Add another layer of change when you consider the ability to share information in real time, and modern marketing can get complex quickly. In this ever-changing environment, sometimes it feels difficult to stay ahead of the game—but it’s vital. To accomplish this, it’s pertinent you stay adaptable.

Follow these three ways to acclimate to the real-time web and the way it’s changing B2B marketing.

1. Provide Relatable Information

Your customers are no longer waiting for information to fall into their lap. Instead, they’ve taken to the real-time web to search your company name, products and services. They’re gathering information and forming their own opinions based upon what’s at their disposal.

Many B2B marketing websites are relatively static. You may add new product updates from time to time or updated copy every so often, but for the most part, new content isn’t added on a regular basis.

B2B blogs and social networking sites allow marketers to add new content weekly or even several times a week. By consistently posting interesting, informative information, organizations will encourage prospects to regularly visit the blog in search of fresh content. Plus, frequently updated, optimized content can help improve a website’s visibility in the search engines.

2. Engage In Seed Nurturing

Lead nurturing campaigns used to take place after prospects landed on your site and entered your database. However, qualified prospects are now visiting your site or social media sites anonymously before you ever have their names or information. Seed nurturing allows you to build relationships with prospects before they you have any information.  Thanks to the real-time web, you’re able to relay valuable resources to these prospects, helping shape their decision-making process.

Use social media to share educational and resourceful white papers, links and articles. Your ability to provide facts, research, updates quickly and rapidly will help facilitate your placement as a thought leader of your industry.

3. Practice Online Reputation Management

The Internet now provides a rich arena for brand monitoring; the marketing analytics possible to report on are robust.  But there is equal potential for the real-time web to either praise or “flame” a brand digitally. Forums, comments, tweets and statuses can turn open-ended text boxes into a weapon or praise. To help ensure you’re receiving the latter, there are a lot of ways to correct and respond to any negative brand mentions. The real-time web gives us the opportunity to leverage brand ambassadors and B2B marketing tools to track our brand and increase awareness, while controlling any negative mentions.

Now that you know a few ways to adapt, it’s time to put these ideas into implementation. If you haven’t already, develop a social media plan and find out what’s being said about your company and products.

Want to learn more about social media marketing for the high-tech industry? Join us Oct. 26, 2010 in San Jose for SocialTech 2010—the only conference that’s all about social media for B2B high-tech professionals.

1. Interact with People

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy for B2B marketers to fall into the trap of simply tweeting thought leadership content and promotions. Content is important, to be sure, but the real benefit of Twitter is the ability to develop relationships. So interact with people, reply to their tweets, ask questions, and start building new relationships.

2. Don’t Tweet in a Silo

Depending on the structure of your sales and marketing department(s), you’ll want to keep tabs on who is a real prospect and who isn’t (yet). After all, you may look silly suggesting to a seemingly new lead that they check out your product or white paper when they’re already in the last stages of the buying process. However you do it, try to set up some form of communication between your sales and marketing team(s) so you: i) hand off good Twitter leads to sales ii) follow and engage with current prospects and iii) are aware of who is in the buying process and who isn’t.

3. Provide Value and Advice in Your Tweets

So you’re interacting with people and probably promoting your own thought leadership content. Fantastic! You’re off to a great start. Now it’s time to provide real value in your tweets and become a trusted advisor. So provide solutions. Offer advice. Help your followers solve their pain points. Say “A great way to increase ABC is by doing XYZ”.

4. Monitor Relevant Keywords

Monitoring keywords is a great (and easy!) way to find targeted people to follow, offer timely advice, and stay on top of industry trends. Let’s say you market dedicated server hosting. Make a list of relevant keywords that your prospects may use to describe their pain points, like “server downtime” or “network reliability”. You can use an RSS feed to receive a notification when someone tweets with those keywords, or you can use the built-in functionality with a tool like Tweetdeck. However you do it, you’ll be able to stay on top of what’s happening on Twitter, and swoop in when someone complains about their current solution’s reliability or downtime.

5. Monitor Your Competitors’ Brands

The great thing about Twitter is that everything is out in the open. You can easily see who is tweeting to your competitors and what they’re tweeting about. By monitoring your competitors’ products and brand names, you can: i) offer advice to a competitor’s customer who is having technical issues ii) engage with anyone who is considering a competitors’ product iii) follow anyone who tweets about a competitor iv) follow people that your competitors follow v) stay on top of trends in the industry vi) engage with the people your competitors tweet to. Just don’t do it all at once. That would be creepy and weird. And you don’t want them to call you out on it.

