We’ve been talking a lot about Twitter around here lately.  It seems it’s become our newest shiny object.  People are loving it, they’re dedicated to it so there’s got to be a way to leverage this very active audience, right?  Right.

As we were out and about reading about the new world that is Twitter, I came across this blog post from Joint Venture Marketing Strategist, Christian Fea – 6 Effective Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool.

Here’s the list of his 6 tips and a few of my thoughts.  Be sure to read his full post, it’s worth your time.

1. Target your market to follow the right people.
   We’re all about targeting here at ReachForce so I couldn’t agree more on this one being #1.  If you are going to use Twitter as a lead gen tool, it only makes sense to find the right audience.
2. Offer actionable advice
   Again, couldn’t agree more.  Please save us the details of your Chinese food lunch or that you are on the bus ride home.  Give us something useful, and please don’t waste  my time.  Just my 2 cents…
3. Use your 140 character wisely
   And don’t forget about tinyurls.  You can customize these too.
4. Your offer and call to action
   Christian recommends that you push people back to your own blog whenever you can.  This gives you an opportunity to interact with more than 140 characters.
5. Frequency of your tweets
   We REALLY struggle with this one.  It’s tough staying relevant and being as frequent as we should be.  We’re trying to share the responsibility here, we have a team of 3 that are each responsible for tweeting once a day.  This way our audience gets different personalities and not just one person is carrying the entire load.
6. Tracking your results
   Google Analytics will tell you if people are jumping from Twitter to you.  It’s free, why wouldn’t you use it?

All great and easy to implement tips, Thanks again Christian!

Are you using Twitter as a lead gen tool?  We’re giving it a shot, in fact, follow us @reachforce.  We’ll be sure to let you know when we land our first customer who found us on Twitter.

Try saying that five times really fast!  If you’re like us and are running a blog, you’re always trying to find new ways to get the word out to drive more traffic your way.  One interesting method that we are partaking in is to create widgets for your blog.  These widgets are little web-based trinkets that make your blog content available for people to access through popular “start pages”, such as Google IG, Pageflakes, and my personal favorite, Netvibes.

It’s really easy to create one and there are a number of services out there that will walk you through the process, but probably the easiest one I’ve found is the Widgetbox Blidget service.  There is no coding required and all you have to do is provide it with the URL to your blog and then optionally configure some standard theme elements and off you go with your very own blidget within 5 minutes.

Widgetbox also hosts a gallery where you can publish your blidgets and it automatically draws in any meta keywords you have setup in your blog and will use them as the default keywords for people searching through the Widgetbox gallery to find your blidget with.

Check out our blidget to see what the finished product looks like.  There are also over 60 other B2B-related widgets and blidgets already published out on the Widgetbox gallery, so no guinea pigs here!

With any luck, your blog could end up on The 25 Most Valuable Blogs list next year!

I don’t share my vacation pictures with everyone I know in real life so why do it in the social world? Jason would not have shared this picture with everyone in our office but it was out of his hands.  If you believe in complete transparency online, then this is not the post for you.  For the rest of you out there, this post will help show you how to manage your Facebook profile so you share only what you want to share with each of your friends.

Step 1: Login into Facebook and click on Settings -> Privacy Settings (it is in the top right).

Step 2: Click on Profile.  From here you can control who can see what on your profile.  The default setting allows your friends and those in your network to see almost everything.  For most of us, one of our networks includes the city we live in.  This means anyone in your city can see your full profile include pictures, videos and more.  If you want to specify exactly who can and cannot see your photos for example, in the drop down menu next to Photos Tagged of You click Customize… From this pop up you can select the option Some Friends and then list each friend you want to be able to see your pictures.

Step 3: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Search.  This page allows you to control who can find you via the search feature in Facebook.  It is also automatically configured to create a public profile that can be found by search engines.

Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on News Feed and Wall.  Here you can choose what stories are published to your news feed to be seen by your friends.  There is a second tab on this page called Social Ads.  Click there and you can choose whether or not you want to appear in social ads.  Social ads are those that pair your profile picture with an application you use or page that you are a fan of.  By default, these will only be seen by your friends.

Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Applications.  The page that you will see shows how applications interact with your information.  If you click on the second tab, Settings, you can control what informaton can be seen by your friends through applications they use.

Step 5: Go back to the Privacy Settings page.  The final option available is to Block People.  I only friend people I know, so I have never had to use this feature, but it is nice to know it is there if I ever do need it.  Feels a little like a virtual restraining order.

