SocialTech 2010

The Official Pre-Game Blog for MarketingProfs' SocialTech 2010 Conference, October 26, San Jose, CA

Smart B2B Companies Now Think Like Media Companies

A guest post by Maria Pergolino, Director of Marketing, Marketo.

Today, more B2B companies are thinking like media companies. They realize it isn’t about traditional selling or interrupting people, it’s about connecting with their audience and building permission.

But what do audiences actually want? They want useful, actionable information that helps solve problems, answer questions and make connections. To that end, valuable B2B content helps companies increase trust and ultimately boost lead generation in a way that scales. To achieve this, follow the steps outlined next to build your brand with valuable content:

1. Planning. The key to thinking like a media company is to add a solid content strategy to your overall B2B marketing plan. Once this is established, you have a clear and decisive direction for your content. Part of the planning process should involve a deep dive into the content that matters to your audience. The planning phase should address buyer personas, understanding potential audiences, what problems they have and how they can be solved. Once you set clear and definable goals for your content, it’s time to start creating that content.

2. Content creation. Traditional push marketing tactics and sales-like pitches are only half the battle. Smart companies are using inbound approaches by marketing with powerful and engaging B2B content. Carefully crafted, genuinely useful content with valuable information bring prospects in organically and gets them thinking—generating higher qualified leads. Sample content formats to leverage include:

1. B2B blogs
2. Video content
3. Audio content (e.g., podcasts)
4. White papers
5. B2B case studies
6. Guest posting on other industry-relevant blogs
7. Creative and shared content through B2B social media

3. Promotion. Building the right content is not enough. To read it, your audience needs to find the content. Making it as simple as possible for your prospects to find, share and consume is vital.To get your content seen and shared, develop a promotion process for each piece of content in order for it to have the highest propensity to spread across the web. This process should be tailored to your category and include both search and social tactics.

Every company is a media company. Today, B2B companies connect faster and easier with audiences of prospective customers—and powerful content is the key to attracting new business. Harnessing it can bring in more fans and ultimately more sales.

3 Social Media Measurement Tips From #TechChat

Last week, Andrew Spoeth of Marketo was kind enough to guest host #TechChat with us. Andrew is also co-moderator of #B2BChat, and he was previously director of Marketing at B2B search firm Enquiro. We were thrilled to have him join us!

Andrew and I chatted with attendees about social media measurement (transcript available here). And within 10 minutes, it was clear: Many marketers aren’t measuring social media. However, even though social media measurement is relatively new territory, our savvy attendees and guest host brought many golden nuggets of wisdom to the chat. From last week’s #TechChat, here are my 3 favorite social media measurement tips:

1. The first step in social media measurement is to define why you want to measure something. (via @AndrewSpoeth)
While it may seem obvious, you must decide why you want to measure something. And then if you don’t know or have a good answer, don’t waste time measuring it. Because measurement for measurement’s sake is a waste of time.

2. Track reach but identify insights and understand quality of the connection or engagement. (via @robpetersen)
Tracking reach is important, but as Rob pointed out, quality is important too. Are the people you’re engaging with influencers? Or are they bots that auto-follow?

3. Making friends with the “cool kids” isn’t the shortest distance. Build your own base to become a “cool kid.” (via @RLMadMan)
Always the wise attendee, Marjorie pointed out that just wooing the “cool” kids isn’t enough. As a marketer, you must build your own band of followers. Sure, they may not have 20,000 followers and a Technorati Top 100 blog, but their loyalty can snowball into a tribe that’s bigger than just two or three cool kids.

Thanks again to Andrew, Rob, Marjorie, and the rest of the #TechChat attendees for your insights. To learn more about B2B social media marketing, join us October 26 for SocialTech 2010. SocialTech is our new conference about social media for the high-tech industry, featuring three keynotes, 14 sessions, and more than 30 B2B social media experts. You can attend live in San Jose or from the comfort of your own computer. See you in San Jose.

