B2B Online Marketing - Business.com

New B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study Released

Ben Hanna — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:43:32 +0000

Want to know if social media is relevant for B2B companies? What about the top social media resources used by people in the Healthcare or Financial Services industries (just to name a few)? Or how B2B and B2C companies differ in the types of social media initiatives they pursue?

See all this and more in Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study report, available at http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study.

This 57 page research report contains 63 charts and is based on responses from nearly 3,000 North American participants in Business.com’s Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey. The 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study report covers the stats and facts B2B companies need to reach their target business audience most effectively through social media channels as well as where B2B companies are finding social media success.

Here is the report table of contents for more detail on what the report contains:

Introduction
Reaching a Business Audience through Social Media
- Top Business Social Media Resources by Company Size
- Top Business Social Media Resources by Industry
- Top Business Social Media Resources for Senior Management
- Top Business Social Media Resources by Job Role
Social Media Initiatives at B2B Companies
- Respondent and Company Experience with Business Social Media
- Top B2B Company Social Media Activities 34
- How B2B Companies Judge Social Media Success
- Initiative Detail: Managing Business Profiles on Social Media Sites
- Initiative Detail: Participating in Q&A Sites
- Initiative Detail: Using Social Media Monitoring Tools
- Initiative Detail: Sharing Business Content on Social Media Sites
Additional Reports Based on this Research
- 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study
- 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study
- Upcoming Reports
About the B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study
Contact
More Resources from Business.com

To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive look at the current state of B2B social media available today. Download your copy of Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study today and tell us what you think below!

Tags: B2B Social Media, benchmark report, business-to-business

Top Social Media Resources for Business Information

Ben Hanna — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:05:45 +0000

In recently released Business.com 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study, one of the main sections of the study covers how business people currently use different social media resources to find business-relevant information in their day-to-day jobs.

Among the nearly 2,400 study participants turning to social media channels for business information, the most popular resources are webinars and podcasts followed by ratings/reviews of business products and services. The third most popular resource – visiting company or product profile pages on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter – was cited by 62% of respondents and is perhaps the most interesting in light of recent studies suggesting that only 10% of companies give employees full access to social networks at work.

Are CIOs over-reacting and cutting off an important source of business information? Download the free 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study report for more details.

Top Social Media Resources Used for Business Information from Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study

Tags: business social media, Facebook for business, twitter for business

Real Estate & Construction Industry Employees Tap Social Media for Business Info, Law Lags

Ben Hanna — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:56:14 +0000

When it comes to tapping into social media channels for business-relevant information, people working in the Real Estate and Construction industries are the most active while those in Law and Industrial Goods & Services significantly lag their peers in other industries.

This is one of the conclusions found in the 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking study and is based on 2,293 responses from North American business professionals. The figure below, found on pg. 7 of the study (which can be downloaded at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study), shows indexed use of social media channels to get the information and resources respondents need to do their day-to-day jobs.

Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Industry | Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study

Real Estate agents are some of the most passionate networkers around, and bringing these skills to the online world through social media is a natural extension of their offline behavior. As one respondent put it, social media allows “[me to] stay socially connected with my customers and potential clients.” In addition, social media allow those in real estate and construction to easily learn more about potential clients and customers by finding and reviewing profiles of those individuals on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

While those in Law are finding value in the convenience of webinars and podcasts to stay current or learn more about specific legal topics, social media channels are not yet a core resource for the research legal professionals conduct on a day-to-day basis.

To learn more about the use of social media for businessby job role (hint: its not the IT team that’s tapping social media for business information), company size and much more, download your copy of Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.

Tags: construction, law, real estate, social media for business

New Benchmarking Report: Business Social Media Usage

Ben Hanna — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:17:56 +0000

We’re very happy to announce that Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study report is now available as a free download at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.

With 2,948 participants from the US and Canada, this is the largest study to date of how North American businesses, and business people, use social media as well as the value they find across different social media activities and sites. All study participants currently used social media in their day-to-day jobs as a resource for business-relevant information and/or work for a company currently managing, developing or planning social media initiatives.

This 42 page initial report provides excellent business social media benchmarking data for 2010 strategic planning. The report table of contents and list of figures are included below for more detail:

Beyond Chatting with Friends: Social Media as a Business Resource
     Who Uses Social Media as a Resource for Business Information?
     Most Popular Social Media Resources for Business
Most Useful Social Media Resources for Business
Current State of Corporate Social Media Initiatives
     Respondent and Company Experience with Business Social Media
     Top Corporate Social Media Activities
     How Companies Judge Social Media Success
     Initiative Detail: Managing Business Profiles on Social Media Sites
     Initiative Detail: Participating in Q&A Sites
     Initiative Detail: Using Social Media Monitoring Tools
     Initiative Detail: Sharing Business Content on Social Media Sites
     Initiative Detail: Business Content Bookmarking on Social Media Sites
Upcoming Reports Based on this Reseach
About the Study

List of Figures

Figure 1: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Job Level
Figure 2: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Job Role
Figure 3: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Company Size
Figure 4: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Industry
Figure 5: Most Popular Social Media Resources for Business Information
Figure 6: Number of Different Social Media Sites/Resources Used for Business Information
Figure 7: Usefulness of Different Social Media for Business Information
Figure 8: % of Work Time Spent Managing or Involved with Company Social Media Initiatives
Figure 9: Experience with Business Social Media Among Those Currently Managing or Involved with Business Social Media Initiatives
Figure 10: Company Experience with Social Media
Figure 11: Most Popular Business Social Media Initiatives
Figure 12: Company Department Driving Social Media Initiatives
Figure 13: Number of Different Business Social Media Initiatives Planned, in Development or Currently Running
Figure 14: Top Social Media Success Metrics
Figure 15: Ability to See Impact of Social Media Initiatives on Success Metrics
Figure 16: Ability to See Impact of Social Media Initiatives on Success Metrics by Company Experience with Social Media
Figure 17: Top Social Media Sites on Which Companies Maintain Business Profiles
Figure 18: Ability to See Business Impact of Profiles on Social Media Sites
Figure 19: Net Promoter Scores for Business Profiles on Select Sites
Figure 20: Top Q&A Sites on Which Companies Participate
Figure 21: Ability to See Business Impact of Participating on Q&A Sites
Figure 22: Net Promoter Score for Participating in Q&A on Select Sites
Figure 23: Most Popular Tools for Monitoring Online Conversations
Figure 24: Ability to See Business Impact of Online Conversation Monitoring Tools
Figure 25: Net Promoter Score for Select Social Media Monitoring Tools
Figure 26: Top Sites to Which Companies Upload Content
Figure 27: Ability to See Business Impact of Content Sharing on Select Sites
Figure 28: Net Promoter Score for Select Content Sharing Sites
Figure 29: Top Sites Companies Use for Social Bookmarking
Figure 30: Ability to See Business Impact of Social Bookmarking on Select Sites
Figure 31: Net Promoter Score for Select Social Bookmarking Sites
Figure 32: Study Participants by Company Size
Figure 33: Study Participants by Industry
Figure 34: Study Participants by Job Role
Figure 35: Study Participants by Job Level
Figure 36: Study Participants by Company Product / Service Focus
Figure 37: Study Participants by Company Type (B2C, B2B or Mixed)
Figure 38: Study Participants by Primary Customer Location
Figure 39: Study Participants by Company Potential Customer Count
Figure 40: Study Participants by Company Average Sales Cycle

We’ll be providing snapshots of some of the data in future blog posts but why wait – download Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study today and let us know what you think!

Tags: benchmark report, business social media

Three Challenges in Measuring B2B Social Media ROI

Ben Hanna — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:27:37 +0000

B2B marketers are rapidly incorporating social media into their marketing mix, and for good reason. Studies show that companies active in social media generate more revenue than their less social counterparts, prospective customers are increasingly comfortable interacting with brands on social media sites, and the downside risks of not engaging are too significant to ignore.

The challenge, especially for smaller companies, is measuring the results from social media activities. Particularly in tough economic times, every marketing activity is expected to show an ROI.

But it’s easy to measure the ROI of social media marketing, right? That’s certainly what some bloggers would have you believe, at least. The standard formula goes something like this:

Create a knowledge asset such as an eBook, white paper or helpful online tool.
Create a landing page to collect lead information before giving access to the asset.
Share the link to that landing page on social media sites.
Determine the total revenue from any sales resulting from the leads you collected in the previous step.
Divide that revenue number by the cost of creating and sharing the asset. Boom! There’s your ROI.

Never mind that there can be a significant cost involved in building up a following on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere before you can even run such a campaign, and that cost should be allocated across time. Even ignoring that cost, and assuming you can show results using the above formula, at best you have demonstrated an ROI from a social media program, but by no means the ROI.

Demonstrating a hard return on social media investment in the B2B realm is problematic, for at least three reasons:

1. Social media is much more of a PR activity than a direct response marketing vehicle. Like other activities, it increases name recognition, enhances branding and builds credibility. It helps establish relationships with thought leaders and other influential voices in your industry. It can also strengthen customer relationships. It is not, however, generally a good medium for direct promotion, and attempting to use it that way (e.g. by turning your blog into an extended marketing brochure) is likely to backfire.

There is an exception to this, though it applies more in the B2C world than B2B: if you are selling a commoditized product and your primary differentiator is price, then social media can be effective for direct marketing; e.g., you can blog about your specials or Tweet something like “Great deal at the minute – Epson Stylus S21 Printer, Pack of 3 Inks AND a free pack of paper all for only $96.09 + FREE DELIVERY!” But in most B2B situations—differentiation on features, substantial price points, complex sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, significant service component—this doesn’t apply.

