There are literally thousands of blog posts, slideshares, eBooks and articles called, “The 24 Most Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing”.  But no one ever bothers to list the really rare mistakes in social media marketing — the ones almost nobody ever seems to make.

Well, at Velocity, we pride ourselves in never letting a gap in the market go un-spackled.  When the world zigs, we kind of amble off in no particular direction.  When the world says ‘Jump’ we get all mournful and introspective.  So here goes, our contrarian cure for social media ennui (with no offense intended to… anyone really.  We’re teasing ourselves here, too):

The 7 Incredibly Rare Mistakes in Social Media Marketing

1. Forgetting to link to your most recent marketing bumf
This almost never happens so don’t worry too much about it.  Occasionally, someone forgets to link to their most recent blog post or ebook but not very often. Most social media sites have essentially become Pimp Central Station so there’s little danger in finding yourself reading a post or tweet or comment that does not exhibit a not-so-hidden agenda with added SEO value. Nature of the beast.

2. Joining a LinkedIn group that has absolutely nothing to do with you and probably never will.
People are always joining groups that are relevant to their work or their life. It’s very uncommon to find people joining groups like ‘Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning Professionals’ when they’re not a heating, ventilation and air conditioning professional and have no plans to do all the things you’d pretty much have to do to become a heating, ventilation and air conditioning professional.  Not a common mistake but a total waste of time, when you think about it, so worth continuing to avoid.

3. Retweeting tweets that are in languages you don’t even speak.
This whole RT thing is great but if you find yourself re-tweeting what looks like a 140-character review of Avatar in Tagalog, it’s probably time to strap on the quality filter.  Just a rule of thumb.

4. Forgetting the password to your Twitter account
It’s 12345 and it’s written on that post-it note on your monitor. No wonder this mistake is so rare.

5. Forgetting that your ten thousand ‘followers’ on Twitter aren’t really following you at all.
They just didn’t want to hurt your feelings. They aren’t sitting around gazing at their TweetDeck, waiting for your next micro-insight.  There is no budding Cult of You and you are unlikely to retire to a 90-acre retreat in Texas surrounded by your rapt and adoring ‘followers’ who will do anything you say even if it’s patently ridiculous or sexually inappropriate.  But you knew that.

6. Deciding not to post the first thing that comes into your head just because you haven’t posted in a while.
If you’re starting to suspect that every little proto-thought that skitters across the shiny surface of your consciousness may, after all, turn out NOT be of immediate and immeasurable value to the world, stop right there.  That’s a fundamental breach of the Social Media Ethos and it’s generally frowned upon using one of those punctuation-based emoticons (and not the ones with the semi-colon wink either. I’m talking full-strength emoticons.)

7. Writing ’social media friendly’ blog posts that don’t have a number in the title.
I can’t imagine this ever happening but one day it just might, so we thought we’d warn you about it.  Our recent post, 7 Tips for Writing Number-based Headlines, gives you a quick how-to.

There you go. Go forth and continue to refrain from committing these exceedingly rare mistakes.

—–

Photo Credit: Roger van Oech, CreativeThink

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Social Media

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Is it just me or is typical B2B marketing utterly joyless?  Why is that?  Why do people who are passionate about carp fishing and bicycling and the Beatles become robots when they sit down to tell the world about the thing they do for a living — the thing they spend a THIRD OF THEIR LIVES doing?

Whatever happened to fun?  Don’t you prefer to do business with people who enjoy what they do?  Don’t you find yourself attracted to companies that look like they’re glad to be doing what they’re doing?

A good friend of mine, Nick, is an accountant. Boring, right?  But he’s incredibly successful and his clients love him and recommend him because, to him, accountancy is the furthest thing in the world from boring. Nick loves accountancy.  He loves business and the hydrodynamics of finance and the way small, sound decisions can have big, positive impacts on businesses and the people who care about those businesses. There’s nothing boring about that.

