Training Marketer

I came across a great post today from Paul Dunay at Buzz Marketing for Technology about how business to business marketers can use social media to spark lead consideration.

“A prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand.”

Engagement is the first step, and many times the hardest, when developing leads. Tools like blogs and podcasts can initially engage customers with ongoing and relevant conversation.

Social media helps business to business marketers, who are faced with selling complex products and services, by asking the customer to simply consider their brand. Once a visitor considers your business as a possible source to buy from, you can then start the lead nurturing process.

Dunay also has some good advice on how to measure social media success -

“Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.”

Thanks to those at The AppGap for sharing this cool new application. It’s a world mosaic created from 1001 web 2.0 company logos. The picture below does it no justice. Click through to Map of the World 2.0 to see how cool this application really is.

Space colonies? Rocket-powered shoes? Robots doing the laundry?

Predicting the future is tough. Most of the time our ideas don’t pan out exactly how we expected, but luckily we have experts out there who can help us see into the future.

If you’ve ever wondered what the future of social media looks like, experts out there have already started their predictions. Those at Mashable, the social networking news blog, had a recent guest post sharing expert predictions into our social media future.

Jackie Peters, CVO and founding partner of Heavybag Media, recently attended the Executing Social Media conference where Peter Shankman, social media guru, gave a very energetic keynote on the future of social networking and how the social web is changing the way we do business and make money.

Some of Shankman’s social media predictions:

Information overload. Think you’re overloaded now? Just wait, soon there will be too many channels, tools and platforms for anyone to keep track of. The solution will be in the form of one tool that streamlines all of the information in order to successfully manage the information, automating the process for you. FriendFeed and Socialthing are two emerging tools on the market now.

Automated life tracking, life sharing and network building. Peters tells us to imagine a world where a business traveler can walk into an airport, their Bluetooth device signals their arrival and a ticket is printed and ready at the check-in desk.

The fall of reviewers and critics. With personal information so easy to access, people will be using recommendations and ideas from your trusted network rather than traditional reviewers or critics.

Citizen journalists rise. “One customer can do better than a million dollar spend on the Super Bowl.” Customer reviews hold more merit than anything a professional critic could write. We want to know what our friends think about a product or service before we give it a shot.

In the end, “the evolution of the web is more about how it is becoming integrated into our lives and less about the technology.”

Peters’ important side note - according to the movie Back to the Future 2, in 2010 it was predicted we would all have a fax machine in every room. Basically, don’t hold the predictions against us in the next few years if it turns out we weren’t so right.

Not only is Twitter a great social media network and an innovative business tool, it can also help get you out of an Egyptian jail cell.

Earlier this month, journalist and UC Berkley student James Karl Buck was covering Egyptian riots in Manhalla, Egypt. Police arrested him and his translator for photographing a demonstration under charges that the two were revolutionary leaders, according to Buck’s story on his website.

Police let Buck keep his cell phone while detained. Buck Twittered one word: “Arrested.”

The single Tweet alerted his followers of his situation and made it to the U.S. embassy by the next day.

From the Q & A section of Buck’s site:

Q: Did Twitter save your life?

A: I have no illusions that the networks supporting me like my university, my embassy and the various networks of influence that have to do with being a white American student weren’t at play. Twitter and SMS both allowed me to contact those networks.

If Twitter can help a man get out of Egyptian imprisonment, I’m sure there’s a way it can help your business.

One author at DoshDosh came up with 17 ways to use Twitter for business. Here are some highlights:

Personal branding. Twitter can help you establish a more casual image, one that people see as connected and approachable.

Direct traffic. Once you have a network of friends set up, Tweet about your sites. Hopefully, your friends will also start to Tweet about it, then their friends, taking on a life of it’s own.

Get feedback. Use Twitter to get an outside perspective and advice for an issue you’re having.

Customer notifications. Send out a message when you have new products in stock or when you start selling an exciting new product.

Event updates. Notify your network when webcast or seminar times and dates change.

Visit DoshDosh for the full list of ideas.

This video examines how Sea World successfully launched a social media campaign around a new park roller coaster and how they measured the program’s effectiveness. I found the video on Web Strategy by Jeremiah in a post written earlier this month.

Sea World discovered a way to successfully communicate with one social network that had a passion for their product, in this case, roller coasters. The company targeted a specific niche market of roller coaster enthusiasts with the opening of a new ride at their California location.

They used a mix of YouTube and Flickr to publish internal videos and then urged the community called “American Coaster Enthusiasts” to use the media pieces in their own network. Some of the videos Sea World created were downloaded 100,000 times.

Sea World showed a bravery that is sometimes rare with big corporations - they let go of their own content and gave the community power to spread their message. Their trust in the community led to enthusiastic, free promotion and measurable results in the form of increased park visits.

It’s a great video that could spark some ideas within your own company on how to use social media to target niche markets.

Watch it now: Measurement makes a splash at Sea World

Presenters at the 2007 HR Technology Conference & Exposition revealed that social networking and Web 2.0 are key marketing strategies for software vendors this year, according to a Workforce article.

Programmers are building tools into HR software that help users sync their in-house goals with online tactics. For example, one presenter at the technology conference demonstrated how their set of HR software tools can allow employees to post jobs from their firms career Web page directly onto their Facebook page.

HR software is adopting highly interactive tools and embracing social media. The latest generation to join the workforce has grown up with Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. When they start looking for a job, the first stop is usually online.

HR software companies have analyzed how people search for jobs and have created programs to help HR professionals hire the best.

Good.

If you’re reading this blog, maybe you’re part of that rare breed of marketers who has embraced social media as a true and reward-delivering marketing tool. But, many marketing companies out there just “don’t get it.”

In a recent column posted on the Social Media Insider by Cathy Taylor, she explains just how agencies aren’t “walking the walk of social media.”

Consumers are currently spending 7.5% of their online time at community sites and they spend 5% of their time on search sites - just two statistics that make Taylor wonder why companies aren’t participating more in social media.

She brings up a great point that it’s more than just having a blog, or a Facebook account. Companies must actively participate. Keep blogs current, post often, and give them purpose.

“As for blogs, the number of agencies that have them is growing, but overall they’re still pretty spotty in terms of technical chops and raison d’etre, and there’s at times an embarrassing level of ‘Gee whiz! We’re blogging!’ to some posts.”

As you start out, pretend like you actually know what you’re doing and learn as you go. Even social media moguls like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace’s Tom Anderson still learn and experiment with new ways to market.