We’re inordinately proud to announce the launch of a new microsite by Salesforce UK that Velocity helped with. The site is called Social Success and it’s all about helping businesses harness the power of social media. Our job was to find the considerable pockets of expertise within Salesforce (the place is crawling with very, very smart people) then help package up their ideas and best-practice advice into content assets for the site.

The core piece of content on the site is a chunky eBook called The Social-Powered Enterprise: how social media is transforming your three most important disciplines. The three disciplines are sales, marketing and customer service and the book presents plenty of action points and cases in each area. There’s a form to fill in to get the eBook — but it’s worth it!

If you’re putting social to work in your business, the rest of the Social Success site is full of best-practice content and expert advice for you, including:

Social Media Expert Interviews
With people like Jacob Morgan on Social Collaboration and Brad Cleveland on Social Customer Service.  These guys really know their stuff and the interviews capture their thinking really succinctly.

Social Media Resource Roundups
These are short curated pieces that summarise some of the best resources out there across the web on subjects such as Mobile Social Media and Social Business Metrics and Social Selling (among others).

Dreamforce Takeaways
Dreamforce is the hottest tech event in the world, attracting amazing speakers. Dreamforce Takeaways are our attempt to summarise the most social-media-relevant sessions in a quick, easy-to-digest way. And you can listen to the original sessions and see the slides here too.  Our favourite is the Social Roadmap session with Gary Vaynerchuk, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and Adam Brown of Dell.  But there are five more excellent ones to browse through.

Social Media Mini-Guides
These are more extensive articles on specific social disciplines including Social Selling and Social Customer Service.

Social Media Articles
Including this crowdsourced piece on Social Media Business Etiquette that had dozens of top-notch contributors or this one on Social Innovation.

A killer Social Media Infographic
On the Six Principles of Social Media Success from the eBook. It’s the social ethos captured in one rather tall graphic.

The site is a major initiative by Salesforce UK and it’s all about helping growing businesses (and businesses that are already massive) to get social media into their DNA – as Salesforce itself has done.  It’s not about selling software, it’s about evangelising something the company really believes in (working with them, we’ve seen how they walk the talk).

The project was the brainchild of Kieran Flanagan, the Search Manager for Salesforce EMEA and it’s an impressively ambitious play — the content will be rolled out to France and Germany this year. We’re not kissing arse when we say this (maybe a little) but Kieran has been hugely impressive through the entire process. He mined the considerable expertise and experience inside Salesforce to make sure we were capturing best practice strategy and real-world tactics. And did it with intelligence, focus and charm.

We loved working on the project and learned a hell of a lot on the way.

There’s a lot more to come on the Social Success site. Drop in, find the content most relevant to you – and do share it with your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Google+ circles. They’ll thank you for it…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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I don’t think any marketing activity rattles the B2B marketers’ nerves more than the company blog. It should.

If your business doesn’t blog at all, you fear that you’re missing a trick. Whenever somebody mentions a blog or blogging, there’s a moment of uncomfortable silence before the rationalizations stream forth.

If your business has a blog, you’re tangling with a beast. The dreaded blog monster doesn’t go away no matter how many times you’ve fed it.

Each post’s traffic, or lack thereof, is all too plain to see for anyone with access to your Google Analytics dashboard.

Those “tweet this”, “Like” and “LinkedIn Share” buttons with their overly optimistic counters – so everyone can share our stuff! – display for all to see how much sharing is really going on.

Also blogging lacks that surgical precision you get from tying off a brochure, advertisement, eBook or landing page. The blog’s never done. Never sent to the printers. Never finished.

The longing for the better post always nags. So often the great post you invested so much time and effort on, got so little traffic. Maybe if we did this. Or maybe that. The perfect formula is antagonizingly always out of reach.

Even when you manage to post three new posts to your blog in one week, the week ends with you thinking “and then?” You read a post over the weekend from a famous blogger who says you need to post daily. At least.