2. The problem of last-click attribution. Research shows that in more than 90% of b2b sales, buyers were influenced by multiple brand exposures rather than responding to a single ad or other medium. In other words, that customer you attribute to coming to you through AdWords, or Twitter, or a Facebook ad most likely saw your name in numerous places—an online publication, a press release, your blog, someone else’s blog, in an analyst report, at a trade show, in a directory, on your website, in an email newsletter, somewhere else or any combination of the preceding—before they made that last click. Marketing automation and demand generation software is great for tracking touch points after a prospective customer is identified as a lead, but no software can magically track all of your brand exposures prior to that point.

3. B2B social media is as much about “influencing the influencers” as it is about reaching buyers directly. A typical B2B Twitter or Friendfeed account, for example, may include as followers consultants, analysts, industry journalists, bloggers and others who will never buy your product or service, but can most certainly influence buying decisions in your market. Rarely will you be able to trace a sale back specifically to your social media outreach efforts to these key influencers (see the last-click attribution issue above), though such efforts unquestionably had an impact.

In short, while social media can certainly play an important role in demand generation (along with advertising, PR and other activities), the complexity of b2b buying processes makes its precise impact difficult to gauge.

About the author: Tom Pick is an online marketing executive with KC Associates (http://www.kc-associates.com), a marketing and PR firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on b2b technology clients. He also writes the award-winning WebMarketCentral blog (http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com), a blog about B2B lead generation, social media, interactive PR, SEO and search engine marketing.

Tags: ROI, social media metrics

Business.com Upcoming Events

Ben Hanna — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:00:13 +0000

Just wanted to let you know that Business.com will be attending the following events:

BtoB’s NetMarketing Breakfast in San Francisco on 10/15
OMC Webinar Featuring Ben Hanna – “Top 10 Secrets for BtoB Paid Search & SEO Best Practices to Drive Relevant Traffic and Tangible ROI” 10/27 – sign up here!

Hope to see you there!

Tags: #BTOBNET, B2B

Business Social Media Benchmark Study

Ben Hanna — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:36:43 +0000

UPDATE – the Business Social Media Benchmark Study report is now available as a free download from http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study

All the data for Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmark Survey is in and a hearty “Thanks!” to all those who participated. The survey closed on Friday, September 4th and we’re working hard to analyze the data and write the summary report.

With over 2,000 complete responses from businesses in the US and Canada, this is the largest study to date of how business people use social media as an information resource in their day-to-day jobs the types of business social media initiatives companies are currently pursuing. Here’s a quick overview of the industries represented in the results:

We’ll post a link here to the 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study report as soon as it’s ready so make sure to bookmark this post or follow @B2BOnlineMktg on Twitter!

Tags: business social media, social media metrics

Quick Primer to New Twitter Terms of Service

Shara Karasic — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:06:41 +0000

Twitter just announced that there is a new Twitter Terms of Service, and we know you’re all getting around to reading it, but…you’ve been busy. So here is a quick guide to what you need to know:

1. The basic points (per Biz Stone’s comments about the new Terms of Service):

”Your tweets belong to you, not Twitter.”
”We leave the door open for advertising.”

2. The rules to Twitter (pay attention here – these are some of the factors Twitter takes into account to determine spam):

If you follow a large amount of users in a short amount of time
If you follow and unfollow people in a short time period
If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people
If you have a small number of followers compared to the number of people you are following
If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates
If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending topic

Tags: social media, twitter, twitter for business

VIDEO: How to Measure B2B Online Conversions

Ben Hanna — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:08:52 +0000

One area of marketing that remains strong despite the economic downturn is search marketing. However, as our recent “Unlocking the B2B Web Analytics Black Box” study revealed, there are still major challenges to measuring search marketing success for B2B. The biggest one: conversion attribution. “Last click” tools just don’t provide the full story.

Watch my recent interview with WebProNews to learn more about understanding web analytics and the best tools to measure success for B2B.

Tags: conversion tracking, ppc, search marketing ROI, web analytics

Interview: B2B Online Community Insights from Mark Yolton, SAP Community Network

Shara Karasic — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:03:24 +0000

Mark Yolton, SVP of SAP Community Network

Q: Tell us about yourself and your background – what did you do before running the SAP community?

A: I’m Senior Vice President of the SAP Community Network. I’ve been at SAP for 4 years. I’ve spent 25 plus years in business, mostly technology. Back in the day I was at Unisys, Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and then SAP. My background is in marketing – that’s where I spent most of my career. In the mid-nineties, that led me to the web – I did early corporate websites at Unisys. And I helped Sun transition to e-business. Then I was at Sun and PeopleSoft in marketing roles. I’ve been at SAP for four years, since 2005.

Q: The SAP Community Network (SCN) is six years old and has 1.7 million members. How and why did you grow to that level?

A: Core to the success is that we offer specific value to the members. We call them members rather than users. “Members” feels like part of a club – not cold and distant like “users.” We embrace these people as an extension of our company — as important customers and thought leaders – and we treat them respectfully, in a transparent manner.

We provide them value they can get nowhere else – connections to other customers, innovators, and thought leaders in the tech world – but also in their industry as well. Those in banking learn from other bankers, consumer product people from others in that industry, and so on.

We can extract content from SAP content organizations – other third-party sites can’t do that. We offer tools through downloads, and offer rich connections through discussions, blogs, wikis, and top contributor webinars. Our members develop relationships with peers and partners. Content and connections are key.

Q: Does real business occur in your community? If so, how do you track this?

A: We help individuals and companies accomplish their jobs faster and with higher quality. This is tracked through anecdotal evidence including feedback from surveys, comments to blogs, discussion forum replies, and so on. We get 6,000 forum posts every day, and the median time before the first reply is seventeen minutes. We track how quickly people get answers. There are 3.4 answers to every question on average. A member usually gets one quick answer, than other answers that offer additional info. We ask for feedback about quality – and that feedback says community members get extremely high quality answers. Our Net Promoter score in the 60% range. A good score would be in 30-35% range.

We also measure whether they return and whether they engage – there have been more than five million individual visitors over the past year – more than 20 million total visits. They wouldn’t visit if they weren’t happy.

Many how-to questions are asked in our forums regarding best practices with SAP software, or “Does Product X fit with Product Y?” When non-support-type questions are asked in support forums, we encourage them to ask their peers. We’ve seen a number of misdirected questions to customer care drop – well, the rate of increase has slowed – the customer support team is asked fewer how-to questions, and these questions have increased in the forums. The answers to those questions help people do their jobs better, and faster.

Q: What do your team’s 35 employees do?

A: The important aspect of social media is that the community itself is as engaged as possible: sharing content, authoring whitepapers, blogging – our customers, partners, and thought leaders in the enterprise software world. My team runs programs that encourage best practices and sharing of experience, and encourage customers to help other customers and partners. We have reputation programs. A small handful of our team runs programs that encourage grassroots communication and knowledge sharing. Another part of our team is involved in content publishing – there is an account manager to draw content out of SAP organizations, format it, and make it more web-ready and publishable. We have project and program management – we seek to innovate and offer the community new features and capabilities. For example, earlier this year, we started a University Alliances Community to address university communities to engage them with developers, business analysts and consultants. The goal is to get students and professors to talk to each other and get them collaborating with actual practitioners in the workplace on real-world business and technology issues. They form connections, so when students graduate, they know how to be technologists using SAP systems or businesspeople leveraging our systems. And they learn the expectation of collaboration with peers in the working world.

Q: How does online and offline community intersect at SAP?

A: We believe that virtual community is great, but the connections that you form virtually can be enhanced and enriched through physical events. We have a conference, SAP TechEd – there are four each year in cities all over the world. Our members see it as an annual “family reunion.” We extend these conferences on Facebook and Twitter. This physical manifestation of community is crucial to our success. Events deepen and enrich relationships. Our communities are so global. We have a member from Peru who was active in our online community for many years and he finally was able to attend a TechEd conference last year. He was like a kid at Christmastime, encountering one thousand laptops with the latest technology, meeting his heroes. They went out for a beer, shared meals, chatted between official program sessions. They helped him fix code, and advance his career for years virtually, and he finally got to meet them in person at our event.

Part of our social media strategy around events is “letting the community take care of it.”

• We use Twitter to talk about events beforehand, during, and after the conference. We get people excited about who’s speaking, and the topics they will be speaking about. Speakers share previews of their content before the conference. During events the Twitter traffic is incredible – hundreds of thousands want to know what’s going on – it allows the people not present to stay up-to-date. We did a product launch in NYC earlier this year and we sent some top contributors who polled a larger audience through Twitter at our press conference. Then we asked questions that came from Twitter of the person on stage – which we then webcast and tweeted out to the community. This broadened the reach of conference, and as a result we were among the top-ten trending topics on Twitter that day.

• We use flickr – so individuals can each take their own photos and tag them and then the community can see them aggregated.

• We use LinkedIn to promote the event and give updates during the event.

• We use community blogs for speakers to share presentation abstracts, ask questions of the audience before their talks, and to draw people to their sessions.

• Some of us even use Facebook connections, and of course Digg and other tools

Q: How do you set your strategy and measure success given the constantly evolving field of online community and social media?

We do set up strategy each year for the coming year – and we’re currently working on an updated three-year strategy. At the beginning of each year, we set strategy depending on the maturity of the community at that point, the accomplishments from the year before, the members’ expressed priority wishes, our business strategy and priorities, and other factors. This is largely organic, fluid, and flexible within certain parameters.

• Of course we want to grow – so we want to increase membership. We ask ourselves if the things we’re doing are creating value for the audience we’re trying to serve – measured by traffic to our communities.

• Another element is measuring engagement – this is Web 2.0, not Web 1.0, and Web 2.0 means engaging and getting a groundswell of grassroots user-generated content (UGC) in wikis, blogs, and so on. We measure that engagement by tracking the increase in forum conversations and numbers of blogs from our community.

• Some of our metrics are more tied to business goals – are we gaining efficiencies – for example, we look at pseudo-support questions that are redirected to the community to answer. Are these set of questions best answered by other customers being redirected – at the appropriate quality and speed?

