Source: Base One 2011 Annual Survey of Changing B2B Buyer Behaviour

Recent research by Base One, 2011 Annual Survey of B2B Buyer Behavior, as well as others, continues to show that although social media adoption and usage are expected to grow, no absolute conclusions can be made as to social media’s effectiveness in B-to-B marketing efforts.

The real insight in the report is the growth in importance/usefulness of what researchers referred to as “traditional online” in the buying process. The traditional online efforts of search and corporate (supplier) websites are predicted to grow two to three times in comparison with “new online/social media.” And that growth is seen at each stage of the buying process.

The nearer the buyer is to signing on the dotted line, the more influential the information sources become, according to the report.

The conclusion? Social media warrants experimentation. And I suspect to understand social media’s true value, companies are going to have to discover their own “killer application” just like they’ve done with other new technologies.

Source: Base One 2011 Annual Survey of Changing B2B Buyer Behaviour

However, with limited time and money, business marketers need to cover the basics, and that is traditional online. Don’t let social media detract from the focus of optimizing your corporate website and search, both organic (SEO) and paid (PPC). Social media might pay off in the future, but search is a sure bet today.

by Scott Gillum
President gyro Washington, D.C. and Head of gyro’s Channel Marketing Practice

Follow Scott on Twitter @SGillum

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

A Gallup study confirmed that the benefits of a positive, engaged company extend beyond lower turnover and increased morale. This research showed that, on average, engaged organizations had an earnings per share (EPS) 390% higher than less engaged competitors.

But how can you objectively determine if your company has an engaged, team-oriented company culture?

Here’s a hint: If you are looking to gain real insight into your company’s culture, don’t review your company’s training manual or look for idioms etched in the founder’s desk.

Ask the intern.

By examining the relationship between employees and interns, you can objectively assess the hard-to-pinpoint but critical driver of success: a positive, team-first company culture.

It is important to examine this relationship between employees and interns, for a variety of reasons. The first of which is that employees treat interns as they were first welcomed into the company. If an employee doesn’t treat an intern with dignity because the employee is wary of teaching the intern too much, then your office is already a crumbling pyramid.

The assumption here is that a business will grow when employees’ ideas compound as they work toward a common goal. This isn’t the little-fish-sticking-together-to-avoid-the-shark strategy. Rather, it’s a team that acts like dolphins strategically corralling their next feast.

So let’s suppose you accept the assumption above and you corner your intern (hopefully in a well-ventilated room with plenty of snacks). What do you ask?

• Has anyone ever gone out of his or her way to teach you something?
• How often do others ask for YOUR opinion?
• Do you feel like you are given one-off projects with no real career value? Or do you feel like you are an investment?

As a recent graduate of gyro’s training program, I can uniquely speak to the value of an engaging culture. Three days before my promotion to the San Francisco account team, I had suggested an idea to incorporate a client’s logo into an ad creative. Our San Francisco president, senior vice president and executive creative director listened to my opinion as though it were as valuable as their own.

In a semi-sarcastic but always humorous British accent, our executive creative director remarked something to the effect of, “Please welcome our newest member of the creative team.” While this comment was certainly said in jest, the sentiment was genuine. gyro had invested in and respected an intern because it was in its DNA to do so. The company wasn’t afraid to let a good idea rise to the top.

To accurately assess how far you have to go to develop (or maintain) your company’s invisible ecosystem, you may just have to ask the intern.

by Jordan Hodgson
Assistant Account Executive – gyro San Francisco

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Follow Jordan on Twitter @JordanBHodgson

It’s almost an involuntary action these days. Whatever we need or want to know, our first reaction is to just Google it. This now ubiquitous behavior has forever diminished the importance of awareness building. The search engine has made finding information so easy that we no longer have to rely on our memory or experiences as a starting point for our investigation. Search has also replaced the time and energy we once used to find resources with the time-consuming task of evaluating all the sources that are out there.

This fundamental shift in brand evaluation behavior should change the way we view awareness and the value we place on it. A recent study conducted by the Enterprise Council on Small Business proves the point:

69% of small-business owners doing research are open to discovering additional brands that were not previously in their awareness set, and 72% start their research on a search engine. (Subscription required)

This is great news for the upstarts and small brands hungry to connect to an audience looking for what they have to offer. But it’s really bad news for the entrenched brands that have invested big dollars in building brand awareness over time.