6. Offer Lead Gen Opportunities

Finally, offer direct lead generation opportunities. Tweet webinars, reports, white papers, and content. Just make sure you’re associating those lead capture pages with your Twitter marketing, so you can track the stellar ROI of your efforts.

Want to learn more about social media marketing for the high-tech industry? Join us October 26, 2010 in San Jose for SocialTech 2010 — the only conference that’s all about social media for B2B high-tech professionals.

One way to greatly improve your ability to measure the effectiveness of your company’s blogging efforts is by tracking the right metrics.  When you are creating the strategy for your company blog, one of the things you need to focus on is making sure that the metrics you track match the goal you have for the blog.  For example, if your company wants to use its blog as a tool to build awareness among current and potential customers, then one of the metrics you might track would be number of email subscribers.  You might also want to look at number of comments per post and also the number of email inquiries or Contact Form submissions.

But you need to make sure that you are tracking metrics that feed back into the goal you have for your blog.  Once you have settled in on the right metrics, then you can customize your blog and your blogging efforts so that these metrics are optimized.

For example, one of the metrics I measure at MackCollier.com is number of email subscribers.  Up until May 15, 2010, I was averaging a new email subscriber every three days.  In the 65 days since then, I have added an additional 87 email subs.  What changed to cause this spike?  I moved the email subscription form to the TOP of the blog, “above the fold.”  That simple change has netted me an 311% increase in email subscribers.  Not too shabby.

So when you look at your own blog, ask yourself two questions:

1. Are we tracking the right metrics? If you are looking to build engagement on your blog, then traffic might not be as important as number of comments.  Likewise, if you are looking to increase sales, then you would probably place more importance on referral traffic from the blog to the website, rather than number of new blog feed subscribers.

Think about what it is you want to accomplish with your blogging efforts, then track the metrics that feed into that goal.

2. Are we making it easy for visitors to perform the desired actions?  If you want visitors to subscribe via email to your blog, then is it best to place the subscription form at the TOP of the blog, or buried at the bottom of the second sidebar?

Think about what actions you want visitors to take on your blog, then find ways to encourage this action.  It could be something as simple as putting your calls to action in the proper place, as with the above example about email subscriptions.  Or maybe you need to figure out a strategy for increasing comments, if that’s a key metric you are tracking.

Track the right metrics for your blogging goals, then look for ways to increase the desired actions from your readers.

Here are 3 quick and easy tips to improve your Facebook marketing:

1. Post Content on the Weekend

On the surface, this is a smart move for Ann Taylor, as it rewards mobile customers for engaging in existing activities.  It’s also a smart promotional play; as customers check in at Ann Taylor locations (the program is being piloted in 8 NYC stores for now), this activity is often shared with their online social communities, such as on Twitter.

So how could Ann Taylor (and other retailers that are offering similar initiatives) build on this FourSquare promotion?

Let’s look at the Ann Taylor example, and the small NYC pilot FourSquare program they have launched.  If I were consulting with Ann Taylor, I would suggest that they consider creating a social/mobile marketing advisory panel from among the customers that are most frequently using FourSquare to check in at NYC’s Ann Taylor locations.  As my friend CK can tell you, while social media is big, mobile marketing is poised to become gigantic in the coming years.  By reaching out directly to some of Ann Taylor’s most passionate customers that are also social media and mobile media savvy, Ann Taylor could get some incredibly valuable advice directly from its customers about how to improve its mobile marketing and communication efforts.

I recently worked with Dell on a similar initiative.  Dell identified a few dozen customers that were actively using social media tools to discuss the company, and Dell brought them into its Round-Rock headquarters to meet with them and get feedback directly from them on how the company could improve its efforts.  Over two days, Dell heard from its most passionate customers about how the company can improve its marketing, product design/development, customer service, and social media efforts.  I was blown away by the event and can tell you that the discussions were incredible, and a joy to be a part of.

Ann Taylor could do the same thing, and I think it would be a wonderfully smart move for them.

So, you want examples, eh? Well, I can’t link to specific pages because that would be just plain mean—besides being highly risky for litigation. But, I’ll tell you about a few I’ve seen lately on Twitter.

Example #1
A social media company that provides social media marketing services to businesses has 175 followers on Twitter, follows around 650, and is on 5 lists. The author has written a total of 10 posts. Huh?