You might sell software that helps trucking companies improve their fuel efficiency.  Or a service that helps IT departments protect their databases.  Or a piece of middleware that improves the way some ERP application interacts with some other ERP application.  But if you love what you do; if you really see the value in it; if you enjoy the challenges or the tech problems or the look on a customer’s face when he gets it… why in the world would you want to bury that passion under layers of business-speak and techno-babble?

Maybe it’s time to lighten up.  If you can’t muster some enthusiasm for your work, find another job.  And if you can, share it with the people who most need to see your passion: your customers and prospects.

How does fun manifest itself in a B2B context without becoming frivolous?  Here are a few ways:

• Light, honest, human blog posts – a blog is a great place to have a bit of fun without jeopardising the hallowed brand values.

• Social media – another place to let your hair down and give the world some evidence that your company is not driven by robots.

• Video fun – quick, short videos are a great way to have a ‘play’ with your story and your brand.  Stick them on YouTube, embed them on your site, email them to prospects.

• The home page – you might think this real estate is too precious to muck around with. Actually, it’s the perfect place for showing a bit of attitude and energy. You’ll increase time on site and page views by giving people an open,  friendly, accessible story. By having fun.

• Data sheet or case study ’seasoning’ – Even hardworking technical documents can have a bit of fun without detracting from the business at hand.  A sidebar, a striking metaphor, a surprising quote…

The list could be endless because the principle applies to everything you do. Before you publish, think “Can this be a bit more fun to read/watch/listen to?”

Of course, done badly, attempts to lighten up can fall flat.  That’s probably why B2B marketers tend to shy away from it.  The point is not to aim for hilarious.  You’ll fail and look silly.  Aim for honest and plain-speaking and you’re a lot more likely to hit the target.  But for God’s sake have a bit of fun with it!

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Copywriting

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We’ve been working with Marketo, the biggest cheese in B2B marketing automation, to design and sub-edit their new eBook ‘The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media’. It’s the latest in the series of Definitive Guides (you can read the first one on Lead Nurturing here).

This new eBook provides a complete overview of B2B social media, giving you all the important information you need to leverage social media. Social media in a B2B context is still relatively new, so the eBook starts from the basics and gives you practical, jargon-free insights into how you can use social media in your business. The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media includes worksheets with some completed examples so you can see exactly how to fill them in and apply them to your business.

We teamed up with talented illustrator Olly Montagu to draw us a figure to be a visual representation of the reader. He accompanies the reader as he or she progresses through the book.

As well as the illustrations, we tailored the eBook to follow the design style of the Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing (created by our own design guy Stuart Rothwell), and did some subediting to improve the flow.

Lots of B2B companies are using social media as a cost-effective way of raising their profile and starting a dialog with potential customers. Download the new Definitive Guide and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

© lucy for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B social media, Copywriting, lead nurturing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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Just came across an excellent post by Matt West of Connected Marketer called A Glimpse Inside the Mind of the New B2B Buyer.  It’s based on a study done together with DemandGen Report into the new buying influences in B2B.

The data supports the trends we’re all seeing out there (buyer-driven purchase cycles, the role of content, social media and peer conversations) but it did surprise me how fast things are changing — some of the numbers are a lot higher than I’d have guessed, including:

New Influences in the Buying Process

• 78% of buyers started with informal info gathering
• 59% engaged with peers who addressed the challenge
• 48% followed industry conversations on topic
• 44% conducted anonymous research of a select group of vendors
• 41% followed discussions to learn more about topic
• 37% posted questions on social networking sites looking for suggestions/feedback
• More than 20% connected directly with potential solution providers via social networking channels

Even better: almost 95% of recent purchasers said the solution provider they chose “provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.”

Cancel that six-figure ad budget. Start generating killer content and spreading it across the web.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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We’re always a bit sceptical about the jargon du jour. But one buzzword keeps cropping up and we think there might be a reason: Tacit Knowledge.

Tacit knowledge, first conceptualised by Michael Polanyi, is knowledge that is hard to put into words — the stuff that’s difficult to articulate and transfer to another person.

Companies and individuals accumulate tacit knowledge over time through front-line experience — often they don’t even realise that they have it. In contrast, explicit knowledge can be easily described in words and transferred to another person (think software demo).