So if your target audiences are quickly moving beyond the brands they are aware of in order to consider a larger pool of brands, what should be your response? In a word, relevance, or building relevance for your brand in the context of an active query. Making it apparent and easy for prospects to relate your brand and offering to meet their needs and interests are the keys to building the kind of immediate relevance required to rise to the top of their evaluation list. Relating to the prospect’s expectations starts with the initial search text block and continues through the links and click paths we construct on the sites that we direct the prospect to visit. In other words, help prospects complete the task of narrowing down their investigation to you and your brand. Perhaps most important is just how fast this all happens. In Google’s “Zero Moment of Truth” report, the company demonstrates just how quickly initial investigation sets the stage for actions the prospect takes as he or she moves forward in the consideration process.

Awareness, the byproduct of time and touchpoints, once held real value in the marketing process, but that value has been eroded. Awareness is just a click away, and relevance is built in a single connected session. To be successful, you need to move beyond awareness and be ready to market in this zero-moment world. You need to move to real-time relevance.

by Mike Hensley
Executive Vice President, Global Client Service

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Follow Mike on Twitter @DigitalHensley

But as a profession, we sometimes have a tendency to chase the new at the expense of the proven. This is not to say that the ideas shouldn’t always be fresh, just that new ideas always should be presented in the way that’s most useful to the audience and the brand, not what the technologists want to try next. By layering on new techniques and new tactics we often find that tried-and-true don’t have to be abandoned. They can be improved and evolved.

For example, most of the readers of this space have viewed and probably created Webinar programs. To some, this vestige of Web 1.0 may seem like old hat. But new tactics and technologies don’t need to replace established marketing channels if they can enhance them. It’s amazing what a Webinar program can do to promote a brand’s thought leadership and generate qualified leads. But it’s even more amazing what marketing that Webinar program can do to build a proprietary database and even educate customers right up to the point of sale.

By layering on social and shareable techniques, for example, gyro client Makino developed what perhaps best can be described as Webinar 2.0. Their updated program includes promotion and interaction not just on the company website, but on public social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

A Webinar trailer even teases the event on Makino’s YouTube Channel and ties all the work into our SEO program.

Of course none of this means we’ve discarded traditional Webinar tactics like in-house and third-party email blasts, banner promotion, prominent home-page links and cross promotion within the family of Makino websites. New technologies don’t trump the strategy and they don’t trump the idea.

They make them better.

by John Dobbs
Senior VP – gyro Cincinnati

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

The reactions to this question are as amusing as they are interesting. Yet we think the answer to this question is decisive for the future of any company. You won’t find it in the description of the company’s business, in its sales figures, in its long-standing presence or in its global growth. The question is more complex than it seems. It’s an existential one (yes, your company is a living organism!), which requires decoding on two levels: an objective decoding of the company’s past operation and business decisions, and of the components of its current development strategy.

Today’s sales figures are no guarantee of tomorrow’s business.

A long history is no longer enough to reassure consumers.

Size is no indicator of efficiency or performance.

The rules have changed fast, and in this new world we need to reset the criteria behind a company’s legitimacy in its market.

A company’s legitimacy to exist in a market lies not in its determination to make profits, but in its willingness to upend an established operating model in which consumers no longer have faith.

The answer to the question “Why do I exist?” is the starting point of the company’s reset. It’s about rethinking in order to get into orbit for the future. It’s a rational, responsible move that challenges old mentalities, which resist the present in their struggle to survive.

We live in fantastic times. Defining and claiming your legitimacy will breathe new life into your company, creating internal inspiration and external appeal. It will give you the thrilling sense that you are contributing to a new world.

So what is your legitimacy to exist? Let’s talk about it.

by Didier Stora
General Manager – gyro Paris

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

When I started my career, I think my job was what added most to my personality. Saying “I’m a creative executive” was as powerful as good cleavage or a very short mini.

Being creative was something that inspired others; that generated emotions.

Now, sometimes,  I feel a bit embarrassed when I say I work in advertising.

I’ll tack on the phrase “yes, I sell pigs in a poke” to my position, somewhat ashamedly.

This doesn’t mean I don’t like what I do. It means I feel we have overestimated our profession. Too many of us have charged exorbitant rates so that others could charge exorbitant rates. We have played God, filmmakers, artists.

We could keep on doing it, but we are forgetting that Caesar, he who decides if what we do is right or wrong, is our audience.

For years we have kicked around the concept of “common people.” We have underestimated the masses’ understanding, good taste and the ability to defend themselves. We acted as if anything could be whitewashed; that anything could go unchallenged.