7 Reasons You'll Love SocialTech

While we're busy putting the finishing touches on SocialTech, we started to think about why the conference is different than other online marketing conferences, and came up with these 7 reasons we think know you'll love SocialTech: 

1. It Features Real, Actionable Case Studies from Brand-Side Marketers
Each session features actionable case studies from marketers at companies like Motorola, Cisco Systems, SAP and more. You'll discover exactly how they are using social media to drive real, measurable business results.

2. It's Uniquely Focused on B2B Marketing at Companies in the High-Tech Industry
SocialTech is the first conference focused specifically on social media marketing for companies in the high-tech space. You'll learn how to successfully market high-tech products and services via social media, and solve the unique challenges faced by B2B marketers today.

3. Scoble, Kawasaki, and Owyang—All in One Day
Where else can you get inspired by tech leaders like Guy Kawasaki, Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble all in one day?

4. We've Hand Picked Content without Pitches
Each keynote and speaker has been carefully vetted to ensure a high-quality, actionable presentation without any pitch or persuasion.

5. You Can Attend In Person OR Online
We must admit—we'd love to see your gorgeous face in person. But we understand that you may not be able to travel all the way to San Jose, so we're streaming all of the keynotes and sessions for virtual attendees.

6. It's Short, but to the Point
While we'd love to spend a few days getting to know you, we know that busy marketers like yourself don't always have the time to set aside 3 or 4 days to attend a conference. So we've packed a year's worth of advice and learning into a single day in San Jose.

7. Great Networking and Tasty Food
Like all MarketingProfs events, we've made sure to set aside time to eat, drink, and be merry with your marketing peers from companies like Intel, Adobe and Intuit.

4 Ways Content Builds Relationships with Prospects

A guest post by Maria Pergolino, Director of Marketing, Marketo.

Engaging B2B content can improve search rankings, conversion rates, lead generation and even overall revenue, but it also builds relationships. When you read great content, aren’t you compelled to comment or share it? That’s the beginning of building a relationship.

Instead of direct selling to prospects, begin to build a relationship with them; forge trust; find out their needs and recommend the right solution for them—prospects buy from people they trust.

Ready to know more about building relationships with content? Here are 4 ways that B2B content helps build relationships.

1. Guest posting: Writing blog posts on other B2B blogs in your industry is a powerful way to position your brand in front of a new audience. By getting in front of other established blog’s readers, you have the potential to build relationships with many readers. To start a conversation with those readers, do such things as invite readers to comment on your post and reply to those comments in a timely manner.Relations aren’t built without effort—you need to encourage readers to engage with you. By delivering helpful, relevant information in your guest post and invite interaction, you open the door to a relationship with that reader.

2. Commenting: Whether it’s on a post from your B2B blog, a guest post or going out and commenting on other blogs in your industry, commenting is a small but powerful way to start conversations. Start building relationships with readers by finding outside blogs or B2B forums, and see what others are talking about and then add to the conversation by adding your own comments. By providing value to the conversation, this expands the audience you are trying to reach and starts building relationships.

3. Social media: B2B social media puts you in touch with prospects in a more personal way—engaging on a personal level with prospects helps build relationships and builds up trust with your prospects. Using B2B social media, you have the opportunity to easily monitor and engage with others on issues in your industry. Also look to monitor social traffic for mentions of your brand, both good and bad. By becoming a resource for them and solving their problems, you can build and repair relationships with potential prospects.

4. Links: You may have heard to be cautious when linking away from your site and it’s true—you should be cautious. However, to get link love, you have to share link love , especially when it’s providing your audience with value. There will be times when the benefits to sending links away from your site outweigh the negatives. By linking out to others, it’s a signal that you value their content. This can be an effective strategy for beginning a relationship with others in the industry and may even result in a link back to you.

Great content not only informs and sells; it also builds relationships with prospects and influencers in your industry—an example of a great B2B blog is this Marketing Profs blog.

When you leverage powerful B2B content from blogs, social networks and even content sharing through links, you start to build the right relationships that will be valuable now and in the future.

