a number of weekly and daily newspapers inside and outside the technology industry.

Link  

The new ROI?

I have attempted in a few of my blog entries to calculate a traditional ROI on social media tools for all of us out there experimenting with them. (see Calculating ROI on Web 2.0 tools and More Thoughts on Calculating the ROI of Blogging)

But I am beginning to think there is a completely new way to view social media ROI, and that’s Return on Influence!

For most of us, traditional Web analytics are not sufficient to measure, track and compare the results from social media. So perhaps that requires a completely new and different set of metrics.

For example, the Conversation Index (a term coined by blogger Stowe Boyd) is the ratio between blog posts and comments plus trackbacks. It is simple and measures whether or not a blogger is getting a response from his or her audience.

Add to that Technorati’s Authority and Rank measure for blogs, and you start to have a completely different set of measure and metrics. When you combine those with page views and clicks, you begin to get the true picture.

Like with technology products, a set of standards is what we are all looking for in social media. ROI - Return on Influence - may sound like a new catch phrase. But it also can be a wrapper for an emerging set of standards by which we can measure our social media initiatives.

 

Buzz Marketing highlights: week of 9/10

Will The Ad Slowdown Reach The Web?
OM brings out the latest data on advertising but my belief is that this is a short term pull back in a long term stampede toward more online advertising.
(tags: Internet Marketing)

Applying a Social Computing Strategy to the entire Product Life cycle
Jeremiah does it again! - he looked at a product life cycle and how social media can apply in the process.
(tags: Social Media)

Example of how not to start a Corporate Blog
A great example of how NOT to do a Corporate blog. Right off the bat it sounds like a sales pitch. Good example of a quick comeback by the marketing VP turning a negative situation into a positive (see comment section). Worth a quick read!
(tags: Blogging, Blogs)

7 Ways Marketers Can Use Twitter
There is a lot of Buzz on Twitter these days but this article details out how some marketers are using to help their marketing efforts.
(tags: Twitter)

The Alignment between Marketing and Finance
Brian Carroll makes a good point on reexamining your relationship with Finance. Programs like his lead nurture program go a long way towards building friends not only in sales but in finance.
(tags: Marketing, Finance)

 

How are clients using Web 2.0 tools, a podcast with Joan Damico

Joan Damico runs a blog called the Integrated Marcom blog and a newsletter called the Integrated Marcom Minute. Her work with her clients spans everything from writing copy to helping them experiment with Web 2.0 tools.

Joan was also one of the first responders to our Web 2.0 tools survey, and her experience with her clients shows that they are aggressively looking for ways to leverage Web 2.0 tools. Pay special attention to the discussion around doing an offline event like (dare I say) a trade show versus launching a blog. Interesting stuff!



Link to Original Audio Source

About Joan

Joan is an independent copywriter and consultant with over 15 years’ experience in integrated marketing for high tech companies in software, imaging, optics and electronics. She’s worked in a variety of industries — information technologies, plastics, paint & coatings, textile & apparel, graphic arts, automotive and appliance. Her work has appeared in trade journals here and abroad. She is the author of How to Be a Permanent Temp and a contributing author to The Marketing Manager’s Handbook (by R.W. Bly). Her most recent white paper, Podcasting Demystified, helps businesses successfully integrate podcasting and RSS into their marketing campaigns.

Joan has presented copywriting and integrated direct marketing seminars to numerous groups including the American Writers and Artists Institute, PRSA and BMA, and she has taught college-level courses on marketing communications. She’s written Web pages, direct mailers, articles, brochures, presentations, newsletters and other marketing materials to generate sales leads and sell products and services to businesses.

 

The Future of RSS

Even the president of CBS Interactive thinks syndication of content is big. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Interactive president Quincy Smith explained CBS’s smarter-than-most strategy for a distributed media economy. “We can’t expect consumers to come to us,” he said. “It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that."