As if that isn’t enough, here’s the copy that appears on the company’s Twitter page: “Social Media Services Ofeered”

Now, would you contact this company for social media marketing assistance?

Example #2
How about the man whose Twitter page says he’s been a general contractor for years? In his bio, he mentions all the nice outdoor activities he’s done in his life. First impression from the photo and the intro? Nice smiling guy in his 60s who probably wants to connect with new people who enjoy the same things. NOT!

Click on the link to his Website, and what smacks you in the face? A sensational headline and high-pressure multilevel marketing pitch with video and an “act now” message. What a disconnect.

Example #3
A professional in my target market began following me recently. I clicked on his profile to check it out. A large message greeted me that says:

This person has protected their tweets.
You need to send a request before you can start following this person.

Is there any wonder that he has only 63 followers? Doesn’t this strategy defeat the entire purpose of social media networking?

OK, your turn. Got any social media marketing dummy stories to share?

To be fair to my insurance friends, regulated industries aren’t the only ones spooked by social media.  Just ask the folks at Nestle (preferably somewhere far, far away from a palm tree) or Southwest Airlines (preferably over a low-fat latte) or Toyota (‘nuff said).  Even some 2009’s shining social media stars are discovering that Facebook and Twitter make for fickle friends when wielded like bullhorns by disgruntled consumers.

So, what’s a marketer to do when the C-Suite begins voicing some doubts about “this social media thing”?  Well, we wondered the same thing at ExactTarget, so we asked 12 marketing thought leaders to pen letters about how companies could “get serious about social media” in 2010.  A few clear themes emerged:

• Social media is not a strategy, it’s a multifaceted channel. Jay Baer (@jaybaer) calls it a horse.  Personally, I think of it more as an elephant.  Whatever the zoological analogy, the consensus is clear—social media is a means to an end, not the end itself.

• Hiring a “social media manager” isn’t enough. As Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) notes, “The complexity of building, deploying and driving a social media ‘program’ not only requires a breadth of skills on the management side, but also a division of labor across the organization.”

• Social media is about commitments over campaigns. Joseph Jaffe (@jaffejuice) hammers this point home: To be a trusted, lasting brand, we must be in it for the long haul.  Those with “burn and churn” campaign mentalities are likely to find themselves short on fans, friends, and employers.

With additional contributions from David Baker (@Social_C_R_M), Sergio Balengo (@SergioBalegno), Jason Falls (@JasonFalls), Kyle Lacy (@KylePLacy), Shelly Palmer (@Shelly_Palmer), Trey Pennington (@TreyPennington),  MarketingProfs very own Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs), and yours truly (@jkrohrs), Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media makes for an inspiring read for anyone gearing up to ask their C-Suite for more support on the social media front lines.


Looking for more concrete ways to get the budget and resources you need for social media marketing? Join Brian Solis July 15 at noon ET for our online seminar Selling Social to the C-Suite. It’s free for Pro members (and just $129 for everyone else). You can catch it on-demand, too!

In an article from “The Observer,” John Naughton wonders in amazement at how society ever managed without the Internet. Naughton ponders a world without Google, Skype, instant messaging, and online bank accounts. And while the Internet has created boom for most of us, the rise of social media hasn’t been sweet ambrosia for all companies. In fact, with social media and Internet technologies, now company decisions and actions are mostly public, including those of front-line employees. Now, actions that happened last week, last night, or 10 minutes ago can be broadcast across the globe in seconds, creating very dangerous challenges for company branding and reputation efforts.

In the Financial Times article “Perils of a Tarnished Brand,” authors Morgen Witzel and Ravi Mattu notice that even the most scripted and orchestrated product launches can go haywire. And even when “best-intented” marketing plans are well-executed, companies can be exposed to the ramifications of their daily operational and strategic decisions (e.g., Google in China and BP). “What affects reputations, in turn affects brands,” the authors point out.

Every employee is a brand ambassador, and brand management is no longer simply the purview of marketing managers. Even the best branding intentions can go awry when actions don’t back up corporate speak, say Witzel and Mattu.

Of larger concern however, is marketing cost-cutting trends in the name of efficiency that potentially leave brands and reputations exposed.