• We also track top-line goals like revenue, market share, and product adoption. We notice when we launch a new product with a community component, the rate of adoption is much faster. There is a ramp-up period, when a product has gone live but has not yet achieved enough market penetration to be generally available. Until then you need to invest money, time and effort in marketing and education. We’ve had products go slow through the ramp-up process, but then we help by introducing a social media component, and then product adoption goes much faster.

Q: How has online community enhanced SAP solutions?

A: SAP Ecohub is an online community-powered marketplace for partner and SAP-type solutions — tools built around our core. Those partners want access to our customer base. We used to publish a partner solutions catalog, but then we built SAP Ecohub, which gives members the ability to use screenshots, to include technical specs, to show demo’s, and really drill down to business problems. The community members are able to rate, rank and review different SAP and partner solutions according to their value to them. The voice of the customer is used to enhance the product catalog. Before the community started, there was not as much richness.

Marketing used to push content, but now there is much more conversation – it’s more balanced now. Social media and communities allow us to engage throughout our company and throughout our ecosystem. Product managers get feedback from customers. If there’s some kind of issue in the marketplace, we know immediately because of Twitter, our blogs, and so on. We know before the issue becomes a black eye — we can address it first.

Q: Has SAP’s corporate culture had to change to embrace online community values? Was there internal pushback?

A: We are fairly conservative. To be this aggressive with community and social media required change within the company. And by doing this, the perception of SAP changed. People realized we can be agile and transparent, authentic, and still be careful about quality. They realize that we are interested in helping our customers to be successful, and that we are embracing the ecosystem of our partners. Customers expect us to help them run their businesses, so we have to be both conservative and innovative.

There was internal pushback – how far should we go? How fast? What are the right ways to orchestrate such a community? What are the right controls? Our CEO and board members have a deep understanding about what we’re doing with communities and social media, and they understand the strategic benefit and that the benefit is much greater than the risk. They understand that the risk of not participating is greater than the risk of something going wrong. We can differentiate from the competition by engaging very actively. We can plug into the power of member influence. This requires constant internal marketing of the communities, and a sales job to bring later adopters to the table.

But our ecosystem strategy, of which community is part, is also a corporate strategy for SAP. SAP has chosen to engage actively and aggressively with its broad, global ecosystem.

Q: According to Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group’s recent report that deep brand engagement correlates with financial performance – do you think that’s true? Or is it the reverse? SAP was listed as a brand using best practices for engagement – your engagement is not limited to a few social media experts, but extends across your brand.

A: It’s a chicken and egg question. Are successful companies more engaged in social media because they can be – because they are successful, or are they successful because they are engaged in social media? There is a correlation…we don’t know if there is causality. I can say that being engaged in community and social media has brought SAP tremendous benefits, including product adoption, market penetration, and so on — and also richness of relationship which can translate into customer satisfaction and success – and I would guess that would translate into customer loyalty.

I know that these communities have brought SAP tremendous financial and non-financial benefits.

Editor’s Note:

Mark Yolton orchestrates the large, open communities of innovation at SAP for the benefit of customers, partners, and SAP. These include:

SDN – SAP Developer Network – http://sdn.sap.com
BPX – Business Process Expert Community – http://bpx.sap.com
BOC – Business Objects Community – http://boc.sap.com
SAP EcoHub – http://ecohub.sap.com
UAC – University Alliances Community – http://uac.sap.com
SAP TechEd & SAP Tech Tour – http://sapteched.com
SCN – SAP Community Network – http://scn.sap.com

Together, these communities are ~1.7 million members in 200+ countries, with forums, wiki, blogs, eLearning, downloads, whitepapers and articles, 400,000 bi-weekly newsletter subscribers, etc.

Tags: b2b online community, B2B Social Media, B2B social media case study, SAP

A Unified Strategy to Boost B2B Search Marketing ROI

Dianne Molina — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:42:26 +0000

By S. Ryan DeShazer, Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

I’ve been known to tell clients that, unless you plan on shutting down your corporate Web site, you cannot ignore search. It’s essential to online existence to be findable. In fact, there’s a great quote I use regularly in workshops and new business presentations. It’s simple, to the point, and perfectly brilliant:

“If you cannot be searched, you do not exist.”

For the new entrant to B2B search marketing, the challenge can be daunting. There is so much to consider, and depending on the industry, a bevy of sophisticated competitors are waiting to eat your lunch. But search is essential to any organization’s viability, so you must overcome any fear and get started. Now.

And while effective strategies first incorporate business objectives before turning to tactics, it should be noted that in search there’s really only one tactic: search! Forget this nonsense that either paid or organic search is preferable over the other. Organic results and paid ads share the same page real estate, and to the user there is little on-the-fly distinction between the two. Eye-scanning studies have confirmed this: page placement is more important in determining which listings get attention than whether they are paid or organic.

The Trick: Pick Fights You Can Win

You’ve no doubt seen a graphic similar to the one below before. The theory of the long-tail, in this case visually representing a client’s search keyword-referred traffic for a given time period. The long tail is a very exciting reality and represents a chance for almost every advertiser to “pick a fight they can win.” Essentially, keyword phrases that are queried can be broken into three categories: “head,” “torso,” and “tail” terms.

“Head” terms are general (and, therefore, typically very competitive) terms that relate to the particular industry. “Torso” terms are more specific and receive fewer queries. “Tail” terms are those that are so specific that they receive very few searches, but when added together amount to a large percentage of overall search-referred visitors.

The Key to Winning: Keyword Optimization

Identify which of these hundreds or thousands of keywords (head, torso, and tail) your company can generate positive returns from. Securing the top position for the most popular keyword phrase in the industry isn’t always enough to ensure success. That positioning has to drive an appropriate response among your target audiences.

Start with paid search to cast a wide net and quickly identify which combinations of keyword phrases, ad units and landing pages yield the greatest rates of response. Paid search, unlike organic, can operate fluidly in response to changing market dynamics or advertiser missteps. What if a keyword doesn’t generate the response that was hypothesized? Re-script the ad, change out the landing page, reduce the keyword-level bid or even remove that keyword from the portfolio altogether. With a bit of diligence, it can be determined with statistical certainty which combinations are working. Organic search takes much more elbow grease, and patience, to move the needle.

Once armed with that insight, bring the top-performing combination from paid search into the fold for optimization and claim as much of the “free” search traffic as possible. Recent statistics show that organic listings receive approximately 75 percent of all search click-throughs, so you’re leaving a lot on the table by not taking this extra step. Remember to optimize only for top performing paid search keyword terms and you’ve found some fights you can win.

Over time, less-sophisticated competition will continue to bloody each other’s noses with high-cost paid campaigns and uninformed organic programs. By following this approach, you can side-step those battles and stay focused on what matters most: results.

S. Ryan DeShazer
Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

Ryan DeShazer is a seasoned digital marketing professional, having served entrepreneurial stints at pay-per-click (PPC) marketing firm Clix Marketing and again as co-owner of interactive boutique NOEINK. His current responsibilities at GyroHSR include developing and advancing the firm’s search engine marketing (SEM) capabilities.

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Twitter for Business Case Study: @B2BOnlineMktg at 120 Days

Ben Hanna — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:02:54 +0000

NOTE: This is part 4 of Business.com’s Twitter for business case study where we share interesting, valuable insights about B2B online marketing through our @B2BOnlineMktg Twitter account and, in the process, build awareness of Business.com as a key online resource for solutions to business challenges. You can find our monthly updates to this case study and other useful B2B social media case studies here – http://www.smartbusinessresults.com/b2b-social-media/.

Business.com's B2BOnlineMktg Twitter Account Stats On July 6, 2009

At four months into our B2B Twitter experience we’ve been more successful at developing a following and engaging our target audience of B2B marketers than I initially expected. These gains have come through a combination of focus – rather than trying to tackle the entire world of B2B social media opportunities all at once, we tackled two blogs and two Twitter accounts with two FTEs – consistent measurement and a healthy willingness to test a wide range of Twitter tactics rather than just following existing “best practices”.

Here’s an update on Twitter metrics from our first Twitter post on March 2, 2009 through July 6. After that, we’ll look at a couple basic characteristics of business Twitter users with the highest follower count and what this means for building a large, engaged business audience on Twitter.

Key Stats for @B2BOnlineMktg at 120 Days

Followers: 2,840

Following: 204

Tweets: 585

Tracked clicks on tweets: 8,209

Top 10 @B2BOnlineMktgtweets by number of clicks over the last 30 days (replaced original ow.ly link with [link] so we don’t mess up tweet tracking):

9 Internet marketing calculators – bookmark this one! [link](via @smallbiztrends) #socialmedia #ppc #seo (55 clicks)
…And @markwschaefer’s list of B2B social media superstars: IBM, GE, Cisco, Boeing & Ingram Micro – [link] #b2b (55 clicks)
New B2B lead gen study shows social media becoming important lead driver (up to 15% of total). [link] #b2b (45 clicks)
Social media metrics – 9 key metrics for measuring the impact of your blogger outreach. [link] #b2b #pr #wa (44 clicks)
9 tips for creating banner ads that drive better ROI from @InbarChap – good B2B display advice. [link] #b2b (43 clicks)
64% of C-level execs conduct 6+ searches per day to locate business information. [link] #b2b (38 clicks)
How marketing goals impact use of different online ad types – Excellent chart from MarketingSherpa [link] (37 clicks)
Who’s watching your online reputation? Good advice for B2B companies getting into social media. [link] (37 clicks)
Time for self-reflection…Why your B2B marketing is so lousy - [link](via @admazing) #b2b (35 clicks)
Marketing a Software-as-a-Service / SaaS solution? Here are 10 essential tips for better results - [link] #b2b (33 clicks)

A Look at the “Pro Business Tweeters”

One of our goals when starting on Twitter was to learn the fastest route to a large, engaged group of Twitter followers. We had some advantages in building our @B2BOnlineMktg account, like thousands of subscribers to our B2B search marketing newsletter that we could make aware of our Twitter presence, but we intentionally didn’t use all our promotional power to drive followers. As I’ve said before, we also didn’t use the “spam-and-cull” approach - following hundreds or thousands of Twitter users, seeing which ones automatically follow back, culling out those who do not, following another set of users, and so on - because we want a large and ENGAGED following. What good are 10,000 Twitter followers if none of them pay any attention to what you’re tweeting?