I love that Facebook allows us to easily share pictures and what is going on in our lives.  Without Facebook, everyone wouldn’t be able to see me hanging out with David Meerman Scott.  However, I like being able to maintain some privacy online.  This guy could have avoided being called a fairy.  Would your boss be so cool?

For our 200th Tip here on The B2B Lead we decided to do a survey to see what you want to talk about these days.  Our goal was to see what our readers are challenged with in these trying times and get an idea of what’s working right now in the B2B marketing world.  Thanks to everyone who has participated in the survey.  If you haven’t taken the survey, you should, we’re sending the results to everyone who takes it and you want to know what your peers are doing, right?

The last question on the survey asks what you [the survey taker] what you would like to ask our audience.  With over 100 responses, we’re already noticing some really interesting trends.  The 2 most asked about subjects from the last question aren’t big surprises though – social media and marketing program metrics.

Since we’re stacking up a good number of questions people are searching for answers to, I thought we’d go ahead and start talking about these.  Below are a few of the questions from our survey, please jump in and share your thoughts.

Social Media –

• Are social networking sites really that helpful for B2B?

• What are the metrics and things corporate marketing can do with social media?

• If your company doesn’t support the use of social media (to promote the business) how have you overcome those objections?

• Do you get returns on podcasting? What is the breakdown for your marketing plan among the social media tools for Blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Podcasting, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg & Plaxo?

Marketing Metrics –

• How are they calculating revenue attribution back to campaigns?

• What trends are you seeing in email response rates? I’m seeing a big problem with increasingly aggressive spam filters and policies trapping marketing emails.

• What metrics do you track to measure overall success of your program?

• How are your google ppc campaigns going?

And the question I’m most interested in…
What has been working for you in the first few weeks of this year?

P.S.  Here’s the tiny URL, http://tinyurl.com/B2BMarketingSurvey, please forward to any other B2B Marketers out there.  After all, the more responses we get, the better the results.

I’m not a marketing or sales guy per se so please help me understand something here.

As the classic saying goes, “I know at least half of my data is bad…I just don’t know which half”.
Marketing Sherpa tells us that contact data degrades at a rate of 2.1% per month (and it’s probably gone up  substantially given the current rate of job loss), it’s easy to see how this is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having said all that, does it matter you could be sitting on piles of dirty data?

Contact data cleanup seems to experience a run-up of demand at the end of the year when marketers have just enough budget to burn on something small to mid-sized but not enough to do anything substantial with.  Or at least this is what we saw. In fact, we cleaned up some of our own CRM data in December as well.

But come the turn of the new year and new budget, the psychology of “new” is the all the rage.  Sales reps are innately in perpetual want for new leads, but as we say around here, it seems most marketing and sales teams would rather keep building new add-on rooms to their houses than spend the money to fix the basement that is flooded with sewage.

So what is the psychology behind using what you have vs. buying something new?  Is it simply fueled by an unquenchable thirst for “new, new, new” (and the perception thereof)?  Or do you have a more systematic approach to if and when you elect to use what you have vs. buy new stuff?

Is it the same mentality of buying something that is on sale even if you don’t really need it?

I just don’t get it.

I am sure most of you have heard of HubSpot’s Website Grader.  If you have not, it is one of the best free tools out there to help you figure out where to start your website redesign.  The basic principle behind website grader is to rate your website on a number of attributes, mostly relating to SEO, and give you ways to improve your rating. It is very easy to get started.  First, go to website.grader.com then simply enter your website, any competitor websites (this is optional) and your email.  Click generate report and you will have a full report of your website in minutes.  (Be patient; trust me it’s worth it.)

The report shows you how your website is doing in six major areas:

1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO
3. Blogosphere
4. Social Mediasphere
5. Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
6. Competitive Intelligence

Each category is broken down further and the report gives you a rating in each as well as advice on how to improve.  Some items are quick fixes like shortening your meta descriptions or adding your company to the Yahoo Directory.  Some things may take longer and require involvement from others in your company, like starting a blog, if you have not already.

This report may also show you that a full overhaul of your website is not necessary.  You may just need to tweak a few things.  And if you do decide a full overhaul is the way to go, make sure you know what your website is already doing well so you don’t loose it.  You never want to loose good inbound links or high keyword rankings.

Keep in mind that this is a free tool and cannot take the place of a good SEO consultant.  However, it is a great starting point to help you decide where to begin first if you are planning an overhaul of your existing site.  The great thing is you can keep coming back to see if your score is improving.

