Think you won’t reach IT decision makers with social media? Think again! UBM’s 2011 Social Media and IT Marketing research shows that 69% of IT decision makers use LinkedIn and 44% use Twitter for professional use. And, 84% visit corporate blogs for professional purposes and one-third of those contacted the technology vendor for more information after visiting.

Turns out IT decision makers are social too! The majority use social networking to stay connected to co-workers and maintain their professional relationships, which are down slightly from last year. However, one of the largest and growing reasons is around their desire to make informed technology purchasing decisions.

For B2B marketers in the high-tech/software industry, this information is key in creating a social media strategy that addresses what these IT decision makers are looking for. Unfortunately, many B2B companies are still struggling to embrace social media as a marketing and lead generation tool. Additional studies show that over 60% say they have no staff dedicated to managing social media activities.

Social media activities such as blogging and the use of Twitter require almost daily attention. B2B marketers need to incorporate them into the overall strategy including the editorial calendar, yet be flexible enough to know when to change direction when business or technical trends shift.
Most marketers and content producers have a good understanding of what the IT decision maker needs in order to make influence the purchasing decision. However, many have not fully utilized the social media channel for distributing that content.

For those that don’t yet have the content that the IT decision makers are looking for, like data sheets, case studies, and white papers, social media may take a much lower priority. The IT decision maker is out there, already engaging with vendors, both passively and actively. B2B marketers cannot wait until all of the content is complete before incorporating social media into their marketing activities. They need to start where they are and grow both their social media channel experience and marketing content at the same time. They need to be available and found when IT decision makers go looking.

These geeks have gone social and they’re looking for you. Are you there?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I’ve been seeing QR codes more and more and wondered how I might incorporate them into my own marketing content and activities for B2B companies. After doing much research, testing, and my own brainstorming, I came up with this infographic to help pull it all together. Hope you enjoy it!

You can also download the PDF version here.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Websites used to be easy. Just get your site designed, developed, launched, and sit back and wait for visitors to enjoy—right? Well, things have changed quite a bit in the last couple years.

These days, our would-be website visitors have numerous avenues to find information. It’s now our job to make sure they find ours. That means getting your content out there where your visitors can find it. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy – especially if your website uses the WordPress platform.

The simplest way to get started is to connect to the major social media outlets: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Once you get comfortable with these, it’s easy to add additional outlets like YouTube and others.

WordPress makes this very easy with the use of plugins. Here are the plugins I use:

Follow Me – Offers hyperlinked social media icons that your users can click on to follow you.

FT FacePress II – Pushes new blog posts to your Facebook Fan page using Facebook’s mobile e-mail address.

Sociable – Provides a wide variety of social media buttons at the bottom of every post so that users can share your content with others.

Social Media Widget – Similar to Follow Me but let’s you put your social media links in your sidebar or footer so that users can easily connect with you.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – This places a retweet button next to your blog posts so that users can retweet your post.

Twitter Tools – This plugin will automatically push a link to your new blog post to your Twitter feed. It can also create a blog post of your most recent tweets – but I personally don’t use that feature.

Twitter Widget – This is a nice way to share your most recent tweets on your website. It helps users see what you’ve been up to, what you care about, and catch up on info they may  have missed.

RSS – This isn’t a plugin but a feature that comes with WordPress. Users can subscribe via RSS and have new posts pushed to their RSS reader.

LinkedIn – I don’t use a plugin but you can configure your LinkedIn account to accept your latest tweets and Facebook updates.

Subscribe2 – And, for those who still don’t get the whole social media thing but want to stay connected, you can offer to email them when you have new posts. They just have to sign up.

Now you have no excuse not to power your website with social media. It’s easy, quick, free, and will have a huge impact on the reach of your brand and content. If you’re still using a static HTML site, talk to me about converting to a WordPress platform where you will finally be able to truly manage your own site.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

If you know me, you know I’m a very visual person. I learn by watching, I enjoy pictures so much I do photography in my spare time, and, the data geek in me loves infographics. So, I started poking around looking for some cool infographics and found some in the social media space.