Very often it’s the tacit knowledge that gives successful companies their competitive edge – (or ‘sustained competitive advantage’ for jargon lovers).

It can live in a number of places in organisations – but most often with employees who have a way of doing things that works but find it hard to explain exactly how or why.

It’s what goes on in the head of that great salesperson or that unassuming techie who can crack a problem in minutes (but explain how in hours). It can even be dispersed across a group of people doing things a particular way. Like that business unit that consistently outperforms every other– what do they have that the other units don’t?

It’s a knack, its an insight, its in their gut. It comes with experience. The good news is - it can be brought out and shared. It’s hard but not impossible.

That’s where marketing plays an important role. If tacit knowledge is indeed so important to gaining and sustaining that competitive edge, then its marketing’s job to identify what tacit knowledge the company has, where it is, how to bring it out and make it easy to understand – not only to use internally but also to communicate the advantage it brings to customers.

There’s no short cut: marketers need to get up close and personal with these experts. Talk to them about their work, how they go about it day to day, observe them doing it then question them hard (but lovingly). Fall in love with the word “Why”. Find ways to articulate their knowledge. To make the tacit explicit.

This will take time, patience and most of all a genuine interest in finding out your experts’ hidden pearls of wisdom. But one thing is certain - put in the hard work and the results will be worth it.

Image Copyright Zitona

© gesu for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B marketing, Marketing, tacit knowledge, Thought Leadership

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Trawling LinkedIn as is my wont, I came across this website which was thoughtfully shared with the world by Reuben Webb:

http://www.101cliches.com/view-the-101

Oh how I sniggered. What fool uses this kind of advertising dross! I wondered. Then I saw one that I’d toyed with using. And then another. Thank goodness I looked through the ones I’d done before they got anywhere near a client, otherwise I think I would have exploded in a puff of shame.

The thing about visual clichés is that they’re so pervasive. You almost don’t realize you’re churning them out. Using a beehive to indicate industriousness is hard to avoid because that simile is now ingrained in the western world’s creative psyche (I blame Virgil. Don’t believe me? Read up on your Aeneid Book 1 and the description of the building of Carthage).

They’re just so easy: if you’re having a tough day and you can’t seem to come up with any decent imagery or snappy headlines, the siren call of the cliché is hard to resist. No one’s going to scratch their head and say ‘Er, why is that there?’ People recognize them and can understand what the advert is driving at without even having to think. But that alone should be reason enough to avoid them like the… um, plague.

Doug has a theory that bad adverts occur when someone starts with an image and then builds the copy around it. There’s something in this, but at least two of the clichés I’ve been guilty of using (at the first draft stage before I discarded them) actually haven’t been inspired by a picture at all. The cliché is just in my head already, placed there by social conditioning. Of course, there are days when a cliché doesn’t pop up at all, and fortunately these are more prevalent than the other sort of days. But you never know when one might sneak up and bite you on the bum.

My method for avoiding clichés is to not look at pictures at all until later. I start by brainstorming all the headlines and copy I can. Then I go away, make a cup of tea, walk around a bit, chat to some colleagues or whoever, yawn, stretch, and then go back and look at my ideas again. And again, and again, until it’s right (all the Velocity people are perfectionists, we can’t help it). If you do this you can catch any howlers before passing them to the client. We work hard to make sure puns, clichés, commonplaces and anything remotely hackneyed is strangled at birth. Cruel, but our work is better for it.

We never do this.

Photo credit: Ben Becker

© lucy for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B marketing, Copywriting, design

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So Gesu was wondering aloud the other day whether negative or positive headlines are more effective. By negative and positive we mean, respectively, the ones that say things like: ‘Ten things you’re doing wrong in your life’ or ‘How to be even more lovely than you are already’. The first, obviously, grabs you by your insecurities, holds a conceptual gun to your head and threatens total and catastrophic failure if you don’t do what the headline wants. The second tries to be your friend and woos you by offering unsolicited advice/help. But they both boil down to the same thing: fear.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice?