Well, it turns out the new media have brought democracy to this state of affairs and voice to a public that no longer remains silent.

Today we cannot control when, how and where our ad is going to be viewed. And even more important, we cannot control what will be next to it. A happy ad by Coca-Cola may share a Facebook wall with hunger in Somalia. Will this go unnoticed?

With each day that passes by, our chances to get away with it shrink. We can no longer turn a deaf ear to our products’ shortcomings, because consumers will expose them five minutes after watching our ads. We can no longer shrug off information about origin, production process, employees, brand values … We cannot—and we never should have shrugged it off.

We can no longer trust a brief blindly, without reservations. We can no longer throw out ideas simply because they are good ideas.

It is pointless to buy myself some organic eggs with one hand and help sell industrial eggs with the other.

What we do is important and the debate of whether it influences people’s lives is at this point a waste of time. Yes, our job does have an influence.

We should be creative enough to generate brave ideas that sell and are responsible at the same time.

From toothpaste to an NGO, whatever it is we are doing, let us not forget respect. Let us move people while respecting their intelligence. Let us be mindful.

by Carolina Comas
Creative Executive – gyro Madrid

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

• Interactive marketing has established legitimacy within the marketing mix. Watch for digital programs to become a more strategic outlet for integrated communications.
• Search will lose share among digital marketing tactics, but will still grow into a $33 billion/year channel.
• Display, mobile and social will all enjoy healthy gains. Social will lag behind the growth of the other channels, but only because social executions tend to be less costly.

Clearly, the digital marketing industry is booming. Beyond the obvious growth trend, Forrester’s projection that an age of multichannel digital communications is before us is most intriguing. Search is slated to retain its position as the most dominant channel, but tomorrow’s search will require an understanding of its role within a larger, more integrated context.

One could point to several factors that lead to these projections:

1. Online consumers are smarter and empowered with more research tools today than ever before. Even the simplest of online transactions is becoming more considered and scrutinized.
2. The evolution of the Web itself has facilitated an environment of research and self-discovery. Consumers are relying on social networks, online reviews, video demonstrations, mobile applications, and other technologies to inform a purchase decision.
3. Smarter data analytics allow for a truer valuation of each online touch point.

It’s that last point that holds so much promise for Web marketers. With digital marketing becoming more diversified, it’s fair to say that the days of launching a single-tactic campaign and watching conversions roll in are gone. A multi-touch presence is required to engage and convert today’s sophisticated online consumer.

The challenge then is how to best optimize across channels.

Google Analytics’ Multichannel Funnels

Perhaps it was coincidence that Forrester’s research was introduced the same week that Google announced the public availability of its new Multichannel Funnels feature within Google Analytics. Multichannel funnels are intended to empower users of Google Analytics to understand the full range of influences that lead to conversion.

According to Google:

When a customer buys or converts on your site, most conversion tracking tools credit the most recent link or ad clicked. In reality though, customers research, compare and make purchase decisions via multiple touch points across multiple channels. So marketers that measure return solely on the last channel that a customer touches before conversion are getting an incomplete picture, and potentially missing out on important opportunities to reach their customers.

This form of conversion analysis is referred to as multichannel attribution, and is certainly not a new concept. Early pioneers in multichannel analytics include ClearSaleing, Atlas Solutions, DoubleClick, and Omniture. But these tools have been geared towards the advanced web analyst, and come with premium pricing. Now, Google has introduced similar insights to its users….for free.

Given the latest Forrester data, it seems as if Google has timed this market perfectly, but let’s look a bit deeper into the ramifications of these “enhancements.”

Google Analytics has somewhat notoriously facilitated the rise of the novice (and often uninformed) Web analyst. Prior to Google (and still to this day for some), organizations shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to understand how website visitors came to them and what they did upon arrival. That type of investment isn’t insignificant.

Companies that my agency works with who have made similar investments universally have in-house web analytics specialists to make sense of the data, create and share dashboards and reports. Most of our clients who have opted to go the Google route lack a dedicated specialist overseeing data. If anyone is responsible, it’s usually a generalist web marketer, or worse, an IT staffer.

I fear that by introducing Multichannel Funnels to these types of users, Google may have just opened up a Pandora’s box. Without expert oversight, this data can lead to faulty conclusions and “optimization” efforts that can hurt a company’s bottom line.

The Digital Marketer’s Role

For the modern digital marketer to flourish in this new multichannel reality, a fluency in data is required. Investigate some of the more popular attribution models online and commit to ongoing experimentation. Modern digital marketers will learn to identify unique marketplace dynamics.