Facebook

Paul Butler, part of Facebook’s data infrastructure team, took just 2% of Facebook’s user data (10 million records) and compiled this beautiful image that shows how we connect within our countries and around the world. While it looks a lot like a map of airline routes, its’ really a map of our human relationships.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is also demonstrating their use of the massive amount of data they’ve collected with Linkedin Maps. Only this time, it the infographic created is about you. LinkedIn’s new Maps feature builds an infographic that shows all of your connections, grouped together by color, and their connection to you is sized by how many shared connections you have between you. The hard part though, is figuring out just how they grouped your connections by color. You have to deduce that yourself.

Here’s a quick video about the maps.

And, here is my LinkedIn Map:

You can get your own LinkedIn Map here.

Twitter

Finally, here is a fun Twitter infographic by Hubspot. Did you know you can grade your Twitter account? The average score is 66%. This map shows how each state’s average compares to the national average. How is your state doing? Get your own grade here. (not bragging, but mine is 95!)

More connections, better networking

So, what does all this mean? First, that social media has connected us in ways never before possible. It’s given us access to people and their ideas that would have been impossible just a decade ago. Now it’s easy to hook up with like-minded people, building our community of friends, expanding our possibilities for finding a life partner, or furthering our business or career.

Social data, better understanding

For the first time in history, social data about human activities is being collected and archived. Social scientists are drooling to get their hands on it to study global trends of all kinds, like health issues, economic changes, and lifestyle habits.

Social media has significantly changed my life for the better, giving me access to people that have helped make my business successful. Has it changed yours in any way?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I recently read an article on Fortune magazine titled, Oversharing: The Business of Share Buttons. The article captured something I’d been thinking about for quite a while: with so many means to share content, is content sharing becoming diluted?

There are two major players in the “share button” space – AddThis and ShareThis. AddThis offers 271 sharing services to its publishers and ShareThis offers 50 sharing services. 271 services? What the heck are all those share buttons at the bottom of blog posts? I recognize maybe a dozen. What is Kaboodle anyway?

The Fortune author calls these sharing services the long tail of sharing. Not the most popular means of sharing but certainly being used by some folks. As you might expect, Facebook and Twitter make up the bulk of the sharing venues. Even so, the sharing service business continues to grow.

Recently, Google has jumped into the mix with Google Buzz. Michael Calore at Webmonkey says, “Buzz is more than a little bit like Twitter — and a whole lot like Facebook and FriendFeed. Anything you post is automatically sent out to the people on your Google Contacts list you interact with the most. All updates are real-time, and anything you share is open for comments. You can also post privately to a select group of friends.”

As a marketer, I’m concerned about “link overload” causing my prospects and customers to tune out. Yes, I want my content to be seen by as many relevant eyes as possible. But the keyword is “relevant.” Not everyone in the world will need to see or even want to see the content I create. I need to make sure the information I share is targeted to the right audience, by sharing content where they’re most likely to see it. Is that with the Mister Wong button? I doubt it.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I thought it was just me. My daily tweet count is down this year but I attributed that to my suddenly being insanely busy. Busy is good but I do miss the pint-sized social interaction, even if it’s limited to 140 characters. However, I’m wondering if my trend is telling of something more significant.

In January of this year (2010), CNN published an article, “Has Twitter Peaked?” The article actually references the number of visitors to the Twitter site, down 770,000 from its peak in August 2009 of 22 million. These numbers are intriguing since Twitter has had such huge growth in 2009, with several months of double-digit growth.

The author, CNN’s Doug Gross, interviewed Mark Logan of Berkley Marketing, who echoed my own sentiments when he said he wasn’t sure if Twitter has peaked but his own usage has tailed off. Also in line with my own thinking, Logan mentions the “signal-to-noise” ratio and how the early conversations were centered around digital marketing topics and technology, but it has become much broader now.