Judging by some discussions on LinkedIn’s forums, marketers don’t like the first type of headline. There’s a sense that it’s a) lazy or b) mean. Or both. It’s as though it counts as cheating. Or like someone’s going to call up your parents to tell them you’ve been bullying your audience. But the analytics we’ve done suggest (albeit tentatively) that the scare-mongering titles produce the most click-throughs. We wrote an eBook and alternated between a positive and a negative-tone headline at random. The negative one got the most reads.

This may not be what people want to hear: it would be nice if it was true that lovely positive headlines made people want to read more, and made them think of your product/brand in a lovely positive way. Perhaps it just seems disappointing that people respond more to being scared. But that’s treating people’s response to advertising as being more cerebral than it actually is. It’s much more visceral than that.

People don’t think ‘Aw, how nice. They must be a really good company’. They think ‘Holy Mary Mother of God I need help!’. Then you can reassure them that help is at hand, and in the absence of divine aid your product or service will do the job just as well. Then they’re so glad you can help they’ll listen to you. Being rescued in the nick of time from the Deadly Flesh-eating Serpent of Doom is a better story. That’s why it works.

Hey, we can be nice… sometimes

At Velocity we use both, depending on the tone and the context. If you’re talking to a hard-bitten marketing cynic with his nose spread across his face and a cauliflower ear, the nice approach won’t work. The marble slab where his heart should be just doesn’t want Butlins-style encouragement. Similarly, the sensible guy who just wants to do his job better probably won’t take too kindly to being shouted at. We tend not to threaten people with poisonous serpents*, but you can’t ignore the fact that putting a small firecracker under your audience’s seat does work, so long as you don’t go overboard. Getting too nasty puts people off. But too much nice and you run the risk of being ignored.

*because the last lot escaped and caused havoc on the Underground

Photo credit:

Oabie

© lucy for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Content, Copywriting

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The sales team owns the sales funnel.
But as a B2B marketer, you feed the top of their funnel.
So you own your company’s revenue pipe.
The success or failure of your company depends entirely on the quality and quantity of opportunities you generate.

This isn’t about how many business cards your team collected from the latest trade show. It’s about how many sales-ready leads you can generate. That’s where Lead Nurturing comes in.

We’re huge fans of Lead Nurturing because it:

• Closes the gap between marketing and sales – connecting us directly to revenue
• Never wastes a lead - moving the cold ones forward while acting on the hot ones
• Creates opportunities that the sales team really values – stopping them from cold calling (or ignoring undifferentiated leads)
• Makes it easy to treat people differently – based on their demographics (job title, industry) and their behaviours (web visits, downloads, email opens…)
• Automates a lot of boring tasks – like creating landing pages and linking them to emails and analytics

Brian Carrol, CEO of InTouch has a great 5-step way of thinking about lead nurturing:

1. Refine – work with the sales team to hone a definition of what  a ’sales-ready’ lead really means. This entails lead scoring and prioritization (50 points if they download White Paper X; 100 points if they visit us at an event…).
2. Qualify – centralise all data about leads, offline and online.  Then decide who’s worth the effort. (Authority, Time Frame, Need, Budget). There’s often a non-automated, human aspect here (remember the phone?). But do it right and sales conversion rates double.
3. Nuture –work the early stage leads until they’re sales-ready; drip feed them emails, content & contacts and score their behaviours; It’s about a relevant ongoing dialog with potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
4. Define – create a defined hand-off process for moving leads from marketing to sales; CRM integration of your lead nurturing system will help.
5. Close the loop – via monthly sales/marketing meetings; get their feedback on the leads you’ve delivered; discuss what’s working and what’s not…

The upshot of all this: more effective selling time for your sales people, focused on people with a real business need – and more revenue for the business.

With lead nurturing process like this, you can track Cost per Opportunity (the ones the sales force is actively working on) instead of the clunkier, less enlightening metric, Cost per Lead.

