The thought of undertaking a viral campaign may seem a bit daunting. But say you have created the perfect video, now how do you actually get the right people to view it and pass it on – the whole point of a viral campaign. In this podcast, listen to my interview with Josh Dilworth at Porter Novelli to explore how detailed planning and execution of the seeding component made my viral campaign at NetQoS a major success.
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The following podcast was also recorded at the BusinessWire Changing Face of Influence event but it features William Hurley or whurley, as he is better known. whurley is the Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy for BMC Software. He created a blog (http://opensville.org), which earned a Technorati ranking of 179 in just 90 days. To put that into perspective, the NetQoS blog www.networkperformancedaily.com has more than 5000 readers a month and is ranked 41,000.

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The following podcast was recorded at a recent BusinessWire lunch seminar I attended. The topic for the event was The Changing Face of Influence: A Wire-Side Chat about PR in the Digital Age. Listen in as Waggener Edstrom’s Digital Strategist, David Almacy, discusses trends shaping the future of communications and the speed at which information travels today. Almacy was also the director of e-communications at the White House, and as the primary owner http://www.whitehouse.gov. He shares some fascinating insights about his experiences working with the President and First Lady on communications initiatives.

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Submitted by John Siberell, Marketing Manager, SuperFlow  Technologies

I was invited to travel to Tokyo and meet with the man who was Toyota’s minister of housing.

He was the chief “bud” for lining up and building homes for the corporate executives at the company. Each bigwig there got housing along with their employment at Toyota. I was there to help some associates sell the idea of building American neighborhoods and “stick” built (2X4) homes for a new development Toyota was preparing to build. (You see, the Japanese go Gonzo over American stuff….Harleys, cowboys, 50’s cars and American homes and architecture…believe it!) I was working with an architectural firm from Minneapolis with whom the car maker was interested in partnering with.

After sipping on tea and having completed cordialities, we started our very formal meeting in the top of the Toyota Corporate headquarters. After about 20 minutes of fact finding conversation from both sides, I asked Mr.housing minister, through his interpreter, if our design firm could prepare a proposal for him and send it over for he and his staff to review.

In amazement we watched him look down at the table, ponder for a moment, slowly push his chair back and stand up. He bowed. Said nothing and walked out of the boardroom. Just that fast.

I looked at our interpreter, and at the Toyota interpreter then at my associates in puzzlement. The corporate interpreter said the meeting was over and thanked us for coming. We were in the elevator just as fast as she could bow and say goodbye.

While plummeting downward from the top floors, we stood all silent…stupefied actually. I looked at everyone in the elevator and asked, “What did I do?!”

Our personal interpreter said that he would share with us at the bar what had happened. Great.

It turned out that I had put the housing minister on the spot. By asking him my question, he was unable to answer it without total disgracing himself in front of us and his staff. You see, I had asked him a question that he would ultimately have to take to his subordinates to discuss before it could be answered. So, he was now in a shameful position because he could not answer properly. The only way he could deal with the situation was leave! Meeting over.

So, in retrospect dealing with the Japanese takes careful study and planning on how one is going to go into a meeting and what you are going to say. Much coaching and roll playing needs to take place with a national (not American) Japanese business person. Japanese mores and local social customs will make or break the process.

Take your time to read up and ask questions on how to successfully deal with any foreign business person. They do not know what a New York minute is….

I recently posted a B2B Lead Blog entry about setting up Google Alerts to monitor coverage of your company. Another great use for Google Alerts is to find great how-to articles to keep up with emerging trends in B2B marketing.

Here’s another great Google resource to help you hone your B2B SEM skills: The Google B2B Tech Industry Knowledge Center http://www.google.com/ads/industry/techbtob/news.html. It includes a quarterly newsletter, success stories and helpful tips to help you get the most out of Google AdWords.

As B2B Marketers, we are focused on putting a growing number of qualified leads into our Marketing and Sales funnel to support Inside Sales or Sales in setting appointments and closing deals. And, generally speaking, we would like to see the trend line on lead growth slope up and to the right. Unfortunately, it is difficult to control the results of online advertising and impossible to ensure you will always have a tradeshow to bolster leads.

After growing frustrated with my inability to control the flow of leads by relying on online advertising and events, I’ve recently transitioned a large portion of my online ad dollars (all except for Google AdWords, of course) to Contact Discovery. This was a scary proposition, as Contact Discovery did not tap into traditional Marketing creative talents and required that I effectively profile my buyers and their responsibilities. But, the use of the ReachForce Insight product and the results of MarketingSherpa’s recent “Business Technology Benchmark Guide 2007-08” report gave me the confidence to make the leap. The report states that over 50% of technology buyers have short listed a vendor after receiving a well-timed call. So, I decided it made sense to make sure my company was on that list when the time was right.