Top 10 B2B Blogging Tips

Last week, MarketingProfs hosted a killer #TechChat with special guest, @MackCollier. The topic was B2B blogging. And we’re so grateful for all of the advice Mack shared during the chat!

From last week's chat, here are the top 10 B2B blogging tips from last week's #TechChat with Mack Collier.

1. “Focus on your subject matter experts, then teach them social tools. You can be the evangelist your biz needs.” (@carissao)

2. “Blogging is like learning to ride a bike—use training wheels, get balance, then go for it! Same applies to Social Media.” (@susanbeebe)

3. “Don’t forget to have a blog promotion plan along with posting/publishing plan.” (@pushingsocial)

4. “Your blog can’t just be a sales pitch, that is going to get old VERY quickly. Related to the industry you’re in w/o being ’salesy.’” (@mikulaja)

5. “Content about your customers draws more customers than content about your product.” (@robpetersen)

6. “I think blogging is the polar opposite of advertising if it’s done well. Don’t post press releases.” (@RLMadMan)

7. “Anyone who thinks a blog isn’t work, time, and investment is selling something. Or clueless.” (@AmberCadabra)

8. “Blogging goals should always stem from overall strategic goals and brand voice.” (@joey_strawn)

9. “B2B blogging allows you to educate prospective and current customers in your field.” (@DavidSpinks)

10. “I believe that every business blog takes on a life of its own, no two should be alike.” (@Michael_Evanko)

4 B2B Social Media Lessons from Cisco Systems

Marketing at the enterprise level has a unique set of challenges — lack of agility, decentralized teams, and long approval processes — to name a few.  Lucky for us, we had the opportunity to chat with SocialTech presenter, LaSandra Brill of Cisco Systems, about ways they have overcome these challenges in their social media program, and consequently, have driven significant return on investment. As LaSandra revealed during #TechChat (transcript available here), social media made the launch of Cisco's ASR family of routers one of the top five most successful launches in Cisco history, reaching ninety times the audience of previous launch campaigns, at one-sixth of the cost!!! Yep, that deserved 3 exclamation points.

From last week's #TechChat, here are 4 social media lessons for the enterprise from LaSandra Brill of Cisco Systems:

1. Educate Employees on Social Media Marketing Best Practices

How many people have you met that say,"I just don't get Twitter. People don't care what I ate for lunch or that my cat just puked."?

If you're like me, you've met lots of 'em. Marketers, too. But Cisco Systems is turning regular employees into social media enthusiasts by educating them on social media best practices with their in-house optional social media certificate program.

2. Have an Open Social Media Policy

Unlike Apple (and the NFL), Cisco encourages social media participation, and has a clear social media policy. Want to comment on a blog, or Tweet about Cisco? Go for it — as long as you follow these rules.

3. Encourage All Employees to Participate

The one advantage that large corporations have is well, a large workforce. Cisco has 70,000 employees — 70,000 potential social media brand champions. Just imagine the power those 70,000 people would have on Twitter. Pretty awesome, isn't it?

4. Share Knowledge with Other Groups

Cisco has an internal site where they post best practices and planning resources. They meet and share their success stories monthly. So if product team A finds out that XYZ works, they can easily share it with product team B, and vice-versa.

A big thank you to LaSandra for participating in #TechChat, and an even bigger thank you for those of you who shared your insights during last week's seminar Cisco and the Social Web — it got rave reviews!  If missed the free seminar and want to learn more about Cisco's high-performance social media program, have a listen to the recording. Learn even more about high-tech B2B social media marketing in San Jose at SocialTech 2010. SocialTech is our new conference about social media for the high-tech industry. Not in San Jose? No worries. We're streaming all content to virtual attendees as well.

And don't forget: #TechChat is every Tuesday at 8 PM ET. Our next guest is Michael Brito, SVP of Social Media at Edelman Digital. Michael has worked for major brands in Silicon Valley (HP, Yahoo! and Intel) and was instrumental in driving social media programs and campaigns emphasizing authenticity and long-term relationship building. Awesome, right? We can't wait to see what lessons he has to share.