Robert Mabro, Honorary President of Oxford’s Institute for Energy, describes this problem in a letter to the Financial Times. He writes, “(Companies) no longer want to employ specialists in soft matters, such as political issues and the like. When an accident occurs, they find themselves hopelessly unprepared. This of course (ends up) destroying shareholder value!” Moreover, economist John Kay sums up the problem quite succinctly, “Yesterday’s cost-savings are so often today’s corporate crisis.”

One potential solution is for companies to invest more in “softer matters” like brand, reputation, crisis and risk management. Undoubtedly, some of these considerations are tough to justify in an age of narrow return on investment marketing calculations such as cost per lead.

However, Internet and social media technologies that transmit events, news and crisis accounts—at the speed of light—aren’t going away. To succeed in such an environment, companies must invest in the softer functions mentioned above even when “payback” doesn’t appear imminent.

It’s difficult to forecast all types of crises that could occur. A much better plan is preparedness. Is your company up for the challenge?

Related: Financial Times “It Pays to Expect the Unexpected“

In one case, it was a local restaurant that made an anniversary extremely memorable. In the other, it was a hotel/resort that redefined “above and beyond” in my book.

Both of these examples involved personalized notes.

I’ve been to countless restaurants and an abundance of hotels, and very few have been remarkable enough to be … well, remarked on in writing. I expect good service and am disappointed when it fails to occur. I am quite pleased with excellent service. But it’s time to think about providing remarkable service that is—to be perfectly tangible—blog-worthy.

For a customer to go home, and freely and happily take the time to publicly praise a person or a company’s service, is an exceptional affirmation. It is also about the best marketing you’ll ever get. It won’t cost you advertising dollars. It’ll cost you rigorous hiring practices, great training, and cultivation of an exceptional work climate.

What it will earn you is all kinds of repeat business and glowing recommendations. Worthy ROI, in my book.

Perhaps every service organization should sit down with employees and say, “We need to treat EVERY SINGLE GUEST as if they have an influential blog, and assume they’re going to write up their experience tomorrow.” Because the fact is, some of them do—and will.

Don’t just pursue good customer service. Shoot for blog-worthy service. That’s social media marketing at its strongest.

It was found by a man in his hedge in Wiltshire, 140 miles away. He read the name on the balloon and took it to the little girl next door. Excitedly she wrote to Laura Buxton to let her know that she had the balloon. The catch? The girl was also named Laura Buxton, and she was also 10 years old.

The girls arranged to meet.

They were amazed at the similarities between them. They looked the same, had the same colored hair and had dressed in blue jeans and pink jumpers. Each had brought along a pet guinea pig. The pets were also remarkably similar, with a small patch of brown on their tails.

Years later, the two Lauras are now firm friends. The story of their meeting is astounding, but is it something more? Is it a miracle, fate, or simply an amazing coincidence? Take a listen to the program from WNYC and make up your own mind.

If you are like me, one of the most intriguing parts of the story is not what is told. What is NOT told – at least as part of the headline – is the story of statistics, of coincidence and the inconvenient facts which were omitted.

You see, the balloon only found its way to Laura #2 because her next door neighbor thought it belonged to her. He could easily have disposed of it. One of the Lauras was ALMOST 10 – not quite.

This story is being told with microscopic precision. Facts that don’t support the sense of coincidence are removed or downplayed. Why? Simply to help the story create a pattern that we can see and respond to. That’s right – the story is all about the audience.

Our brains work to identify patterns, to make connections and to ultimately make sense of so-called random events. When a pattern is identified, the brain releases dopamine – the chemical trigger that produces a sense of reward and pleasure. So as readers, as listeners, as people engaged with the story, we are being pulled further into the story with each new revelation.

Think about the sense of realization and excitement for the two Lauras. Think of the way their friends and family would have reacted. Think about your own response to the story.

In many ways, the ultimate goal of branding is to create coincidences that our audiences are able to piece together, experience by experience. We leave out extraneous details and focus on the pattern-building aspects – repeatable symbols, names, images and so on. But this is branding with no soul. The real challenge is to open the brand up to the world of individual experience, of interaction. If we really want to recreate the magic of coincidence, we have to do this in the realm beyond the borders of your brand.

It is, perhaps, why social media has so captured our attention. It is the perfect field for the discovery of these kinds of coincidence. And who knows, maybe social networks really do act as a form of brand oxytocin, reinforcing a sense of trust that plays out as what Kevin Roberts once called Lovemarks.

But there is no doubt about one thing – it’s the power of the story that attracts us. And the two Lauras are living proof.