To start getting a handle on how to build a large, engaged group of Twitter followers, we followed a number of more experienced B2B Twitter accounts with 5,000+ followers and started watching for patterns. Among these ”pro business tweeters”, there were two starkly different groups in terms of the Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio:

Follower-Friend Ratio ~= 1
- roughly equal number of followers and following
- attract followers interested in tweet content and/or building their own follower count (i.e., great targets for the “spam-and-cull” approach to building a Twitter following)
- wide range of people and backgrounds but usually have multiple years of Twitter experience
- tweet a lot of thoughts/observations, some links to interesting content they’ve found and retweet a limited set of other pro business tweeters
Follower-Friend Ratio = 5+
- attract followers interested in tweet content only since its obviously unlikely that these accounts will follow you back
- usually following <300-400 other Twitter users, and often much less than that (<50)
- may be big brands or social media/Twitter-specific companies with a large customer base already on Twitter, publishing companies with the reach to attract a lot of followers to a Twitter account or long-time Twitter users who chose not to automatically follow other users back
- may or may not tweet a lot of thoughts/observations, heavy focus on links to their own or other relevant content they’ve found and retweet a limited set of others

The follower-friend ratio caught my eye because, after reseaching many of the existing B2B social media “best practices,” it was clear that there were two very different, and often conflicting, perspectives on the right way to engage in social media. The first is a view of social media as an interpersonal medium governed by interpersonal rules. For example, if someone wants to be your friend, the polite thing is to shake hands, say “hi”, and try to be friends – most people would consider it just plain rude to walk away. Those pro business tweeters with a follower-friend ratio around 1 seem to be following this norm and with automatically following someone back. Since there’s no obvious, objective benefit to blocking a follower if you decide not to be their friend, follower and following counts grow together.

The other group with a follower-friend ratio on the 5+ range seems to be viewing social media as a mass communication medium governed by mass communication rules, and the pro business tweeters in this group are often larger companies, business media and/or experienced execs at mid- to large-sized companies. From a mass communication perspective, its perfectly acceptable and even expected for the relationship to be one-sided or interactive only on demand (such as when a customer has a question). After all, its utterly impossible for someone to follow 5,000+ other Twitter users, let alone 500, and pay attention to all their tweets. If you think reading and processing 100 emails a day is a challenge, try 5,000 tweets.

You see these same styles with newer and much smaller Twitter for business accounts as well – some follow hundreds of others to kick start their own follower base (and then worry about how unfollowing may hurt their reputation) while others follow very few but seem to attract a lot of followers themselves.

Thoughts on Building An Engaged Business Twitter Following

If you’ve though of using Twitter for business and/or find your existing business Twitter presence stalled out with little follower engagement, here are some thoughts to get you on the right track:

Twitter is a viable business communication channel, end of story – From what I’ve seen in the past four months, Twitter has a role as a business communication channel for most B2B companies. Whether Twitter figures out a way to monetize its business or not is irrelevant because, if Twitter fails, some other micro-blogging platform will take its place. If you’ve already tried Twitter for your business and struggled to make it work, its most likely because the B2B social media rules are still being written. Don’t give up, and keep your eye on this list of B2B social media resources for the straight scoop.

Twitter for business is mass communication- I’m sure I’ll get hate mail for this one but if you plan to use Twitter for business, and you have more than a few hundred prospects/customers/influencers combined, you’re kidding yourself if you think interpersonal norms can govern how you use Twitter or other social media for your business. Why? Because Twitter is incredibly inefficient for forming interpersonal relationships. 140 character tweets are efficient for finding interesting people/content, maintaining contact with existing “friends” (as was the original purpose of Twitter) and asking/addressing simple questions. Establishing more meaningful business relationships through Twitter, though, is highly inefficient – people connect on Twitter, then want to take the conversation elsewhere because going back-and-forth through 140 character bursts is a quick road to carpal tunnel syndrome. For the vast majority of businesses out there, “mass communication” is the model you should follow as you plan your Twitter strategy.

You have a business contact list, so use it – As a business on Twitter, you don’t need to build a following like an individual would. This is a key advantage for business Twitter users that’s either forgotten or, more likely, ignored out of some combination of a misplaced desire to not disrupt existing communication channels and the sheer revulsion many B2B marketers feel when considering how a P2P or B2C trend may apply to their business. Get over it. Establish a basic Twitter presence, make your prospects and customers aware of this new channel, and let them use it.

Focus on tweet quality over tweet quantity- I covered this finding in my interview with Mark Schaefer about Twitter for business, but we’ve found that tweeting interesting things (e.g., tweets with links that more people click on) has a much bigger, positive influence on follower growth rate than does tweet volume (e.g., making sure you tweet very frequently to keep your tweets in front of your followers). In other words, the best practice for getting people’s attention and interest on Twitter is the same as it is across other business communication channels – talk when you have something important to say. Blanketing your followers with tweets doesn’t work any better than does blanketing the media with press releases about non-issues or hammering a direct mail list with irrelevant offers. One more reason to look at Twitter as a mass communication channel for business rather than a medium ruled by strict adherence to norms of interpersonal interaction.

Tags: @B2BOnlineMktg, B2B social media case study, twitter for business

Mapping Search Marketing to Reach the B2B Buyer

Dianne Molina — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:39:08 +0000

By S. Ryan DeShazer, Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

What I’ve always enjoyed about being a B2B search marketer is the inherent complexity involved in persuading the business buyer. Not only do communications need to speak to multiple stakeholders to the purchase decision, but those stakeholders typically happen to be pretty intelligent people, holding prominent roles in their organizations. Gimmicks definitely will not work here.

So the challenge to B2B search marketers is in determining how to secure multiple buy-ins from a finite and intelligent group, overcome a lengthy consideration process, while mitigating fears over high costs and risks associated with the transaction.

Nobody said this was easy work.

The trick to maintain your sanity, while delivering positive returns on ad spend is to focus on things that are under your control. In B2B search marketing, that means you have to do things a bit differently than in B2C. To succeed, you must:

1)   Recognize that business purchase consideration cycles aren’t always linear
2)   Let micro B2B conversions show the way
3)   Capitalize on navigational search
4)   Draw qualitative conclusions from quantitative data

Business Purchase Consideration Cycles Aren’t Always Linear

This is huge. B2B marketers tend to over-think programs and believe that their audiences fit neatly into pre-defined, academic categories of Awareness, Consideration, Negotiation, Purchase. In my experience, no B2B transaction actually maps to this type of consideration cycle. B2B transactions follow myriad paths to completion. The only commonality among B2B transactions is that, at some point, a company became aware of another’s offerings and decided to ultimately purchase.

Not very helpful insight when planning a search program. So, what are B2B search marketers to do?

Let Micro B2B Conversions Show the Way

Not everything has to be about the purchase. Introduce a call-to-action that focuses just on the ultimate transaction and you will lose 95% of your potential audience. What is more impactful, is introducing offers or points of engagement that directly address individual stages of the consideration cycle. Think of these as “micro conversions,” or opt-ins that map to earlier consideration.

For example, online ROI calculators can often be the perfect “offer” made to those considering a purchase, comparing alternatives, and attempting to determine the payback period of a capital investment. Provide website visitors with tools to better inform their purchase decision, and engagement with your website and brand will increase. Investigate what your competitive set is doing and see where you can borrow, and best their offers.

Capitalize on Navigational Search

Navigational search, or search terms that are queried specifically to navigate directly to a particular brand’s website, are huge opportunities as well. In our experience, a disproportionately large number of search-driven conversions will come from brand-term queries.

It makes sense too. Anytime there is complexity in the purchase decision process, you can anticipate that a brand preference emerges as the transaction draws nearer. We see evidence of this as search-referred traffic becomes more brand-focused over the life of the visitor’s website touches. In fact, we’ve invested in analytics technologies that specifically help us to investigate and understand the holistic chain of search events that lead to an ultimate conversion.

Clients don’t always like focusing on branded terms as part of their Search programs, but they’re essential to efficiently capturing and converting web audiences.

Draw Qualitative Conclusions from Quantitative Data

Marketing is not formulaic. It cannot be solved by mathematics, nor can it be run by software alone. Human intelligence and oversight are needed in order for marketing to ensure the brand realizes its full market potential. The raw numbers can, however, help to enhance our own understanding of the marketplace dynamics.

What is the search data telling us that we weren’t aware of previously? Have our target audiences responded differently to our messaging than we originally hypothesized? Has our offer failed to entice action? If so, why has it failed? Can we test alternative messaging to see whether it’s the messaging or the offer itself?

Data can lead us to either conclusions or more questions. Where we’re taken to more questions, we follow-up with more hypotheses.

These four insights can help your search programs become far more comprehensive and relevant to B2B audiences. Your efforts and diligence will help round out a more complete view of your market, that in turn can be used to help establish a long-term competitive advantage. Ultimately, you will be engaging and converting more search-referred prospects than ever before.

S. Ryan DeShazer
Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

Tags: b2b marketers, ppc, search marketing

Business.com Earns Click Quality Accreditation

Ben Hanna — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:38:57 +0000

At Business.com, we’re dedicated to providing high quality traffic to our advertisers.