Even if someone else does the number crunching, appreciating the fact that multi-touch scenarios are complex will serve your programs well.

by Ryan DeShazer
Vice President, Global Practice Leader – Search

Follow Ryan on Twitter @RyanDeShazer

To our collective thinking, PR was the only remaining bastion of moral marketing intelligence; the purveyor of true behavioural change and primary artillery of any self-respecting CMO or indeed CEO.

They were wrong; I was wrong. Yet it wasn’t until I left PR did I recognize that so many other agencies – across all the disciplines – are obsessively driven by the same channel tribalism.  Something gyro calls creative apartheid.

This blinkered vision doesn’t just fail the execution of an idea. It impacts on the idea itself, and ideas are essentially the crux of all marketing activity. The single most dangerous thing in the world is an idea. An idea can achieve, improve and change anything – for any number of people. This is fact, and as marketers, we are all seeking the idea that will transform our client’s/brand’s world. But something is missing; marketers and agencies the world over are creating selfish ideas, thereby betraying the core idea of, well, an idea.

Ideas with “me” in mind.

The “me” is the media budget, the digital budget, the events budget. It’s the imagined “clash” with PR activity, the news agenda, internal communications. We are too often creating ideas that sit far too close to these negative influences.

The true measure of an idea is its ability to exist everywhere. What good is a PR idea pushed into advertising or a digital idea molded into events? A truly big idea doesn’t need to change its shape in the name of a 360-degree approach. It should flow wherever we as people see it and, most important, where we can feel it.

Consider this: Hold your agencies to account not for their executional excellence but of the expansive power of their ideas. You will see change occur. Executional excellence is expected but ultimately forgettable; consumers remember the idea and the effect it had on them. What an idea starts should never stop.

Ideally, agencies of all sizes, working across all disciplines, in different locations, can pitch ideas against each other. The idea is what matters, not how it is delivered. Ignore anybody’s protestations that the reverse is true.

by Patrick Danaher
Director of Marketing

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

One of the main takeaways I’ve always experienced at Burning Man is the overwhelming amount of creativity that permeates the entire environment. In fact, one of the most awe-inspiring things about Burning Man is the sheer scale resulting from the collective creative imagination of 40,000-plus people. No matter where you go over the course of the nearly 1.5-mile-diameter city, you’ll see, hear and experience fantastical art, performance and engineering to a level of execution like no other place on the planet—all coming from the collective efforts of individuals and teams—which, by the way, are not being paid, not being managed, and whose efforts, many of which, will end in flames and never be seen again. Considering that, ask yourself these questions: Are you fostering that kind of environment in your own organization? Is your team and staff feeling and being as creative as they can be? Do they have the license to experiment and (sometimes) fail? How are they rewarded for their ideas? Sometimes money isn’t the most effective motivator. Check out the article and imagine how you can inject some Burning Man ethos into your organization.

by Roland Deal
Senior Vice President – gyro San Francisco

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

It’s a good question.

But it’s one I’d answer with a “why wouldn’t you want to listen?”

After all, a lot of time, money and effort is dedicated to trying to figure out exactly what customers want. Companies spend millions of dollars in customer research to influence product formulations, tweak service offerings and get a leg up on competitors.

Social media offers an inexpensive, quick way of gathering marketing insight. You can keep tabs on customer needs, wants and concerns. You can get an intimate view of how competitors are connecting with customers. And you can check out the influencers who give your brand a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down.”

Perhaps more important is the key reason to listen: Social media is a conversation. It’s not a presentation. It’s not a broadcast channel. Why? Because there’s never been a medium that so easily and quickly allows your intended audience to tune you out … if you make it all about you.

Before you engage in social media, you should listen. Check out the social media channels where your industry is being discussed. Learn the vernacular: You may call it the “KR9M945-2E55,” but your customers and prospects call it just “the turbo.” Additionally, you may think that the most important venue is your favorite one to engage, but after you listen, you learn that no substantial conversations are occurring there.

It’s just like a conversation that you have in any other venue. You don’t immediately walk into the room and start screaming your message. You don’t go on and on about yourself the whole time without finding out what’s important to your friends, colleagues or family members. It’s listening and engaging that make these social situations rewarding.

Listening is a skill we learned at an early age. And it’s a skill we should embrace in the corporate world when engaging in social media (engaging being the operative word).

by Denise Suttman
Senior Vice President – Public Relations

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network