3 Social Media Ideas from #TechChat with Guy Kawasaki

Whew! We hosted our first #TechChat last Tuesday with our special guest, Guy Kawasaki. More than 500 RSM (really smart marketers) joined us to chat with Guy about social media marketing for the high-tech industry. While the chat moved faster than any chat I’ve ever attended, most of us were able to take away a few key insights about social media marketing.

Here are my favorites:

1. Trial and error leads to strategy.

Because social media is still relatively new territory for most marketers, it makes sense to develop your strategy as you go along. You can’t plan what you don’t know. According to Guy, “I think ’social media planning and strategy’ is an oxymoron. Basically, you try stuff and see what sticks.”

2. It’s all about the numbers.

Let’s be real. Twitter is all about the numbers. The more followers you have, the more opportunities for developing connections you have. According to Guy, “The best way to get good connections is to get more followers. It’s the big law of numbers.”  With more than 250,000 followers, Guy has played that game very, very well.

3. No one’s an expert. We’re all experts.

Again, because Twitter is so new, we all have the opportunity to be experts. Unlike other forms of marketing, we’re all still figuring Twitter out along the way. So seize this opportunity to own it like no one else. Guy says, “No one’s an expert at social media. One of the reasons I love it is we all have a fighting chance to use this thing effectively!”

A big THANK YOU to Guy for these insights, and thanks to everyone for attending. If you missed the inaugural #TechChat, don’t fret. WTHashtag has a transcript, the Isatis Marketing Blog compiled the best Tweets from Guy, and Stanford Smith wrote a great blog entitled, “How to Tweet like a ‘Beat Reporter—#TechChat Edition.”

Ready for more? Join us Tuesday, August 24 from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Eastern standard time) for the second #TechChat. We’ll be chatting with special guest, LaSandra Brill, social media manager at Cisco Systems, about social media for high-tech, B2B marketing. LaSandra is also presenting the new seminar, “Cisco and the Social Web: Our Adoption and Evolution,” on Thursday, August 26 at noon (Eastern standard time).

3 Other Social Networks for High-Tech Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. When B2B marketers decide to dive into social media marketing, they usually start there. However, when marketing a high-tech product or service, the use of video and presentations plays an important role in the buying process, allowing them to explain the benefit of a product with more than just words.

To help you take your high-tech social media marketing to the next level, here are 3 other social networks you should consider using.

1. SlideShare
Do you have a corporate SlideShare account? You should. SlideShare is a great way to demonstrate the benefit of your solution in presentation format. You can imbed the presentations in a blog or article, or provide presentation links to your sales team for use in the sales process. Whether you create new presentations or upload files you have on hand, Slideshare presentations don’t have to be long or wordy. In fact, Cisco System’s most viewed presentation is just one slide long!

2. StumbleUpon
If you’ve ever had a piece of content get hot on StumbleUpon, you know that it can drive significant amounts of traffic for weeks, months, and even years. While you can Stumble (or vote) on your own thought leadership content, it’s best to let your visitors Stumble your content for you. Make sure you have a StumbleUpon button on your content to remind your visitors to Stumble it, and ,of course, create “Stumble-worthy” content. I’ve had the most success (literally thousands of visits a week!) on StumbleUpon with comprehensive, top 10 lists.

3. YouTube
You know video is important in B2B marketing—from product tours to demos to presentations. But are you creating video content specifically for YouTube? Or are you just uploading formal demos to the channel? Instead of simply uploading previously created content to YouTube, get up close and personal with interviews with the executive team, product team, and your customers. The great thing about YouTube is that users actually expect user-generated content, so your videos don’t have to be expensive, big-budget productions. In fact, your prospects may relate better to an informal conversation with the engineering team, rather than a formal corporate video with the CEO.

What other networks should high-tech marketers be using? Let’s talk about it in the comments below.