Should you blog about Justin Bieber (for the traffic) or follow the strict and serious party line (a “pain points” post that goes into excruciating detail)? How to judge readability, interest level, subject breadth, emotion and level of detail?

And, for all their appearance of ease and prolificacy, blog posts generate more internal critique and heartache than just about anything else. The same guy who says “psssh, it’s just a blog” one day, will berate you for a post the next.

If you, like most B2B marketing executives, choose not to produce or create your blog, but rather just want to manage it, those are only the beginning of your headaches.

For the professional digital marketing manager who wants their business’s blog to run unencumbered, there are countless difficult questions to ask, such as:

• • Do we work out our content plan ourselves, do we outsource the editorial plan, or do we work together with a supplier on it?

• • Do we work with one outfit to produce all of our posts, or many different suppliers, bloggers and/or freelancers? What is best in terms of money, consistency, manageability, quality and experimentation?

• • Do we share our blog’s analytics with the writer or agency, in order to help them improve, or do we hold these numbers for ourselves?

• • To what extent can we combine internally produced blog posts with externally produced blog posts? Will externally produced posts seem unauthentic and detached from the intricate nature of our business?

• • What happens when our CEO is asked about a series of blog posts produced by our agency, and he has no knowledge of them (because he hasn’t read them)?

• • How do we ensure that the knowledge and relationships created via blogging come into our organization, if the blog is produced out-of-house?

• • How much do we really need to pay in order to get quality? And what is must-have quality, versus good-enough quality? What are fair rates for those levels?

Marketers love to sort things out. They see a circular hole, and they seek a circular peg to fill it. Which is why blogging creates such a headache. It’s not a circular hole. It’s not square. Or trapezoidal. It’s not even fixed. It’s amorphous and always changing. How do you sort that out?

This all might lead the average marketer to think “then why do it?!” But if you’re serious about what you’re doing and you’ve learned a thing or two about web marketing, you know the answer to that. You must, and you must get it right. There can be no other way.

I have worked with countless companies on blogs – some here at Velocity and some in an earlier life. And I’ve blogged for over a decade, both here and elsewhere. Plus I’ve talked to, and listened to, countless other marketers bemoan blogging.

So I offer up this little post to say, I understand. I know. But the questions can be answered, and we can stumble along and pretty soon we’ll have something to look back at and say: “There was a there there. And – goddamn it – I think we’re actually getting better at this.”

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Blogging, B2B social media, Blogging, Social Media

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Blogging is an anxiety-inducing business. Business blogging even more so.

I don’t think any marketing activity rattles the B2B marketers’ nerves more than the company blog. It should.

If your business doesn’t blog at all, you fear that you’re missing a trick. Whenever somebody mentions a blog or blogging, there’s a moment of uncomfortable silence before the rationalizations stream forth.

If your business has a blog, you’re tangling with a beast. The dreaded blog monster doesn’t go away no matter how many times you’ve fed it.

Each post’s traffic, or lack thereof, is all too plain to see for anyone with access to your Google Analytics dashboard.

Those “tweet this”, “Like” and “LinkedIn Share” buttons with their overly optimistic counters – so everyone can share our stuff! – display for all to see how much sharing is really going on.

Also blogging lacks that surgical precision you get from tying off a brochure, advertisement, eBook or landing page. The blog’s never done. Never sent to the printers. Never finished.

The longing for the better post always nags. So often the great post you invested so much time and effort on, got so little traffic. Maybe if we did this. Or maybe that. The perfect formula is antagonizingly always out of reach.

Even when you manage to post three new posts to your blog in one week, the week ends with you thinking “and then?” You read a post over the weekend from a famous blogger who says you need to post daily. At least.

Should you blog about Justin Bieber (for the traffic) or follow the strict and serious party line (a “pain points” post that goes into excruciating detail)? How to judge readability, interest level, subject breadth, emotion and level of detail?