As such, we’re very pleased to announce that Business.com is one of the first four pay-per-click industry leaders, including Microsoft (adCenter and Atlas Media Console), to earn click quality accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) certifying full compliance with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Click Measurement Guidelines. See our press release here.

The MRC accreditation means Business.com advertisers can be assured that the clicks they pay for on Business.com are generated by real people with a real interest in the product or service being advertised.

Business.com has been an active member of the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group over the last three years, working with other industry leaders to finalize a clear, standardized definition of a “click” and how clicks are measured and counted, including the identification of fraudulent or other invalid clicks. Published in May 2009, the IAB Click Measurement Guidelines also include auditing and certification recommendation for organizations involved in performance-based advertising. To earn MRC click quality accreditation, a company must undergo a through MRC-drive audit of its operations and review of the findings by the MRC Audit Committee. Once granted, click quality accreditation by the MRC certifies that an organization has provided full and complete information to the MRC regarding all details of its operation, conducts its processing and reporting substantially in accordance with representations to its clients and in compliance with IAB guidelines, and submits to annual audits of its systems by CPA firms engaged by the MRC.

Suffice to say, receiving MRC click quality accreditation is a lot of work but well worth the effort as part of our commitment to click quality and good measurement practices. While Business.com is one of the very first to earn this accreditation, keep your eye out for more announcements as other leading companies offering performance-based advertising commit to full compliance with the IAB’s Click Measurement Guidelines.

Tags: ppc, search marketing ROI

Interview: Top 5 B2B Online Community Myths with Impact Interactions’ Mike Rowland

Ben Hanna — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:56:49 +0000

In this interview with Mike Rowland of Impact Interactions, a consulting group advising B2B companies such as Cisco on social media and online community strategy, Mike covers the top 5 myths about building B2B online communities and then offers his top tips for successful community building:

Myth #1: B2B online communities must have a serious tone

MR: When you look at B2C communities, the perception is that they are fun and entertaining, but B2B communities have to be cut and dry. But for B2B, the facilitators, like in any community, need to haveboth a sense of humor and people skills to be effective. They don’t have to be serious and focused all the time. B2B doesn’t have to stand for “no fun.” That is not true. Think “measured fun” – for example, the kind of discussion that happens at the watercooler.

Myth #2: New B2B online communities need a presence on all major social networking sites

MR: We see communities that get launched with webcasts, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. If you are in too many places at once, you fragment your audience, and they never link all of your efforts together. Start small with your feature set, so you can aggregate people first, before giving them multiple tools. Too much focus on tools, rather than the behaviors you’re trying to get, can backfire.

Myth #3: B2B online communities need active moderation to start but eventually run themselves

MR: When building a B2B community, you should expect that your company will always need to be actively involved. When companies stop actively engaging in community, it alienates people. If you see zero responses, it feels like the company doesn’t care. For example, I’ve seen cases where companies will launch an open Q & A channel, but they don’t set up a team of subject matter or community experts. It becomes a virtual wasteland. Companies underestimate the work communities take.

Companies think that there’s a magic formula, and that once there is active community participation then the company can pull back because they are no longer needed. That’s not true. Companies must maintain their activity level, not just at launch, but have a plan for what they’ll be doing in three months, and into the future. Don’t expect to start out heavy, then back out substantially. B2B relationship-building is much more intense than B2C – you can’t just back out.

Myth #4: B2C and B2B online communities have similar participation rates

MR: The 90-9-1 participation ratio (90% lurkers, 9% intermittent contributors, 1% active participants) that community managers often cite as a benchmark is a myth, at least for B2B communities. In my experience, that ratio doesn’t fit well. That model doesn’t take into account what the community is trying to accomplish. In a B2B support community, if users don’t see their issue and need support, they post it – it’s different than a gossip community where there may not be a high user incentive to post as opposed to lurking. Support communities still have lurkers, but the intermittent contributor participation percentage can be as high as 25-30%. On the other hand, active participants in B2B communities can be more like 0.1% or a tenth of what community managers expect to see in B2C.

Myth #5: Social networking site metrics indicate the health of B2B communities

MR:The main problem with participation in B2B Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIngroups and so on is that you’re able to identify active participants and intermittent contributors, but you can’t see who’s just reading. Social networking site follower or friend counts can also be misleading because not all of these people could even be considered lurkers. Instead, use social network sites as beacons to point traffic to your site so you can measure community participation more actively.

Mike’s top tips for building B2B online communities:

MR:What does the audience hear from you over time to make you want to take action? You can’t just blitz people – you have to be providing info over time – it’s more about brand awareness. B2B companies are playing catch up a lot – but things are moving faster now. Dell and Cisco are examples of B2B companies on Twitter – that’s a big growth market.

To B2B companies getting started, ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. Lead generation/sooner-faster sales, support? Companies need to put that into a goal – and really think about their business objectives. What would the KPI’s be? Success indicators can come from CRM, the community, the website, the ecommerce website.

After that we start talking about tools. What are you offering? If it’s perceived that you’re not offering something of value, you’ll have a low conversion rate. And –- how good is the user interface and navigation? With each extra step you lose more people. How passionate are people regarding your product or brand? Higher passion equals a higher energy rate for your online community.

We get asked questions like — for 100,000 visits per month, how many registrants should we have? It depends. There are so many variables. Compare the percent of registrations to traffic. The ratio is dependent on value exchange –- what are you offering?

An example of a passionate B2B community is Cisco Networking Professionals. The power of that brand is a combination of everything they do in the marketplace –-good products, people, treatment of customers – and how they get the message out – that ties directly into their community metrics.

A smaller company without brand awareness can use social media to get started –- online community must come later. Create an executive level blog to set the tone –- talk about where the company/industry is going. Set up Twitter –- feature your blog and call attention to yourself as a company that’s willing to communicate.

Everyone thinks they’re a social media expert. The key is to understand people, not tools. Understand what drives behavior, and why they’d want to interact.

Tags: b2b online community, LinkedIn, twitter for business

Building B2B Brands with Search Marketing

Ben Hanna — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:39:37 +0000

Oil and water. Mars and Venus. Search and branding.

Not long ago (or still?), brand marketing and search marketing were viewed as two polar opposites in the marketing mix. Many diehard pros specializing in one or the other of these areas still struggle to understand find value in, or even imagine, using search marketing to build or reinforce a brand message.

“The 10 blue links of the search results page are simply not a worthwhile medium for building brands,” say the brand marketers.

“Who cares about building brand awareness and preference when we’re driving conversions!” say the search marketers.

We address this debate for B2B brand marketing and B2B search marketing pros in *NEW* Business.com whitepaper “Building B2B Brands through Search Marketing“.

Here’s a quick summary:

The purpose of this whitepaper is to provide a straightforward overview of how to build your business-to-business (B2B) brand through search marketing, and to provide several best practice tips for finding and leveraging brand-building opportunities in the context of search marketing. Specifically, we cover the three fundamental ways paid search and SEO connect with B2B brand campaigns:

1. Brand initiatives provide key inputs for search marketing campaigns

2. Search marketing delivers an impactful, branded experience

3. Search marketing impressions, CTR and conversion rates are affected by brand campaigns

And, in the process, review the mounting research supporting the impact of a strong B2B brand presence in search results on search marketing ROI.

We don’t get into the “which is better” debate that branding pros and search marketers so often fall into. As you review the research it quickly becomes apparent that this debate is a waste of time - brand marketer and search marketers absolutely need each other to deliver the best possible ROI for their companies.

Visit http://www.business.com/info/building_b2b_brands.asp today to get your copy of “Building B2B Brands through Search Marketing”.

And once you’ve had a chance to read through it, we’d love to hear your impressions below.

Tags: branding, marketing mix

6 B2B Online Community Takeaways from OCU 2009

Shara Karasic — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:50:40 +0000

Online Community Unconference 2009

At Forum One’s energized gathering of online community professionals at the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View last week, there was great interest in B2B online communities compared to last year’s conference (marketers are starting to realize that B2B companies need social media too). Mike Rowland of Impact Interactions, a community consulting group, led a well-attended session on B2B communities and their characteristics based on his six years of experience helping major B2B companies such as Cisco, Intel, and SAP establish relationships with their customers and prospects using online communities and other social media.

Here are Mike Rowland’s six key takeaways for building B2B online communities:

1) Building B2B online communities takes more than copying B2C practices

Clearly defined objectives and a focus on driving business results are the hallmarks of more successful B2B online community efforts. You can’t get there by simply adopting B2C community practices without reference to whether these make sense for your business or target audience.

2) Question the 90-9-1 participation ratio

B2C community managers typically expect that 90% of visitors will be lurkers, 9% will be intermittent participants and 1% will be active participants (90-9-1). In the B2B space, according to Rowland, the typical ratio is closer to 99-0.9-0.1 – B2B online communities will have about 1/10th the active participants of a B2C community at comparable traffic volumes – but participation rates are all over the map. In support communities where people can ask a quick question and get a quick response, the 0.9% intermittent participant rate expands.

3. Don’t confuse traffic and behavior with value

Its easy to get excited about traffic to your B2B online community, or from seeing members interact to address issues or challenges. However, don’t confuse traffic and behavior with value to your business. Is your B2B online community generating more revenue for your business? More leads? Lowering support costs? Raising awareness? Providing key insights into your customer base? Understand the business reasons for creating your community in the first place and keep your eye on those metrics.

4. B2B online community participants are buyers

Survey research from multiple B2B online communities shows that 60+% of members say that something they read or saw in the community influenced them to buy. This is a theme Forrester’s Laura Ramos also mentioned in our B2B social media with her.

5. Use Twitter and Facebook to direct traffic to specific landing pages

Give B2B social media and community participants a clear call to action and take traffic to specific landing pages. Keeping track of traffic, leads, revenue, etc. from each third party application is also critical.