Is it better to have a lot of social bookmark icons on your blog, or ones that are relevant to your space? I have heard (and seen) different opinions on this. What do you think?

I personally think you only need to have ones on your blog that are relevant to your audience.  So how do you going about finding these?

I don’t know if there is an easy way, or if it depends on what you are looking for, but I used sites like Social Poster to look up social bookmarks.  Then, I went through them individually and searched “marketing” to see if there was anything. That’s how I made the decision of what is on this blog as of now.

Any ideas or know where to find other applications like this to help B2B Marketers?

We’re currently conducting a survey of B2B Marketers inquiring about how the economic downturn has impacted their budgets and activities.  As part of this survey, we’re also probing for what types of social media activities are being tested by these Marketers.  Some of the results are not surprising (blogging), but there are a few surprises (which you’ll have to wait until we publish the final report to find out about).  Some B2B companies are experiencing or interpreting success with their company blogs and even Twitter participation.  The latter is of particular interest, especially since finding a way to monetize corporate participation on Twitter appears to be a leading candidate for Twitter’s “how do we make money off this” strategy.

As most of what I see on Twitter (and even blogs) seems to be people mass-emailing the types of random, quippy things that we used to put up on our Yahoo Messenger status, the true relevance of content circulating about Twitter falls into a fairly classic signal-to-noise ratio problem as depicted below.  However, as the Post Office makes it increasingly less attractive to do direct mail marketing and technology makes it more difficult to do email marketing, it will be interesting to see how those who Twitter on their employer’s behalf will fare in their experimentation with this.  Done craftily, I could see CRM systems build on top of Twitter, similar to what this company is doing.  Those who don’t grok it so well will unleash upon us a brand new epoch of spam….several times a day, 140 characters at a time.

Jason Morio, VP of Products at ReachForce

I’m the resident technologist and product “strategery” guy.  After serving an almost decade-long sentence on the chain gang of enterprise software, I have emerged reborn, abask in the glow of SaaS and web x.0.  My current musings include gazing into the crystal ball of “U.S. Economy – The Restart” and how B2B marketing is going to react and adapt to it.   You can expect postings from me covering (well, pondering, mainly) B2B marketing applications of social media and that fountain of eternal vitality that seems to write its own material these days: venture capital.  All postings served with a sprig of controversy, a twinge of east coast humor and an occasional dash of psychedelia.

Now with the 9th and final installment discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6) (#7) (#8)

CEI is a metrics-based way to drive revenue growth from customers you have, those you’ve lost and one’s you’ve yet to win. In drops 1-8 we’ve given CEI use cases for:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.
• Using metrics for Reference Account Management and sorting a top 10 list of best customer references, and why.

Last week’s rant aside, I heard some heartwarming feedback during my phone rounds last week on Reference Account Management. Sorting a top-10 list using the aforementioned steps is great way to have a constantly regenerated, rules based index of advocates who are not only loyal for reasons intangible, but are also qualified “satisfactioneers” from a statistical lens measuring service fundamentals such as quality function, value, basic expectations, length and frequency of engagement. And as you are able, you can even create sub lists for different verticals, channels, etc. for more precise matching of current prospects with current customers who can and want to help you win deals.

Taking this one step further, what if you took all of the companies on your top-20 RAM list and created a rules based profile that paints the picture of what a perfect opportunity looks like for your sales team? No guessing! If you find and start prospecting companies who match up with your most loyal and satisfied customers you’re not only communicating where your message is most likely to resonate, you’re also creating mindshare and giving your company a strategic messaging and positioning edge segment by segment (directly relating to where you have the most traction). Look at this as a snapshot of your winning market segments and the activities that contributed to these wins, thus arming Marketing and Sales teams with the road map to further success.

Is this a shameless plug for ReachForce’s Insight SaaS? Yes it is. But it’s still a golden opportunity to ask and answer the following:

1. Are you marketing to the right companies and what rules do you use to make this determination?
2. Are there trends in your sales funnel that you are not capitalizing on?
3. What kinds of leads move through the sales funnel the fastest and generate the most revenue?
4. Can you look into their sales funnel and identify current trends. By analyzing opportunities in the sales funnel in real time, marketers are able to adjust programs on-the-fly to help keep deals moving to close.

These are all questions marketers ask themselves as they are developing lead generation programs. And by combining CEI metrics with applications such as ReachForce Insight, marketing and sales teams can finally agree on winning target markets and focus lead generation efforts at other companies that match the same profile.