And, for all their appearance of ease and prolificacy, blog posts generate more internal critique and heartache than just about anything else. The same guy who says “psssh, it’s just a blog” one day, will berate you for a post the next.

If you, like most B2B marketing executives, choose not to produce or create your blog, but rather just want to manage it, those are only the beginning of your headaches.

For the professional digital marketing manager who wants their business’s blog to run unencumbered, there are countless difficult questions to ask, such as:

• • Do we work out our content plan ourselves, do we outsource the editorial plan, or do we work together with a supplier on it?

• • Do we work with one outfit to produce all of our posts, or many different suppliers, bloggers and/or freelancers? What is best in terms of money, consistency, manageability, quality and experimentation?

• • Do we share our blog’s analytics with the writer or agency, in order to help them improve, or do we hold these numbers for ourselves?

• • To what extent can we combine internally produced blog posts with externally produced blog posts? Will externally produced posts seem unauthentic and detached from the intricate nature of our business?

• • What happens when our CEO is asked about a series of blog posts produced by our agency, and he has no knowledge of them (because he hasn’t read them)?

• • How do we ensure that the knowledge and relationships created via blogging come into our organization, if the blog is produced out-of-house?

• • How much do we really need to pay in order to get quality? And what is must-have quality, versus good-enough quality? What are fair rates for those levels?

Marketers love to sort things out. They see a circular hole, and they seek a circular peg to fill it. Which is why blogging creates such a headache. It’s not a circular hole. It’s not square. Or trapezoidal. It’s not even fixed. It’s amorphous and always changing. How do you sort that out?

This all might lead the average marketer to think “then why do it?!” But if you’re serious about what you’re doing and you’ve learned a thing or two about web marketing, you know the answer to that. You must, and you must get it right. There can be no other way.

I have worked with countless companies on blogs – some here at Velocity and some in an earlier life. And I’ve blogged for over a decade, both here and elsewhere. Plus I’ve talked to, and listened to, countless other marketers bemoan blogging.

So I offer up this little post to say, I understand. I know. But the questions can be answered, and we can stumble along and pretty soon we’ll have something to look back at and say: “There was a there there. And – goddamn it – I think we’re actually getting better at this.”

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Blogging, B2B social media, Blogging, Social Media

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If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the change taking place in digital marketing – and all the blogs, eBooks, videos and research reports that try to explain it all – take an info-break and read this one report from the Gods of Digital Marketing: Econsultancy.

It’s the new Internet Marketing Strategy Briefing and, unlike the vast majority of content from Econsutlancy, it’s free.

The Briefing covers a hell of a lot in its 46 pages, including:

Customer Centricity – user experience, customer experience management and ‘voice of the customer’

Channel Diversification – (think Mobile)

Data – measuring social, attribution models…

Social Media – social search, social commerce…

Content Strategy – the move to earned media…

Nobody boils down the complex world of digital marketing better than Econsultancy.

Highly recommended.

(Disclaimer: Yes, Econsultancy is a Velocity client but we don’t pimp unless we mean it.)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B social media, Content Marketing, digital marketing, SEO, Social Media, Strategy

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The URL, when fully unfurled, reveals the Google Analytics tracking code:

http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/2010/09/20/b2b-marketing-manifesto-ebook/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitterautodm&utm_campaign=manifesto

I generated this with the Google URL builder, a simple tool that makes tracking links really easy (especially if you have a guy like Neil Stoneman to set up the Analytics).

For you closet geeks: you can decode the URL by looking at the stuff after these words:

?utm_source = social

?utm_medium = twitterautodm

?uth_campaign = manifesto

(Neil says I did it wrong — apparently the medium should have been ‘social’ and the source ‘twitterautodm’, but, hey, at least I tagged it.)

So anyway, this is the DM tweet that people get when they follow me:

I was worried it might be cheesy or crass (what do you think? comments welcome below), but thought it was worth a test. If no one came for the Manifesto, then we’d stop.  Of course, a chunk of new followers came to me from reading the Manifesto, so this offer wouldn’t be attractive to them, but anyway…

The idea of automating communication felt false to me at first. And I don’t always like the auto-DMs I get when I follow people: they often have that reek of false sincerity (“Hey! Thanks for the follow! I hope I can help you achieve the full potential of your personal brand!”).