6. Young B2B communities take significant work to build

B2B communities don’t just emerge in the field of dreams sense – if you build it, they will come. Given the community participation ratios above, B2B communities are much harder to build than B2C communities. Companies must to be prepared to work to build relationships and grow the community over time. While you will put in more work at first, and an active B2B online community will require somewhat less effort over time, don’t expect to just sit back and watch as your community grows astronomically. It takes work, but the business value derived may be well worth the effort.

Tags: b2b online community

Twitter for Business Case Study: @B2BOnlineMktg at 90 Days

Ben Hanna — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:00:48 +0000

NOTE: This is part 3 of Business.com’s case study about using Twitter to share interesting, valuable insights about B2B online marketing through our account (http://twitter.com/B2BOnlineMktg) and, in the process, build awareness of Business.com as a key online resource for solutions to business challenges. Also read part 1 ( @B2BOnlineMktg at 30 days) and part 2 (@B2BOnlineMarketing at 60 days) for more background.

Business.com's B2BOnlineMktg Twitter Account Stats On June 3, 2009

I hesitate to say this, but I think we’re starting to get the hang of Twitter for business – why it makes sense as a business communication channel, how it fits into our marketing plan, the most relevant metrics to track, how to build a strong follower base (without simply following everyone else on Twitter and hoping for a reciprocal follow), what makes a compelling business “tweet” and much more. I can’t cover all these topics in this post, but I’ll hit the highlights below and we’ll provide more details in future posts (which we’ll tweet via http://twitter.com/B2BOnlineMktg, of course!).

First, an update on Twitter metrics from our first Twitter post on March 2, 2009 through June 2.

Key Stats for @B2BOnlineMktg at 90 Days

Followers: 2,043

Following: 197

Tweets: 404

Tracked clicks on tweets: 6,257

Top 10 @B2BOnlineMktg tweets by number of clicks over the last 30 days:

5 situations where B2B marketers should AVOID social media – great summary http://ow.ly/4N6D (via @btobmarketing) (134 clicks)
Improving conversion rates in a world where “99% of business buying is covering your butt.” http://ow.ly/59nU #b2b #marketing (84 clicks)
US companies to more than double investments in web analytics over next 5 years – new Forrester report. http://ow.ly/ao2R #wa (69 clicks)
Case study – Customer reviews drive 196% increase in paid search revenue for Office Depot (via @whatworks) http://ow.ly/59P6 (61 clicks)
Good laugh for B2B marketers – 7 Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing (via @michelelinn @RossGraber ): http://ow.ly/6vPi (60 clicks)
3,600 LinkedIn users speak – Twitter most important platform for brands to master. http://ow.ly/anO1 (via @SocialMedia411) (59 clicks)
Integrating online and offline B2B marketing strategies – register now for May 11th webinar http://ow.ly/5hGO (42 clicks)
Love this one – reminder to dig a little deeper into marketing research stats before quoting. http://ow.ly/5hAv (41 clicks)
Get the latest update on 2009 B2B Marketing Trends in this MarketingProfs webinar – May 6, 11 AM PDT/ 2 PM EDT http://ow.ly/4Dp2 (37 clicks)
The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media – http://ow.ly/9h3M #socialmedia (36 clicks)

Drive More Clicks From Business Twitter Users

Over the last 30 days we focused on identifying underlying patterns in how business people use Twitter. To do so, we spread our tweets across days of the week and different times during the day. We also varied the time between tweets and tweet length in characters. Looking across 182 tweets from both our business user-focused Twitter accounts (@B2BOnlineMktg for B2B marketers and @whatworks for business people in general) from May 4th through June 3rd, 2009, we found some interesting patterns…

Average Lifespan of a Business Tweet = 4 days

If you measure the lifespan of a tweet by the number of days on which it receives at least one click from a Twitter user, then business tweets don’t live very long. On average, our tweets with a clickable link received at least one click on four separate days with a range of one day (not a very popular tweet) to 23 days (home run!).

Best Day to Maximize Business Tweet Clicks = Monday

I noticed this phenomena pretty quickly after starting our @B2BOnlineMktg Twitter account in early March and our study bears it out – if you want to capture the attention of business people with your tweets, make sure you’re tweeting on Monday (and Monday morning, in particular) or Tuesday. Tweets we sent on Monday garnered nearly 10 clicks for every day with a click (e.g., if a Monday tweet received at least one click on four different days, we’d expect about 40 total clicks on that tweet). The middle of the week is, well, weak, as is Sunday.

Best Time of Day for Business Tweets = 3 Distinct Windows

Its tempting to think of the social media guru who tweets throughout the day to stay connected to their followers and up on the latest news. That’s the exception, rather than the rule, for the vast majority of business twitter users who may check Twitter and/or post a few tweets at opportune times during the day – the same times they might stop to catch up on email, read a few posts on favorite blogs, etc.

Our tweets with the highest click activity were posted in one of three periods:

After 5pm PDT / 8pm EDT – when people on the East Coast may start getting back to work after an early dinner or putting the kids to bed
11am-noon PDT / 2-3pm EDT – when attention wanders in the mid-afternoon on the East Coast and before lunch in the West
5-7am PDT / 8-10am EDT – when people first start sitting down to work and catching up on email/blogs/Twitter before meeting start for the day

Optimal Time Between Business Tweets = 31-60 minutes

In our 60 day update one of the pieces of advice we gave was to tweet frequently but leave room for your tweets to breathe. Again looking the average clicks per day with a click, the optimal space between business tweets to attract the most clicks is either 31-60 minutes or 2-3 hours. Tightly packed tweets just don’t appear to attract as much attention as tweets with more space between them. I’m not certain what causes the dip in click activity for tweets between 61 and 120 minutes but I suspect it has to do with missing prime Twitter activity time on the East and West coasts (we may look into this in a later post).

Optimal Business Tweet Length = 91-100 characters

I found this very interesting, and I’m not sure I have a great theory as to why tweets between 91 and 100 characters should draw the most clicks from business twitter users. This length is about a line and a half for people actually visiting Twitter to check their tweet stream, and I’m sure it varies for different Twitter monitoring applications. This length also allows plenty of room for others to retweet without modifying the tweet itself, something that’s a lot more difficult when you get in the 120+ character range. While it makes sense that tweets under 70 characters long don’t attract much activity – if its hard saying something interesting in 140 characters, try it in less than 70 characters some time – the fact that the 131+ character tweets attract the second highest click activity isn’t clear. It may have to do with the benefit of retweeting or mentioning others in your tweets, something I’ll cover in a later post.

Now that we’ve shown our data, what do you think is behind the business twitter use patterns above? Any business Twitter stats of your own to share?

Tags: @B2BOnlineMktg, B2B social media case study, twitter for business

B2B Social Media – The Business.com Case Study

Dianne Molina — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:25:49 +0000

As 2008 unfolded, our team at Business.com closely monitored exploding interest in B2B social media. The Business.com site is designed to help people find solutions to business challenges through resources like the leading online B2B directory and over 30,000 business how-to guides, and we were intrigued by the potential to connect with our target business decision maker audience through various social media channels.

Like the rest of the industry, we learned from experts like Forrester’s Laura Ramos as they chronicled how early adopters were leveraging social media. We religiously downloaded Marketing Sherpa special reports to glean where business-to-business brands were finding measurable success. We also created our own B2B social media case study that looked at what players like Intuit and Dell were doing right. By year’s end, we were chomping at the bit to dive in!

Our first steps? Defining clear, scalable goals. After all, social media might be a new platform but it’s still marketing, folks. We determined our primary goal is building awareness of the Business.com brand as a source for business solutions and driving higher quality traffic to our site. Our short term goals included determining the key differences between B2C and B2B social media and figuring out just how much effort is really involved in making an impact with B2B social media.

With those critical guide posts staked in the ground, we got to work. In the first half of 2009, Business.com launched two corporate blogs. Each blog targets one of our key audience segments. What Works for Business is the user-facing resource penned by our own small business expert, Dan Kehrer. B2B Online Marketing is our advertiser-focused blog serving up actionable online marketing tips and best practices for B2B marketers.

Over the course of the last five months, we’ve achieved steady growth in the audience for each blog. By testing design, editorial content, plug-ins and posting frequency, we also gained invaluable insight into our audience’s needs and habits. Having two blogs has given us the opportunity to test different approaches and compare results.

To help drive readership and engagement of both blogs, we also joined all the cool kids on Twitter. We started an account that corresponds to each blog, @B2BOnlineMktg and @WhatWorks. We tested key variables – number of Tweets each day, time of day, content of tweets, scheduling tweets, hashtags, etc. We began “following” key social media players like Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) and subject area thought leaders like Anita Campbell (@smallbiztrends) for small business, Galen DeYoung (@GalenDY) for B2B SEO and Stephanie Tilton (@StephanieTilton) for B2B writing/case studies to better understand the Twitter universe (plus find great content to retweet). We even worked hard on creating compelling tweets, a process akin to writing great headlines given the 140 character limit.

Don’t get me wrong. We aren’t always sure what we’re up to is the optimal approach but, hey, that’s what learning is all about and we’ll continue to stumble here and there.

Like most marketers, the biggest challenge we’ve faced has been pinpointing the “right” social media metrics to measure success. Recently, we’ve been focusing on total branded impressions delivered, Twitter follower growth, click through rate on tweets and blog repeat visits to directionally guide our B2B social media efforts. We’ve found tools like HootSuite, Twinfluence, and Radian 6 to be invaluable. In fact, they have become a bit addicting since they show the immediate impact (good or bad) of our efforts.

I think most companies who are honest admit their social media efforts are a bit of an experiment, defined by trial and error. We’ve been particularly surprised/frustrated/overwhelmed by how important the volume of blog posts is to attracting a consistent following and solid search engine rankings. Cranking out quality content is obviously not easy to do with everything else on our plates.