"This is the way all media executives should be thinking," Smith continued. "Go to the people. Don’t make the people come to you. That’s expensive for you and inconvenient for them. It’s just not going to happen, and it’s no way to build a media business model anymore." This is very relevant for RSS. Notice Google's acquisition of FeedBurner. They clearly see it too.

The idea here is that RSS is not just a cute way of delivering blog information and getting podcasts onto iTunes. It’s the future delivery model for all content. Throw Ajax into the mix, and you have a recipe for having movable “windows” of content fed into any site.

Now that’s a big idea! And that’s what Google saw when it bought FeedBurner.

 

Buzz highlights from this week ...

Survey says more women blogging than men as blogs hit mainstream
Interesting results and demographics, I liked the part about what percent of Americans know of blogging, vistied a blog and what percent have a blog
(tags: Blogs Blogosphere, Blogging)

Where B2B Marketers Get Leads, New Study
Great data point on how many marketers use their website for lead gen in B2B
(tags: Lead Generation)

What the Web Strategist should know about Twitter
Everything the web strategist and B2B Tech marketer should know about Twittering
(tags: Twitter)

Plaxo Pulse Aggregating Your Social Networking Profiles
Great idea by Plaxo if they can pull it off I think it will be very successful
(tags: Social Networking, Social Networks)

Online ad spending will surpass radio ad spending this year!
eMarketer uncovers online ad spending surpasses radio in 2007, another report showed online ad spending surpassing offline ad spending in 2011!
(tags: Online advertising, Radio advertising)

 

Field Marketing 2.0: The Next Generation of Demand Creation

SiriusDecisions recently released a report on Field Marketing 2.0 that evolves the principles created in Field Marketing 1.0.

The key differences are: a tighter connection to sales, processes to support that connection, technology as a backbone for those processes, and metrics that justify spending and prove the impact to sales, executive management and even the board of directors.

While that may sound like a lofty set of goals, I believe it isn’t. If you have in place a few not-so-simple things, you can begin to move down this path. First: do you understand what a lead really is in the eyes of sales (not marketing)? Once you have that, as a marketer how far can you get sales down that road? Once you know that, how you design your processes to support that in every campaign you run becomes easy.

What I really liked in the report was the redefined funnel of lead management: It goes from Inquiries, to Marketing Qualified Leads, to Sales Accepted Leads, to Sales Qualified Leads and then to Won Business. Finally, the report provides a definition that addresses a key fact: just because someone contacts you doesn’t mean that’s a lead. It’s an inquiry that needs to be qualified by marketing before it can be accepted by sales.

Evolving from Field Marketing 1.0 may seem like a daunting task, but the rewards of creating a tighter connection to sales are worth the effort.

 

Building a Community: The Right Steps

Building a community online is like building a business. You have to take all the right steps if you want to succeed long term. Community building also shouldn’t be thought of as a marketing campaign, which implies a beginning and an end. Communities are much longer term.

I believe it’s presumptuous to think we can build a community from scratch. Most successful communities get their start around a very specific need (like the Apple user community) or exist already as a group that has common interests (like a peer group of CFOs).

Having said that, if you can find a way to tap into an existing community, or a subset of it, you will surely have a winning community on your hands.

Ok, if that’s the case, all that’s left is to build a community and take the right steps. Here are my 5 steps to creating a community:

1) Start with potential members – who are they, what do they want, what can we offer.

2) Lay the foundation by starting offline, developing a small member council, selecting an independent chair, and planning a regular meeting of the council.

3) Develop the community by providing value to the council – best practices in other communities, online facilities for collaboration, tools for promoting the community.

4) Create an anchor event for face-to-face interaction and recruitment. Build relationships between members of the council and community members. Generate great content for potential members of the community.

5) Provide the best online meeting place possible, where members can post their own content, interact with others, and ask other experts.

Community is a long-term investment that centers on people, not technology. You can have the best technology in place, and yet no one will show up. A well-run community can be your most important channel to your customers and prospects.