But then the ‘pro’ rationale won out:

– it’s only polite to welcome new friends
– if you’re following me you really might like the Manifesto
– no one is twisting your arm, it’s easy to ignore the DM

Well, I’m still not convinced that this isn’t a diluted species of spam (SPAM lite! Less gristle!), but the results are in and…

It works.

After about eight weeks, Google Analytics (well, Neil) tells me that 20 people came to the website from this link. Okay, small numbers, but that’s from about 75 new followers, so it’s not a bad click through rate (26%).

More importantly, the goal conversion rate for these people – the ones who actually filled out the form and downloaded the Manifesto – is two-and-a-half times the site average. Here’s the Analytics snippet:

See? 15% of the visitors from this source converted versus 4.18% of traffic from all other sources. Okay, the numbers are tiny (Amazon we ain’t) but the principles hold up:

The Principles

– Test stuff!

– Tag your URLS! (so you can…)

– Track everything!

And one final conclusion: if your offer is relevant and your message not too crass or simpering and doesn’t mention the words ‘personal brand’, then go ahead and set up a Twitter Auto DM.  It works.

Hungry for more Project Open Kimono? Knock yourself out:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, Google, Online PR, Social Media, Twitter, web analytics

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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

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I’ve never seen ‘visual persoanlization’ in an out-bound email before but it’s pretty compelling to see the faces of so many friends and contacts looking back at me.  I also like the little scribbled comments like ‘See Simon’s new job’.

The only question is whether the call to action is a bit weak. I wonder if they could have used this technique to get me to do something a bit more valuable to them — like upgrade to a Premium account (“If you were on Premium, you’d be able to ask Jason to introduce you to Richard Branson…”).

Thoughts?

Recognise your face?  Leave a comment.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Innovation, Social Media, Web Marketing

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Birth of a B2B Campaign.

The B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign map, kind of

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing agency, digital marketing, Lead Generation, SEO, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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No time to do an extended next installment of Project Open Kimono, the case-study-in-progress that follows our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign, but I wanted to check in quickly with two big things we’ve already learned.

The Manifesto is, what — three days old, and it’s already flying off the virtual shelves — which we’re thrilled about it (Neil will update us all later). Better still, we’ve already learned two really interesting lessons:

Lesson one: Community really works

One of the things we did to get the Manifesto off the ground was to share the piece in draft form with a few friends we’ve made online who also happen to be well-regarded B2B bloggers.  These generous people not only gave us their honest feedback — lots of really insightful thoughts — they were also kind enough to tell their readers and followers about the Manifesto.

This has helped enormously and it made us resolve to do two things: give back more to the B2B community by sharing content that we really like with our blog readers, Twitter followers and LinkedIn groupmates.  This is not only a win-win proposition, it means you store up some goodwill for when you really want to get the word out.

Second, we resolve to THANK these smart, kind folks explicitly. We’ve done so in the Manifesto itself but wanted to do a special shout-out to a few bloggers for their really great feedback and reviews:

• John Sweeney of Biz-Builders – John helps B2B companies get their sales and marketing departments aligned, then shows them how to automate the marketing and run what he calls rhythmic campaigns. Smart dude.
• Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers a lead generation company that uses best approaches in demand generation to dramatically improve the flow of quality sales leads. (Enough anchor text in there Jeff?). :–)
• Patsi Krakoff of The Blog Squad – her Writing on the Web blog is popular for a reason.
• Ardath Albee – author of the hugely influential E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale and Marketing Interactions blog.
• Michele Linn (Content Marketing Institute) and Stephanie Tilton, both of the famous Savvy Marketers. And both sharp thinkers and very generous people – the kind that make the B2B community go round.
• Billy Mitchell at the sharp, fun, cutting edge B2B shop MLT creative. Billy gives back much more than he could ever take. And he knows his stuff.