One of our key lessons learned: the importance of clear editorial planning. Don’t expect to do a lot of big posts. Instead, intermix longer ones with more frequent smaller ones. We also recommend finding people on your marketing team with a mix of writing skills. For example, some people are great at writing short summaries of topics, while others can’t seem to write less than 1,000 words to save their lives.

As we begin the second half of 2009, we plan to apply some of the brand extension tactics that the likes of Comcast and Dell discussed at last week’s TWTRCON conference in San Francisco. And we will continue the P.O.S.T strategy that Laura Ramos touted in our recent interview with her. Here are our social media do’s and don’t’s :

Don’t take on too much- Social media takes significant time to execute well and see results. Focus is critical. No one – including IBM, Cisco, Intel, or other big B2B names – has been successful trying to tackle blogging, Facebook, Twitter, message board participation, etc., all at once.
Do use social media as a content play for your brand- Refine your content strategy by monitoring key word searches, plugins like “Share This” and Twitter hot topics to gauge most the popular topics in your area of expertise. The key is not just blasting out your message but creating SEO-friendly and unique content that your audience is looking for online.
Don’t spam - Spam is a big problem online and only getting bigger thanks to all the social media testing going on out there. Producing quality content is vital to long-term success. Don’t sacrifice quality for a few more followers or blog visitors. Period. Remember your company’s reputation is on the line.
Do figure out what works for you – We’re standing on the shoulders of social media giants, testing out ideas and seeing how they work for us. As we’ve found, some general social media best practices apply to Business.com but some don’t (or apply in unique situations). No one knows YOUR brand and your better that YOU. Look at social media outreach as an opportunity to open a dialogue with your core audience and find out what they want from you. Every company has to experiment with social media and find what works best for them.

Look for more details in future posts as we share important insights from our social media initiatives and visit our collection of best insights and advice about B2B social media strategy and tactics.

In the meantime, tell us: what are your B2B social media do’s and don’t’s?

Tags: B2B social media case study, business blogging, twitter for business

Interview: B2B Social Media Insights from Forrester’s Laura Ramos

Ben Hanna — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:11:01 +0000

Forrester B2B Marketing Analyst Laura Ramos

My Company is Blogging and Tweeting: So Now What Do We Do?

Recently, I had the great pleasure of talking with Forrester’s B2B marketing guru, Laura Ramos, about the emerging social media landscape and opportunities for B2B companies to build better relationships with their customers and target prospects.

The idea for the interview came from our own ambivalence at Business.com about social media – we started experimenting with blogging and using Twitter for business in late Q4, 2008 but I, like so many other B2B marketers I meet, wanted to get the “big picture” perspective on the B2B social media opportunity from one of the leading researchers in this area. Laura’s groundbreaking study, with G. Oliver Young, of how business technology buyers use social media was a wake-up call for B2B marketers, and I think her insights below provide much needed perspective for any marketer looking to better understand B2B social media:

Q: I’ve had this experience, and I’m sure you have it all the time – an experienced B2B marketer comes up to you and asks “I keep hearing about social media, Facebook, Twitter and all that. Is any of this relevant for B2B marketing today?” How do you respond?

Laura Ramos: Social media is clearly relevant for B2B marketing today for two reasons. First, at Forrester we’ve studied how B2B buyers participate socially and found that participation is much higher than U.S. adults in general. Second, business buyers are always looking for new sources of information and are actively turning to social media channels these days for information to support their purchasing decisions. Using social media to engage your target business buyer audience may seem daunting, but it’s possible to be successful if you focus first on your audience and what you want to accomplish by engaging with that audience socially.

Q: How is B2B social media marketing different than B2C?

Laura Ramos: Today, most of the B2B social media is buzzing around the front of the sales funnel – about driving awareness. However, I expect that B2B social media will ultimately have a much bigger impact on the end of the funnel – on things like customer loyalty and advocacy. For example, take the idea of customer references which are so integral to much of business buying. With social media, you can give customers a way to engage with other customers and like-minded individuals and talk about how to best use your products and services. Seeing a community like this is a much more compelling experience for prospective buyers than a written case study or a brief call to a pre-selected happy customer.

In addition, because trust is so important in business buying, I think we’ll see the user side of B2B social media gravitate to gated, private experiences. Rather than throwing out your question to the world as folks do today on so many social media networking sites, you’ll direct your question to people in specific industries, specific roles, etc. or be able to filter responses to your question by these characteristics. In B2B, it’s about connecting with ‘people like me who have experience I trust’ – not strangers.

Q: How has Web 2.0 changed the B2B marketing landscape and sales process?

Laura Ramos: The landscape has changed a lot and will change more. I see B2B activity shifting from using social media in ‘broadcast mode’ to get the word out like you might do with a press release, to actively looking for prospects on social media sites. There’s tremendous activity right now because social media is a novelty to the B2B world. However, novelty does not last over the long haul. For B2B companies, social success will be about creating community – offering your customer base different levels of access for different levels of participation and advocacy. The relationship is what’s important, not the channel.

Q: It’s a challenge for B2B marketers to look at a new communication channel and not immediately focus on how we can use that channel to broadcast our message. You’re saying we need to make that shift in mindset from pushing information out to thinking about how to use social media technologies to foster interaction among our community of customers and prospects. Is that right?

Laura Ramos: That’s correct. Business buyers get hundreds of emails a day and then there’s Twitter, Facebook and everything else that contributes to information overload. You can keep layering on more messages from more channels, but then folks start to tune out. People are going to want to listen to people they know they can trust, and not just people they know directly, but people that have similar backgrounds, experiences or who faced similar challenges in the past.

We advise our clients to start with objectives and think about how social media will change your relationship with customers. In B2B, the first objective is listening. A lot of people want to jump right into talking but they that when they do, no one listens or talks back. For example, look at many corporate blogs. Who’s the audience? Everyone online? That doesn’t work, so blog authors find it hard to get people to listen and comment. B2B marketers who get blogging right succeed because they have a very clear understanding of their target audience.

To listen the right way, marketers need social monitoring tools to help them figure out what’s being said about their company and brands online and in traditional channels. It’s important for B2B marketers researching social listening tools to understand that there’s both a technology and service component to these solutions right now. While it can seem straightforward to just search for brand mentions, you can easily miss much something important since people use jargon, abbreviations, etc. and the tool and service should help you sort all of that out.

Q: Are many B2B companies using social monitoring tools today?

Laura Ramos: Not many but the number is growing. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Cymfony, Visible Technologies, and Radian6 are ones I hear mentioned most frequently.

Q: I’m seeing two different perspectives on B2B social media during the current recession – on the one hand there’s great interest, but we also know that companies are cutting back on marketing programs without proven ROI. Do you expect the vision of social media as an efficient communications channel to drive rapid adoption in B2B, or do you expect companies to hold back?

Laura Ramos: Our data shows that both buyers and marketers believe they need to move to more digital channels. Social media channels definitely attract interest because of the economy, but B2B companies that get started find social media to be relatively expensive terms of resources and time commitment.

Q: So it sounds like you’re seeing companies wrestle with the question “We need to do this but how to do we get started in this challenging environment?”

Laura Ramos: It’s actually very easy to get started with social media by starting a blog, creating a Twitter account, participating in discussions on social networking sites or starting a wiki. The tough part is figuring out what the second step is. Starting a blog is easy, but it’s a different story when you realize you need at least 1-2 high quality posts per week, need to engage readers in discussion, build traffic, and keep them coming back.

Q: What advice would you give to a B2B company that wants to develop a social media strategy?

Laura Ramos: Follow Forrester’s POST methodology. People, Objectives, Strategy, Tools. I’ve already mentioned people and objectives, so strategy is about how you’re going to measure and execute. Unfortunately, many marketers want to jump to the tools first. Instead, go check out your own Web site – that will become the center of your social media universe. If your Web site is all about broadcasting how great your company and products or services are, rather than inviting engagement and participation by your customers and prospects, then your Web site is not going to be a place community members are going to want to hang out. Forrester has done over 1,000 website reviews – many of these B2B sites. Our scores on B2B Web sites show they lag behind B2C sites because they promote the company and products too much and fail to engage an audience. Consumer sites have had to be more engaging, because they are more transaction-focused. The best Web site experience helps people achieve their goals, it doesn’t talk non-stop about your features and capabilities. So fix your Web site – it’s not about usability, it’s about making hard business choices.

Another thing is segmentation. Who are you going to talk to in these social channels? Most high tech companies just want to address whomever comes by – they don’t want to limit their positioning by providing clear value messages targeted to specific segments. However, you simply can’t talk effectively to everyone. What are you going to help them achieve? When you are more precise about segmentation and targeting, your marketing – and social conversation – gets better.

Q: What are some good ‘get started now’ tips for B2B marketers who want to take the social media plunge?

Laura Ramos: First, pick an audience. Understand who you’re going to talk to. Listen, talk with them online and use those experiences to shape your strategy. Don’t be afraid to go out and talk to sales and support people in your company as well to get a better understanding of your target audience. You don’t always need fancy tools to get started, and you can do a lot with TweetDeck, Google Analytics, and systematic searches on your product names. This will tell you whether you need to invest further in tools that I mentioned earlier.

Second, put together an editorial calendar for any social activity that creates content. Know not only what you want to say now, but what you want to say later and how you’ll build upon those later topics or issues. Always know where you’ll take it next.

Q: Do you have examples of B2B companies that are doing really well with social media today?

Laura Ramos: IBM is a great example of a company that started using social media to broadcast but now there’s a real interest in how to create community – a logical next step with a tech audience used to online forums and bulletin boards. I see IBM making the transition from ‘let’s use these tools for tech talk’, to ‘let’s have our customers tell our story.’