Take a look at this wonderfully cheesy YouTube video from Symantec, the makers of Norton Anti-virus software.

Their web site is even better http://www.nortonfighter.com/.

With increasing commute times and greater responsibilities, today’s workers don’t seem to have time for a leisurely newspaper read. That’s why they are turning in record numbers to RSS dashboards such as iGoogle, 24eyes, NetVibes, and others for their daily news fix. After all, with these news aggregators, you can customize your “paper” with news from whatever source you choose to keep up with the latest from your employer, competitors, professional organizations, and get a quick update on local news and World events.

For B2B Marketers, this presents a cost-effective opportunity to capture a significant share of voice in this new morning news. You don’t need a costly advertising campaign or even a public relations agency. You just need to develop the content and catchy, relevant headlines to supply a compelling RSS feed or feeds. Marketing Profs has an excellent piece on RSS at http://www.marketingprofs.com/7/top-five-reasons-rss-or-die-clark-cormier.asp.

Reputation Management is the new buzzword for Brand Management, at least in the B2B space. It involves monitoring what’s being said about your company or your brand by the media, bloggers, customers and anyone else who may be talking about you. And, then taking a proactive role in ensuring that commentary is generally positive. It’s become increasingly important with the explosion of social media.

You don’t need a pricey monitoring service like Factiva to do a reasonably good job of tracking who’s talking about you or your competition. Your first step should be to take 2 minutes to set up a few Google Alerts.

Here’s how:
Visit http://www.google.com/alerts. Type in your company name, your products or any other relevant search terms. Select the frequency of your Alerts, submit and every day or every few days, you’ll get a handy email full of links about your topic.

Oh, and Google Alerts is also an excellent way to keep track of new ways to improve your Marketing results. Simply program one for B2B Marketing or any other related topic and sit back while Google does the work.

Would like to hear from you how you are using Google Alerts.

It’s that time of year again. Time to pull out the spreadsheets and start the painful process of ’08 marketing planning and budgeting. For me, it’s actually not that painful. First of all, I know exactly how many leads it takes to produce the qualified leads that it takes to generate the meetings that it will take to produce a certain amount of revenue. So, with that handy benchmark, I can easily estimate the number of leads I’ll need to generate to meet our ’08 revenue objectives. I also have an average cost per lead in mind so I can calculate the costs, but finding the actual media or events that I need to make my leads goals is another challenge that I typically address with contact discovery services.

Anyway, back to budgeting. I have other business objectives, as well, including brand awareness and support company operations. Unfortunately, those areas are not as well defined, and they don’t come with a formula for success. So, it got me to thinking: how do most B2B Marketers actually create their budget and how often is that budget really reasonable for supporting business objectives? I ran across this very compelling entry by Allen Silveri at The B2B Blog. He writes:

“Start with a clean slate and focus on the important sales and profit drivers for the company now, next year, and the years beyond. First you need to truly understand company goals and the market reality. This requires open and frank conversations with the CEO and President on their vision and objectives (both short-term and long-term) for the company. Next involves in-depth discussions and alignment with sales management and the sales force to determine what the frontline troops are facing and the support they desire to quicken sales cycles and increase their productivity.

Talking to several other department heads for a cross-section perspective of the company situation and goals is also recommended.Now that you have consensus from key players about what your company wants to do, you need to hold that up to the light of inspection based on the reality of what the market understands and will accept. This market-up approach enables you to discover, confirm, and/or reconfirm market conditions that exist and will affect your industries/niches prospects and the customers you serve. All company goals must be tested from a market-up perspective.”

This all makes sense to me. Often, in the planning stages, we all consider our objectives and not what the market will support. It’s a good lesson to remember at this time of year.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t found any great tips on how to budget for activities like building brand awareness without a pricey ad spend. This year, we accomplished a great deal using viral marketing and it was extremely cost effective. Next year, I’ll likely leverage PR, RSS and more on the social media front. Those costs are relatively easy to predict, but you can’t always rely on a viral campaign to catch fire.

If you have advice to share, I encourage you to post and share with the group. In the mean time, I’m back to budgeting for demand generation. We just started using the ReachForce Insight tool recently, so I will be interested to see how it will help me with the planning and budgeting process.