We could go on but you’d stop reading. The point is: ask for help and good people will give it. But you need to create content that they’re happy to endorse and it helps to give back. We resolve to work harder on both fronts.

Lesson Two: Use your forms to ask a question

As almost an afterthought, we put an optional question in the Manifesto download form that said “The hardest thing in B2B is _______” .  We’ve had almost 50 responses to this question and it’s already sparking lots of new ideas.

We’ll report back on the results of this micro-survey (it’s fascinating) but just wanted to share this insight right away: whenever you do a form, ask a question. It’s great for insight and it starts conversations (you can’t reply to them all but a few do leap out and inspire an email chat).

That’s it for now. We’ll lots more goodies as we go along so do come back.

Want the full  Open Kimono picture. They’re all here:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

———–

photo: Creative Commons – Clinton Meyer

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Case Study, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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Photo credit: Dan the Man

You can practically hear the moral outrage screaming between the lines:

“Four government departments spent almost £6m ensuring their websites appeared on search engine results pages in the last two financial years, according to newly released figures.” (BBC)

Apparently DEFRA, the Department of Health, and others, have been resorting to paid search and running up large bills. So far, so what? “Government department squanders cash on pointless marketing” is hardly news. They’ve been doing it for years. Every time someone fancies some new departmental pencils they embark on a rebranding exercise. It’s practically law.

The BBC helpfully tries to explain what paid search is, and gets it wrong: “Organisations can pay search engines to ensure their websites appear at the top of users’ searches. They are often charged for each person who accesses their sites via the link.”

Often? How about “always”? I don’t know a single search engine that doesn’t charge by the click. They certainly don’t do it for free.

But aside from the BBC’s poor research skills, the real scandal here is that government departments are using PPC advertising at all. They don’t need to. All they need is to do some serious SEO work and optimize the bejesus out of their web pages. Then they’ll get to the top of Google without having to resort to expensive PPC. As it is, this is the internet equivalent of dad dancing: the government trying to get down wit’ der kidz by using SEO techniques and getting it wrong.

But what really got my goat, tied it up and did unspeakable things to it was Tory MP Damian Hinds’ reaction to these figures:

“Of course there are times and subjects when getting the information out there is an absolute imperative.

“But in general I don’t see why government departments should spend large sums improving their showing on search engines.

“I would have thought the search engines themselves should ensure official information is easy to find.”

Pardon? “Search engines themselves should ensure official information is easy to find”? You might have thought that search engines should act as a government mouthpiece Damian, but you would have been wrong.

A search engine is not a library catalogue. They’re a commercial concern, and for all that Google massages its own ego by propounding its fatuous motto “Don’t be evil”, it’s ruled by naked commercialism. Public service doesn’t come into it. If I ring up NHS Direct, I expect to be given impartial advice because it’s a public body. If I ring up GlaxoSmithKline and recount my symptoms to them, I expect to be sold something (or to be hung up on).

Search engines don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, because they don’t have one (something a politician should relate to). They’re refreshingly amoral: anyone can buy their services, and that applies equally to governments, arms dealers, purveyors of hardcore pornography, and charities. But the operative word in that sentence is “buy”.

Whining that official information should get special treatment goes against the free market nature of the web, and besides, it’s a specious (and slightly alarming) argument. Government propaganda should come first? Henry Elliss made an excellent point about this on Econsultancy’s blog:

If the Government want priority-listing in search engines, what happens when the next election comes along? Do the incumbent party get first dibs on the top results for searches like “Immigration” and “Job losses”?

It’s a short step from automatic priority listing for government information to censorship. Of course, some would argue that it’s for our own good, but personally as a fairly autonomous adult, I’d like to be able to make my own mind up. And it’s my considered opinion that Damian Hinds is a halfwit.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, SEO, Social Media

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