There is standard model that describes the technology adoption lifecycle. It was developed by Joe M. Bohlen, George M. Beal and Everett M. Rogers at Iowa State College and used to describe how new ideas and technologies spread in different cultures. You’ll recognize the typical bell curve.

So, how do you think the Twitter curve is shaped? My guess is that we’re in the early majority, but I’m not so sure we’ll ever get the late majority or the laggards. So far, none of my friends or family are using Twitter and I don’t expect them to.

Just so you don’t think I’m a Twitter-basher, I will tell you that Twitter has done a lot for me. I’ve met some great folks and won some great new clients. Maybe this post is my unconscious way of apologizing for my lack of tweeting. Tweet me at @BIMarcom.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Remember watching cartoons about Aladdin and the magic lamp? I always hoped I’d find a magic lamp on a beach somewhere and I’d be granted three wishes. Didn’t you wish you could have three wishes too?

Well today I’m setting aside my marketing hat, my BI hat, and my corporate sustainability hat. I’m putting on my customer hat and asking for three wishes I know  your marketing team can grant me.

Here are my three wishes:

1. I want a real relationship with you. I want to know that you are real people. I want to know that your company values align with mine. I want to know you are passionate about what you offer. I want to know you understand my needs and that you care about my success. I want to know how you give back to society. I will look for clues in your blog posts, Twitter tweets, forums, and other forms of social media.

2. I want you to help me be successful. I need to fully understand my challenge, including the business impacts. I need to learn better ways to do things, including best practices. I want to know how others have been able to overcome challenges and be successful. I need you to help educate me with credible and objective information. I need you to help me justify my business case. I will look for this in your white papers, case studies, data sheets, articles, webinars, e-books, and other educational content and tools.

3. I want to be able to find you when I need you. I want to easily find the information I need. I want my questions answered quickly. I want you to communicate in ways relevant to my needs. I want you to know who I am when I call. I will look for a well-designed, organized, and complete website, regular newsletters, targeted e-mails, trade show presence, search engine results, and most of all: contact information that leads me to a real person.

Rather than standing in the middle of the marketing department and looking out, I encourage you to walk over and stand in your customer’s office and look out. How do they see you and your company? Does your brand personality show through? Are you approachable? Do you offer a variety of content to help meet their educational needs?

If the magic genie could grant you three wishes (not necessarily marketing or business related), what would they be?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Social media is on the tip of most every B2B marketer’s tongue these days. They’re wondering which activities they should be participating in. “Should we be blogging and tweeting?” “Should we have a Facebook page?” “What about LinkedIn? Should we be there too?” These are typical of the types of questions that are heard whenever new techniques are introduced.

Laura Ramos of Forrester recently published the 2010 B2B Marketing Budgets and Mix Trends Research. The study looks both at marketing activities and how the marketing spend is split amongst those activities. Of course, it’s no surprise that Forrester finds social media to be the hot new marketing tool.

Looking at B2B social media efforts in 2009, the study shows:

• 68% have set up group pages on social networking sites
• 55% use Twitter for marketing
• 49% are active with corporate blogging (up from 32% in 2008)

While these statistics are interesting, even surprising in some cases, she cautions that they represent what marketers are doing—not necessarily what is working. In fact, she says that, on average, fewer than one in five say social media has been highly effective for branding and lead generation. What isn’t defined is the term “highly effective.” But I think the point made is that social media tactics still have a ways to go before they produce the returns of more traditional marketing tactics such as e-mail, search marketing, and inside sales.

Forrester’s 2010 study did show that e-mail, search marketing, and inside sales were the only tactics to show steady upward trends in both branding and lead generation. She states pretty strongly that marketers must get these right before adding social media to the mix.

As for marketing spend, most marketers cut spending across all activities, and their 2009 budgets looked the same as 2008. Not a huge surprise given the sting of the recession. She mentions that while trade show activities are down, these types of events still take up an average of 20% of the marketing spend. This is followed by traditional tactics like print ads, executive events, direct mail, and PR, which consumed between 10% and 13% of the budget.