Cisco is engaging in social media and communication as well, and is proving to be a real B2B social media innovator as they launch products only on digital channels. Early on, I would say, Cisco also focused too much on broadcasting their message and not enough on measuring sales results. For example, they launched a product on Second Life but when we asked, ‘How many more units did you sell as a result?’ they couldn’t really give us an answer, because it is hard to trace the impact of this social activity through their channel. Did they sell a lot of product? Sure. Did social media help to do that? Don’t know yet.

Q: Great question since there’s debate about whether B2B companies should look at social media as simply an awareness driving activity or whether there must be a tangible connection to revenue. What would you say – should B2B companies let social media off the hook for driving sales?

Laura Ramos: No, I don’t think we should let social media off the hook. As engagement and community activity increases, the positive vibe influences sales, becauses there’s proof that shared experiences of loyal customers are real and prospects can see that the claims the company makes about its products/services are trustworthy.

That said, I think that it’s hard to connect social media to revenue. I don’t want to appear critical about Cisco, because understanding social media’s impact is a hard thing to figure out. Cisco’s launch goals focused on awareness and consideration, but the challenge they faced is one every company eventually faces – you only have so many dollars to spend on marketing, so how do you split these across the marketing mix? To answer this, companies will need to know if a dollar spent on social channels gets you more revenue than a dollar spent on traditional channels. I’ve only seen IBM demonstrate that they can measure how social activity helps them to increase event attendance and extend event lifespan and value.

In B2B marketing, we always focus on the sales funnel – how do we attract and close deals. What we don’t realize is that inside customer organizations, there’s another funnel, but it’s flipped around. A small group of employees figure out they have business problems they must solve, and they need the products or services they apply to solving those business problems to get wide adoption inside their firms. How do we, as B2B marketers, help not only our direct customers successfully deploy new technology purchases, but also help their organization adopt the new technology more quickly and effectively? Social media holds great promise in B2B for creating this type of internal community and for efficiently sharing those ideas that make it possible to speed up the adoption process and create lasting customer loyalty.

Tags: business buying, forrester, technology marketing

B2B Technology Buyer Social Profile Tool

Ben Hanna — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:01:38 +0000

Do you market to business technology buyers? Considering how social media may fit into your marketing strategy?

If so, you’ll be interested in Forrester’s free B2B technology buyer social profile tool below (and also available on the Groundswell web site). To help B2B technology marketers better understand the social media habits of their target audience, Forrester developed this tool using data from their groundbreaking study of the social media habits of over 1,200 business technology buyers.

To use the B2B technology buyer social profile tool, simply select the company size and primary purchase category for your target audience. Go ahead, try it out…

To help you interpret the results, here’s how each of the Forrester Social Technographics(r) groups are defined based on the social media activities in which they participate (do at least one of the activities at least monthly):

Creators – publish a blog, publish their own web pages, upload video they create, upload audio/music they create, write articles or stories and post them online.

Critics – post ratings or reviews of products/services, comment on someone else’s blog, contribute to online forums, contribute to and/or edit articles on a wiki

Collectors – use RSS feeds, “vote” for web sites online, add tags to web pages or photos

Joiners – maintain a profile on a social networking site, visit social networking sites

Spectators – read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video from other users, read online forums, read customer ratings/reviews

Inactives – none of the above

Tags: business buying, forrester, technology marketing

Code to Create Custom Share Buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Delicious

Ben Hanna — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:31:16 +0000

Interested in sharing your B2B content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or delicious? Do multi-option social media sharing tools such as ShareThis seem like overkill?

That was our conclusion after researching the social media sites on which readers are most likely to share content from our blog focused on solutions to a wide range of business challenges, What Works for Business. We decided that Facebook, LinkedIn, delicious, and Twitter were the sites on which our target business audience is most likely to share business-related content. Rather than using the ShareThis widget which provides many more options (many confusing options for most of our readers), we decided to create custom share buttons.

To add custom share buttons automatically to each post in a WordPress blog, add the following code to single.php, the file which renders the individual post (note that you must be using WordPress.org, the self-hosted version of WordPress, to be able to customize the php files). See an example of how this looks.

Facebook Share Button Code

Here is the Facebook share code, which can also be found at http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php/.

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=>” onclick=”return fbs_click()” target=”_blank”>

Twitter Share Button Code

Here is the Twitter share code, which can also be found at http://www.jhuskisson.com/code-tidbits/share-on-twitter-link.

http://twitter.com/home?status=Currentlyreading ” title=”Click to share this post on Twitter”">” alt=”Share on Twitter”>>

LinkedIn Share Button Code

Here is the LinkedIn share code, which can also be found at http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=developers_widget_shareonlinkedin.

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=the_permalink(); ?>&title=&source=ADD_YOUR_BLOG_URL_HERE”>

delicious Share Button Code

Here is the delicious share code, which can also be found at http://delicious.com/help/savebuttons.

http://delicious.com/save” onclick=”window.open(’http://delicious.com/save?v=5&noui&jump=close&url=’+encodeURIComponent(’’)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(’’),’delicious’, ‘toolbar=no,width=550,height=550′); return false;”>

Good luck, and we’d love to see how you’ve implemented this on your own B2B blog!

Tags: Facebook for business, LinkedIn, twitter for business

Business Blog Readership Skyrocketing According to New Warrillow Study

Ben Hanna — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:44:31 +0000

According to a new study of small business owners released by Warrillow Market Insight, 40% are now turning to blogs for business-related information. This represents a 122% increase over 2008 where 18% of SMB owners read business blogs.

Small Business Owners Increasingly Turning to Blogs for Business Information (Warrillow Market Insights)

If you’re interested in marketing to SMBs, you really should subscribe to the Warrillow Weekly e-newsletter. They conduct great research on a wide variety of topics to help B2B marketers better understand and market to the SMB segment.

Tags: business blogging, small business

Business.com Conversion Tracking Released from Beta

Ben Hanna — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:21:09 +0000

Following a very successful beta test with over 70 participants, we’ve now made Business.com Conversion Tracking available free to all Business.com advertisers.

Business.com Conversion Tracking is now available to all advertisers within the Business.com Account Management System

The most exciting aspect of this launch is we’re now offering a simple, free solution to the “last click” attribution problem I wrote about in our study of B2B web analytics market share. In short, the problem is that B2B advertisers who rely on web analytics solutions which attribute 100% of campaign ROI to the last click before conversion get an overly simplistic, and inaccurate, view of the contribution made by different online marketing campaigns to overall results. And its a problem that’s getting worse as the B2B sales cycle lengthens and business buyers interact with more online advertising before finally purchasing, registering for a free trial, signing-up for an event or otherwise converting. This conversion attribution issue was the second hottest topic (behind Twitter) when I spoke at Mediapost’s recent Search Insider Summit – there’s solid recognition among top brands and agencies that conversion attribution is a problem and that “last click” tools don’t provide the full story.

In essence, Business.com Conversion Tracking punches a hole in the black box of “last click” web analytics, allowing Business.com advertisers to easily see how their Business.com campaigns and keywords are performing to support campaign optimization. We designed Business.com Conversion Tracking to be both extremely easy to implement – 44% of B2B web sites don’t even use web analytics today, and a major reason for this is the complexity of implementing many of the solutions available today – and to work as a complement to existing “last click” or more full-featured web analytics tools. The specific benefits vary by the type of web analytics solution, if any, a company uses today:

For B2B Companies Without Web Analytics

For the 44% of B2B web sites without web analytics today (yes, scary, but its true), Business.com Conversion Tracking offers both clear return-on-investment (ROI) metrics for their Business.com advertising and a very simple 3-step process to implement conversion tracking.

For B2B Companies Using “Last Click” Web Analytics

For those companies using “last click” web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Urchin Software by Google, Nedstat or others, Business.com Conversion Tracking uncovers data often not available, or incomplete, in these web analytics tools. This includes the ability to monitor the true impact of Business.com campaigns on registrations, quote requests, purchases or other transactions.

For B2B Companies Using Advanced Web Analytics

Advanced web analytics solutions like Omniture, WebTrends and Coremetrics enable B2B online advertisers to track the influence of multiple campaigns throughout the business buying process on eventual conversions. As we saw during the beta, Business.com Conversion Tracking is still very appealing to companies using these more advanced solutions because it takes literally just a few minutes to implement, saves time by making campaign ROI metrics conveniently available within the Business.com account management system and offers a useful check against third-party systems.

To learn more, visit the Business.com Conversion Tracking FAQ page or see the Business.com Conversion Tracking announcement.

Tags: conversion tracking, ppc, search marketing ROI, web analytics

Web Site Traffic for the 2009 BtoB Media Power 50

Ben Hanna — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:50:20 +0000

Business.com was recently named to BtoB Magazine’s Media Power 50 annual list of the most influential business-to-business marketing vehicles. This is the fourth year in a row that we’ve been named to the list which also includes household (or should I say workplace?) names such as The Wall St. Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CNNMoney and more.

When the BtoB Media Power 50 list is announced, we get another great opportunity to answer the question we frequently hear from B2B advertisers and agencies – how big is Business.com?

The answer is surprising to many, but its a bit more difficult to tell this year because BtoB decided to combine print and online properties into a single entity on the list. For example, The Wall St. Journal print edition and WSJ.com are now reported as one in the list. While this change makes sense, it also makes it difficult to interpret the circulation and web site traffic stats for each of the winners.

So how big is Business.com? The chart below compares the number of unique web site visitors in April, 2009 for each of the BtoB Media Power 50 General Business category members:

2009 BtoB Media Power 50 - General Business category

Business.com has more unique monthly visitors than all members of the General Business category except for CNNMoney.com. This comparison is based on quantcast.com estimates for March, 2009.

Surprised? As we often say, Business.com is one of the best kept secrets for reaching a large, targeted audience of active business buyers online. For more information, visit the Business.com Advertising Center or call us at (888) 441-4466 (within the U.S.) or (310) 586-4185.

Tags: B2B media, web analytics

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