There are an increasing number of Lead Nurturing systems that support this kind of process and automate a lot of the activities that go into it.  We’re getting up to speed on Marketo (pioneered in Europe by John Watton, CMO of ShipServ) and think you should be too.  This is where B2B marketing is going: actually generating business instead of undifferentiated names and email addresses.

(photo credit: Bram Reinders, Creative Commons)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring

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London-based B2B marketing agency Velocity today announced its acquisition of a new, high-capacity teapot to support its growing team of B2B marketing professionals.  The new teapot, a 10-cup, 3.2 litre Globe from the London Pottery Company will go into service alongside the agency’s previous 1.5 litre facility.

“We’re thrilled with our big, red teapot,” says Lucy Longhurst, agency copywriter, “Its very similar to the last teapot but holds more.” The new teapot will be used for occasions that were previously inadequately supported by the legacy teapot. “The teapot that got us here is still a great teapot”, says Longhurst, “but during peak consumption periods (9-9:30am; 9:45-10:45am; 11:00-3:00pm and 3:30-6:00pm) it failed to adequately enable workforce productivity.  It was resilient but it didn’t scale.”

Managing Director Stan Woods concurs, “In my view, tea should always be made in a pot and this acquisition certainly fits the bill.  It’s red, so we feel it maintains our strategic direction and, since the two-teapot deployment model is service-oriented, we’re actually delivering a new level of Tea Agility™.  Ooh.  I like that.”

Gartner analyst Tibor Toromerde, was first to put the new acquisition into industry context. “Velocity’s B2B tea-making needs have recently increased in inverse proportion to the available deskspace.  We call this the Slope of Obviousness and it’s one of the four key drivers of B2B teapot proliferation. Ooh. I like that.”

The new teapot solution brings added SEO benefits to the digital-obsessed agency.  “The keyphrase ‘B2B Teapot’ is wide open,” says Neil Stoneman, some other guy in the room, “With this single purchase — and it’s attendant press release and Twitter-storm –  we can power to the top of the results pages for what is admittedly a vanishingly small,  almost homeopathic traffic stream.  Over a typical ten years, we ought to see up to two searches going straight to us.”

“In my view, tea should always be made in a pot,” repeats Woods.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing agency, teapot

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As B2B web marketing comes of age, a battle is brewing between some pretty big players (and a few upstarts) over who will become the primary dashboard for marketers.  The three combatants:

CRM – the first app to automate some of what marketers do (and a lot more of what salespeople do).

Content Management Systems – the coal face of web marketing and, increasingly, the platform for all kinds of digital campaigns.

Marketing Automation tools – email, lead nurturing, analytics, campaign management, digital asset management… each with its own dashboard and workflow.

As B2B marketers get more sophisticated, the tools they use are starting to merge.  CRM is adding rudimentary marketing automation.  CMSs are adding campaign and automation.  And the automation apps are filling out into proper ’suites’.

Who will win?  Well, all three will be around for a long time but for my money, the CMS is the best place for marketing functionality — as long as the CMS vendors can get their acts together and realise they’re not just in the web editing business.*

More and more B2B marketers are learning to plan, execute and analyse their own campaigns with very little help from the techies.  Part of this will always be generating emails and landing pages; designing the campaign logic that strings them together; and analysing the results to keep improving.

The natural home for CRM is really the sales department. And, however valuable its contribution to the whole revenue cycle, CRM doesn’t really DO anything. It just holds all the information so others can do things better.

Marketing  automation tools are preferable now because they can each focus on one discipline and do it better than any generalist.  But as the platform players watch and learn, they’ll be able to replicate almost anything the automators can do (after all, it’s not rocket science). Then, the benefit sof integration will outweigh even ‘best of breed’ tools.

The CMS will always be central to the marketing department.  It’s easily extended with modules and plug-ins (especially if it’s based on an open platform). And it actually lets the market DO things like build landing pages, HTML emails and whole campaigns.

Agree?  Disagree?

* We know one CMS vendors that’s way out in front on this stuff but they’re a client so we can’t ethically mention their name here.  Oh bugger it: EPiServer.

(photo by chandlerparker, flickr creative commons)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing

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