Chat with Guy Kawasaki August 17th

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of #TechChat, the first and only Twitter chat about social media marketing for the high-tech industry. Starting August 17th, join hosts @MarketingProfs and @MprofsEvents every Tuesday at 8 PM ET to chat with industry experts about social media for high-tech marketing.

The best part? Our first guest is @GuyKawasaki. Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. He’s a former Apple Evangelist, a social media expert, all around kick ass guy, and a keynote speaker at our upcoming SocialTech Conference, which will be held October 26th in San Jose.

If that hasn’t convinced you to log in August 17th at 8 PM ET, here are 4 reasons to attend the inaugural #TechChat with @GuyKawasaki:

1. Guy Kawasaki is the man.
We could go on and on about the reasons he rocks, but let’s get straight to the point. There are very few people (if any) who have used Twitter as successfully as Guy has. He has over 250,000 followers and consistently updates his followers with the best, most interesting content on the web. If you join #TechChat, you’ll chat directly with Guy and and see his insights on marketing high-tech products via the social web.

2. Build Your Own Brand
If you’re new to Twitter Chats, they’re a fantastic way to interact with people, share your own opinions and advice, and network with superstars like Guy.

3. It’s easy!
You don’t even have to Tweet anything (although you should!). To join the chat, you’ll simply add #TechChat to the end of your tweets and join the conversation with Guy, Ann Handley, and other smart marketers like yourself. Or you can simply follow the #TechChat hashtag on Twitter. Whether you contribute or merely lurk, it’s a free hour of networking and advice, straight from your own computer.

4. Get a Preview of SocialTech 2010
SocialTech is our brand-new conference all about social media for high-tech marketing. Consider #TechChat as a free preview of what we have in store for attendees.

5. Free snacks!
Let’s not forget: there will be free beer and jalapeno poppers for all attendees.*

Have I convinced you yet? Fantastic! I’m glad you can make it. See you Tuesday August 17th at 8 PM ET for the first #TechChat.

* Assuming you BYO, of course.

4 Ways to Improve B2B Facebook Marketing

While Facebook marketing continues to grow at lightning speed, it’s still relatively untapped territory for many high-tech marketers. Just because Facebook got it's start with the college crowd in 2004 doesn’t mean B2B marketers shouldn’t be there in 2010. With that in mind, here are 4 ideas for getting more from your B2B Facebook Marketing.
 
1. Humanize Your Fan Page
No matter how large or corporate your company is, people still buy from other people. As a marketer, you must strike that magical balance of being professional and personable so your prospects feel connected to your product(s) and your brand. Humanize your Fan Page by uploading pictures of employees and your office(s). Give prospects a view of what goes on behind the scenes. Introduce them to engineers, customers, the product team, the sales team, and the CEO. The more they get to know you, the more they’ll trust you. And the more likely they’ll be to choose you over a competitor.
 
2. Consider Facebook Your Competitive Advantage
As popular as social media marketing is in high-tech B2B marketing, it’s still in it's infancy. Do a quick search and take a look at the Facebook Pages for the largest software and hardware companies. While most have a Facebook presence, few are harnessing it's full potential. Use this to your advantage and make your Fan Page better than your competitors’.
 
3. Take a Group Approach
While many larger companies have full-time social media marketers on hand, in smaller or less progressive organizations, social media still falls under a marketing manager or PR manager’s responsibility—and their plates are already full. By allowing multiple team members to update the page, you’ll increase the frequency of updates and subsequent Fan activity on the page. Just make sure you have strict guidelines in place on what’s acceptable and what’s not. I’ve seen this group approach produce significantly better results than having just one or two Fan Page administrators. Nothing’s worse than landing on a Fan page that hasn’t been updated in weeks.
 
4. Create an Opt-In Form with Static FBML
With static FBML, you can create a custom tab that allows Fans to subscribe to your newsletter, request a white paper, or contact a sales representative. Most email solutions have instructions on how to integrate an opt-in form with static FBML.
 
What high-tech organizations do you think are doing a stand-up job on their social media marketing? Let’s talk about it in the comments below!