Boiling this all down, she advises marketers to rethink their marketing mix and take bigger risks when allocating marketing budget for online efforts. She says that even though digital and social media efforts will not overtake traditional outbound communications anytime soon, marketers can no longer ignore the shift as customers move more into the social media space.

Personally, I expect to see even more of this marketing shift as 2010 sees a lift out of the recession and business returns to a (new) normal. Also contributing to this shift will be the increased ability to measure and see positive results. Something that has been slow to come.

What does your company think about social media marketing? Have they dipped a toe in the water? Have they seen positive results? Love to hear from you!

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

They say content is king. But anyone with a good Internet connection can publish content. In fact, the Internet allows anyone to market themselves as an expert. This funny video mocks just how easy it is. Warning: there are a few cuss words tossed in.

So, how do you separate the “wanna-be” experts from the real thing?

Do your homework. Get to know the person or the company. Read their content and understand their motivation.
Here are a few areas that experts tend to excel in:

• Blogs – Does the expert post content regularly—at least weekly? Is it full of buzzwords or does it actually say something that provokes your thinking? Jim Harris’s OCDQ Blog does just that, as does Ted Cuzillo with his Datadoodle blog.
• Websites – Does the expert offer helpful, educational content? Teradata has one of the largest resource libraries available on their site.
• Twitter – Does the expert stay top of mind with meaningful tweets? Kognitio, Initiate, Tableau, and Composite Software have discovered the power of Twitter.

Finally, you can feel pretty certain that you’re listening to an expert if they’ve published a book. Yes, anyone can self publish, but it takes quite a bit of discipline to produce a couple hundred pages of content. Some of my favorite experts who’ve published books are:

Jill Dyche (@jilldyche) “Customer Data Integration” “CRM Handbook” and a few others!
Phil Simon (@philsimon) “Why New Systems Fail” and “The Next Wave of Technologies”
Mike Stelzner (@mike_stelzner) “Writing White Papers”
Casey Hibbard (@casey_hibbard) “Stories that Sell”

Of course, anyone who does all of these things has raised their credibility as an expert—as all of the book authors do.

As a person or company that would like to be perceived as an expert, are you publishing content (big or small) on a regular basis? Is it quality content? Do you provide supporting facts to back up your opinion? Are you committed?

Love to hear who you think are good examples of experts who know how to use the Internet as a publishing medium to share their knowledge.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I skipped last week’s post since I was at the TDWI conference for business intelligence last week. It was a successful conference on a number of levels. One huge AHA (more like duh) moment for me was the reaction I got when meeting my social network friends in person for the first time.

Let me set this up with a little background. As you know, I am a content marketer for high tech companies with a focus on BI. I attend conferences to stay current on technology and the software/hardware market. But I also attend for the opportunity to meet with vendors (who are my customers). Where else would you find so many of your customers in one place?

I’ve embraced social networking. I’ve been able to have conversations with so many people I would have never had the chance to meet otherwise. I’ve talked to industry analysts, BI experts, vendors, and peers. I’ve commented on their blog posts and they’ve commented on mine. We’ve retweeted links to great information and tweeted a mix of personal and business thoughts. We’ve connected on LinkedIn and some on Facebook.

But, what really seals the deal is getting to meet these great folks in person. Time after time I heard, “Oh, you’re @BIMarcom! Nice to finally meet you in person!”  I had lunches and dinners with these folks. I got to know them (and they me) on a more personal, intimate level.

An old, but still relevant article from Rider University on cyberspace vs. in-person relationships says:

The human face and body language are rich in meaning and emotion.

We get a lot from our cyber relationships, but we get so much more in person. The face gives off so many cues. Linking these cues to how the words are being said improves communication, even cyber communication. Having talked in person, I can better visualize how the person is reacting during our online conversation.

My relationships have taken a big step forward. Now when we tweet, comment, and post, we have faces for the names. Our communication is much richer and our relationships stronger. When a vendor has a need, chances have greatly increased that they will consider me.

What about you? Are you finding it too easy to hide behind your avatar? Or are you exploring all the ways to get in front of your customer in person?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI