We’re big infographics fans so when LinkedIn launched their new LinkedIn Maps tool, we were first in the virtual queue to have a play. The tool generates a colourful, dynamic map showing all your connections and how they’re related to each other. It colour codes the clusters it identifies and lets you assign your own labels to the colours. You can zoom in on specific individuals and see where they fit in your world.

My network was pretty accurately clustered in these groups:

It would be nice if you could embed your map in a web page or blog post. In any case, the share-able version doesn’t let others see the names of the individuals in your cloud. Which is probably a good thing.

Go have a play.

inmaps.linkedinlabs.com

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, Content Marketing, design, Innovation, LinkedIn, Social Media, Web Design

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

The micro-gasps of “awesome content” or “exhaustive summary” that accompany every re-tweet suggest something big is going down. Sold! I click through with a tingle of anticipation.

And then it hits you, hard – the stench of a content piece so rotten you expect every reader’s nose to be thrust back inside a newspaper by the morning.

So why is this lacklustre piece doing the rounds when other things that I’ve written read seem so much better?

Content By Association
It’s simple: the quality of your content is only part of what makes your, only too human audience, pass it on with a slap on the back.

People share content that makes them look good; stuff that proves they’re up with the trends. In fact, they’ll do it (whisper this!) without even looking at it.

Yes, it’s a bit sad, but entirely true. You can make people endorse your content who know almost nothing about it, if they can bask in the association.

Let’s look what goes through the mind of your audience:

Does it sound great in a sentence? The video sounds fantastic but it could be longer than Ben Hur. But a clever 140 characters proves I’m focused squarely on the right stuff.

Is it endorsed by people I respect? I’ve not got time to read this but it comes with the authority of real content gurus. It’s a risk free bandwagon I can join.

Does it look fantastic? I’ve opened the document and it’s got the wow factor. Worth sharing on the production values alone.

Can I share it with a touch of a button? I’m due in a meeting but enjoyed page one. I’ll share it now because it’s easy and I might not get back to it when the real job takes over.

Is the author a name I can trust? This author’s got a great CV and is a veritable LinkedIn and Twitter rock-star. She’s got risk-shattering credentials – all these people can’t be wrong.

Is this a social media savvy company? This company is top of the social media pops and I’d like a piece of the action. Their reputation for social media success alone makes this piece a risk free forward.

Would I like this company’s patronage? This company is in a position of power and I’d like to get to know them better. I’m more likely to get on the inside if they know I love their stuff.

There’s an audience out there that’s ready to tap into your presentation, promotion and profile if you get it right.

But make sure it’s balanced by the best quality content or you’ll soon use up your hard earned goodwill. Let’s not disappoint the people they pass it to.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Content Marketing, LinkedIn, Twitter

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Gotta love Twitter...

It’s been about four months since we published the B2B Content Marketing Workbook and we thought we’d report back on how the campaign has worked so far. It was the first time we’ve used social media as a vector for our content marketing and so makes a nice case study.

The Campaign
The above tweet is Exhibit A.  We ‘pimped’ our recent B2B Content Marketing Workbook on Twitter, in LinkedIn groups and with some judicious (and always relevant) comments on blogs we like. We also blogged about it ourselves, put out an online press release and featured it in an email newsletter to our own list.

The tweets got lots of re-tweets. One of these got us invited to guest blog on Savvy B2B Marketing and to do an interview on Connect the Dots by ClickDocuments.  And David Fideler, founder of the B2B Lead Nurturing group on Linked In, gave the book a rave review — (“The single best overview I’ve yet seen on strategic B2B content marketing…”).

All this activity then got us on the B2B Marketing Magazine radar.  They invited us to do a Webinar on Content Marketing with them (with hundreds of attendees) — you can watch it here (it’s about half way down the listings).  And a followup article (out soon).

The eBook itself took a few days to write (but a few years to be able to write). Design took less than a week (not counting Stuart’s faffing around) (bloody Stuart) (worth it though).  Pimping took about 10-15 hours over the course of a few weeks.

The Results:

• Over 600 downloads to date. About 60% are from other marketing agencies or freelancers (never a bad thing). But lots are from B2B marketers we didn’t know before and are happy to be connected to.
• About seven new business conversations – that came straight off the back of the workbook. Some are rather exciting (and all are warmly welcomed).
• An invitation to design an eBook for Marketo – we’re big Marketo fans and Laura Mishima was a pleasure to work with on The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing. Our work on this also generated interest from other companies.
• A tangible piece to use in new business meetings – it’s nice to leave something behind that captures our approach to what we do best.
• Proof that we take our own medicine – it’s hard to recommend content marketing to clients if you don’t practice it yourself.

So, all in all, a successful campaign built on the exact principles that we discuss in the eBook itself: create something that your prospects will find useful; present it in a clear, compelling way; promote it all around the Internet, especially on relevant social media; and stand back.

(BTW… Got the eBook yet?)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, LinkedIn, Online PR, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Twitter, Web Marketing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Once again, ShipServ has ‘scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine.  ShipServ, piloted by CMO John Watton, won a CRM Elite Award given to customer implementations that push new boundaries.

The judges recognised ShipServ “for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media” — including viral video, eBooks, Twitter and a LinkedIn group (we’re kind of proud of our work on all these).

We don’t know of any other B2B marketer who uses the Marketo/Salesforce integration so effectively. Add in the content marketing and social media aspect and ShipServ does pretty amazing things on very little budget.  This is how B2B marketing should work. It maximises the power of digital marketing to create a real marketing funnel that nurtures and scores leads before turning them over to the sales team.

The result is a completely different relationship between marketing and sales. Instead of mutual recrimination, the two teams at ShipServ work closely together to drive revenues.  And it’s working.  Well scooped, John.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, LinkedIn, technology marketing agency, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Football tittle-tattle is now, unbelievably, hotter news than serious military dispatches from Afghanistan.

We watch football differently now.  Today cameras focus on individual players and the modern soccer superstar or, as they say more poetically in Spain, Galactico has been born.

These superstars have led a dramatic shift in power from the boardroom to the pitch in a way unthinkable before Sky’s revolution.

The top teams know financial success depends on surnames that make grown men go weak at the knees from San Diego to Shanghai.  Today there’s more than one ‘I’ in team.

The Corporate Galactico
The growth and impact of social media means a similar swing in corporate communication power is near.  The corporate Galactico is coming.

A corporation is the ultimate team – in fact its raison d’etre is to draw an indelible line between an organization and its people.  Corporate communication has never cared for individual opinion – it’s the corporate voice, managed by rules and training, that counts.  Mavericks need not apply.

But the way we’re using the internet to learn about corporates and their products and services is changing.

Google’s search system obliterated the competition by, put simply, favoring sites with the most reputable links for a specific search term.  Its long-term view suits the corporation.

Facebook, along with other social networks, uses a different methodology based on followers (fans) and  fast debate.  Such measures are, as the Guardian’s Charles Arthur writes, fleeting and random, but powerful and, crucially, not suited to Google’s ranking method.  It’s not easy to learn from Google what’s hot on these sites.

Facebook’s search model suits the outspoken expert more than the consensual organization, and will force a re-evaluation of the management of real-time corporate communications.  Companies will be forced to seek out glamour signings to lead their frontline communications.

Recruiting Galacticos
Organisations will start to recruit and empower individuals to join the debate with, by necessity, reduced levels of corporate control.  A new breed of communicator, with license to build personal brands on the company buck, will be primed for superstar status as the intelligent, high-value company ‘face’ ready to debate complex, fast-moving industry issues.

It will not be an easy or comfortable corporate experience.  Premiership football teams have quickly learned that superstars bring their own problems: new contract demands, transfer requests and drives for autonomy are now a common management issue.

If it goes well, everyone’s a hero, but if relations fail, they’re off to competitor taking their precious followers with them.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B comm, Football, LinkedIn

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

The first guy, me at home, is bursting with envy and admiration for a veritable tyro with a corporate Koh-i-Noor for a CV.

What a tremendous achievement, I thought, for a youngster to show gumption to get on the ladder and win over senior colleagues with insight while other teenagers are, well, just being teenagers.

And it’s this point that makes the second guy, me at work, rather annoyed.  This teenager is exceptional, but hardly typical.  Is one extended group of friends representative of the youth of today?  Unlikely.

I did ask my teenage cousin for her view but she was too busy swimming with her friends.  All teenagers swim on Wednesdays, right?

The serious point is that genuine marketing research is regularly sidelined in favour of anecdotal evidence.  It drives me nuts.  I have seen countless marketing projects shape up after a conversation with one unrepresentative customer is extrapolated to the marketplace.

Conducting effective research might feel like too much trouble – it’s costly and time-consuming – but marketing on a whim is generally a disaster.

Over 50 years ago Isaac Asimov published Franchise, a short story based in 2008, where the US decides elections are simply too much work.  Instead they programmed a computer to identify the most representative voter to pick the government.

Prepared to accept that Norman Muller is a fair substitute for democratically elected government?  No.  Then beware every time you hear strongly held views being presented as the facts.  They’re no substitute for a genuine poll.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, LinkedIn, marketing research

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

But it’s only a part of the influence debate. Now we must ask how these influencers can be, well, influenced. The absence of an easy answer perhaps explains the lingering reticence to accept blogger power.

Traditional media is easier to get. It’s a relentless story-gathering machine with fixed editorial schedules and an absolute commitment to publish. The BBC won’t send Fiona Bruce home in a taxi just because it’s a slow news day.

Such reliability leads to conventional content tools that help fill editorial space: press releases, feature pitches, case studies, bylined articles etc.

Such tools have little, if any, appeal to rich-media loving bloggers who pay little, if any, attention to convention. If your communication department entirely mirrors the traditional media then it’s time for a change of mindset.

Competition v Community
Publishers and broadcasters are like secret agents looking for a big ‘scoop’. B2B bloggers are more of a knowledge sharing community.

Communicators cannot influence bloggers furtively from the shadows. They need an open ethos to engage the community and publicly win its respect.

Education v Expertise
Correspondents are often a mile wide and an inch deep. The genuinely influential B2B bloggers are invariably the opposite.

Content tools designed to educate rarely provide bloggers with the depth required to analyse products, issues and events as experts.

Lines v Loops
Traditional media operates linear, repeatable processes that mean today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper. B2B bloggers return to the same issues.

Traditional content tools are ‘hit and run’ and fail to satisfy the need for regular returns to the blogger’s world.

Ten Steps To Influence
So here are ten key tips to help you influence key bloggers in the absence of established behaviour and content conventions.

1. Research – Identity the big hitters. You need to know which bloggers carry most weight with their industry peers.

2. Listen – Hold! Don’t hit the pitch button. Establish the prevailing thinking and consider the impact for your business.

3. Engage – Ease in. Get involved in an open, two-way dialogue by responding to posts. Earn your stripes by following the agenda.  That’s different from imposing your own.

4. Gather – Break convention. Open your organisation’s content vaults and identify the arguments and proof points that apply to the key issues.

5. Adapt – Be blogger-friendly. Crystallise responses into visual or aural content packages ripe for expert analysis and sharing: videos, podcasts, schematics, ebooks, diagrams and slides fit the bill.

6. Complement – Stay aligned. Ensure your content complements, but doesn’t simply replicate, what the media relations teams are doing.

7. Share – Populate distribution channels. Make content easy to find, use and share on your own site and YouTube, SlideShare and Twitter.

8. Monitor – Keep watching. Good content spreads quickly across the web and lands in unexpected places. Use dashboards, Twitter and blog aggregators to keep up.

9. Follow-Up – Don’t stop. Bloggers will respond. Make sure you’re there to answer questions or face looking exposed and unengaged.

10. Measure – Prepare metrics. Ensure you can report on KPIs like web traffic, downloads, engagements and meetings arranged.

The Blogger Bounce Effect
Blogger and media relations use different content, but effective synchronisation can deliver spectacular results.

The following graphic, christened “The Blogger Bounce Effect”, illustrates how a synergised approach improves the impact, credibility and longevity of big announcements.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B Bloggers, LinkedIn

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

We call the two groups “purists” and “progressives”.

Purists doubt.  Some subscribe to Doctor Johnston’s mantra that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, but for money.”

Others are more sceptical.  A senior press officer of a global enterprise once described blogging to me “as the ramblings of lonely geeks sitting at computers – in their pants.”  Don’t be shocked – the bedroom-dwelling, scantly-clad, burger-munching blogger is a staple of the purist imagination.

Purists believe influence is based on motives, trust and experience.  Journalists apparently have them: bloggers apparently don’t.  These assumptions, particularly in B2B, need tested.

Motives
Journalists are professional.  Their career depends on exhaustive research methods and quality writing.  Bloggers are amateur.  But the career still counts.  You don’t build a reputation among future employers, partners and customers by spouting dross.

Trust
A new survey suggests consumers have limited trust in blogger reviews.  The same survey, however, scores the views of known experts and personal contacts highly.  In B2B circles many bloggers are highly networked experts.  That’s pretty trustworthy I’d say.

Experience
Nobody can deny the value of experience.  Journalists spend years learning how to report and write.  B2B bloggers spend years learning how to use, integrate and work technology.  Ask yourself who knows the most about servers.

Progressives, on the other hand, believe the blogging community is of real substance and primed for the truth.  Journalist and author Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “when this community is on to something real…it can create as much energy, buzz, and hard news as any network or major newspaper.”

Journalists, paradoxically, are often progressive.

While communicators cling to the journalistic ideal, journalists are rapidly evolving to embrace the dynamism and community spirit of the blogging medium.

The B2B blogging community began integrating journalistic motives, trust and experience.  It is now integrating journalists.

Purists find it easier to deny the influence of bloggers than deal with it.  It’s simply unsustainable.  As journalist-turned-blogger Dennis Howlett laments: “I’m a blogger not a journalist. There’s a BIG difference that few understand.”

In Part II we’ll explore that difference and ask: how can B2B marketers influence bloggers?  We’ll see the progressives among you there next week.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, LinkedIn

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

A few years ago, as an experiment, I joined LinkedIn because lots of the people we worked with seemed to have. But I stopped receiving invitations about three years ago. Now, suddenly, I’m being deluged by them again.

And as part of that process an old friend, Tony Morris, popped up (we first worked with him at one of our oldest clients, Argogroup). Tony’s a serial entrepreneur, strategy consultant, and private investor working exclusively with technology-based growth companies. Serendipitously while we were all musing on social media, he pointed out Guy Kawasaki’s pretty compelling list of 10 ways to use LinkedIn to increase its value. It’s a good list, but for B2B firms, improving your Google page rank and enhancing your search engine results feel the most important. Over eight-and-a-half million business people use LinkedIn, including people from each of the Fortune 500 (and 499 of them are represented by director-level managers).

That’s a pretty good resource. Albeit one that only works today one-to-one. It’s when you start to think about what B2B firms (as opposed to individuals) should be doing with social media that it starts to get confusing. On the face(book) of it, social media should already be really important: experts everywhere from Seth Godin to Richard Branson tell us that future winning brands will be the ones that can build innovative or novel online relationships with customers. No doubt there are real attractions and benefits in communicating with a prospect group online in ways that competitors haven’t tried yet. Particularly when most B2B buyer segments run to a few thousand companies at most and many are no more than a few hundred (think about companies selling into mobile operators…).

But before we all run off and start building widget utilities that allow clients to relay time sensitive, high value information to business customers via Facebook or iGoogle (see Roger’s recent blog on that), consider how most tech companies communicate with customers today.

Most times I yearn to eat my own spleen rather than read another sentence from the press release announcing a company’s latest piece of highfalutin’ middleware or the product brochure about the sexiest wireless gizmo on the planet. Imagine the impact on a company’s reputation if they were to take this type of deathless prose onto Facebook?

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh