The B2B Lead » Jason Morio

Social Media Marketing Forecast Looks Sunny

Jason Morio — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:37:47 +0000

Forrester, via Mashable, reports that $716 million will be spent on the social media marketing this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. Granted, it doesn’t appear to break down this forecast by B2B and B2C, but it’s pretty staggering any way you cut it. Another interesting comparison stated in the article:

“At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).”

I’m a firm believer that email marketing will see its effectiveness reduced to the point of near-extinction within the next 5 years, due in part to social media as well as increasing proliferation of anti-spam technologies that will drive email into an almost completely whitelisted experience. But it’s still unclear how all this social marketing spend is going to manifest itself. The costs and ROI of social media are poorly understood at this point, especially with virtually all the tools and services being free. I’m sure we’ll see more of this develop very soon.

In the meantime, congratulations to CoTweet who closed their Series A round of funding yesterday. Good to see some of this activity happening in that booming hotbed of technology (and the town I grew up in), Hershey, Pennsylvania.

A New Gobbledygook Phrase? – Marketing WTF?

Jason Morio — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:40:22 +0000

Because “platforms” just don’t cut it anymore…

Quake in slack-jawed awe at the bombastic extremism that is….

Superplatform On-Demand

From the press release…
The term “Marketing SuperPlatform” was created by Upshot Institute and has gained fast industry acceptance. The term is applied to solutions offering multiple core marketing technologies, accessed as a single application suite.

Wow. So where do we go from here? How can anyone possibly top that? I guess we’ll have to stay tuned for the next level of one-uppedness, which can only spring forth titles such as:

Colossal Solutions Hyperplexus
Marketing Methods of Gaussian Proportions
Orwellian-Scale Mass Marketing

(any resemblance to companies or products, both real or hallucinated, is purely coincidental)

Want to make sure you aren’t filling your news releases with Gobbledygook? Be sure to use Gobbledygook Grader.

B2B Lead Gen Low Down – Batchblue CRM

Jason Morio — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:40:30 +0000

We are starting a new series here on the B2B Lead to bring B2B marketers new and/or remarkable products/companies/ideas that could make your life easier or are just plain cool.

Our first entrant in a series of many to come on this theme is BatchBook CRM by BatchBlue Software. Now I’m fully aware that there are more CRM systems out there than you can shake a stick at. What sets BatchBook apart from the rest is this simple assessment (IMHO): if you were to start a company to provide a current, modern CRM system today, BatchBook is what it would look like. It sports an extremely easy-to-use interface and provides all the features and functionality that the primary end-users of CRM systems (sales reps) actually use. But what makes it cool is the unique social networking and tagging elements that, whereas all the other CRM vendors are scurrying to retrofit their systems with it, has been built in. Tracking relationships between social network contacts and keeping tabs on the social chatterings thereof are just some of the interesting capabilities on this front. Their tagging capability, SuperTags, enables users to capture and search on ad-hoc information, such as “talked to this guy at EventForce”.

It is probably best suited for companies fitting the “S” in “SMB” (which most of their customers are), but the pricing model is attractive and I think we will be seeing some interesting things from this company in the future.

Recession? What recession? – Marketing WTF?

Jason Morio — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:45:18 +0000

Ah, to be counter-cyclic. That holy grail of business performance that is coveted by all but achieved by few. As our economy attempts to recover from the “off the top turnbuckle” piledriver inflicted upon it by our good friends on Wall Street, recent news in the Marketing Automation sector seems to indicate that things are going just fine, thank you, as evidenced by:

Marketo celebrating their One-Year Anniversary with their 160th customer win

Eloqua announcing their $33M year in 2008, up 58% YoY

Impressive on both accounts and hopefully this trend continues during the rebound. Interestingly, new findings from the recently released Marketing Outlook study conducted by the CMO Council indicate that 50% of marketers are keeping flat or actually increasing their budgets, but as far as investment in Marketing Automation goes:

“…tactical capabilities and point solutions dominate. The top two target areas of investment for 2009 are email marketing (44.9 percent) and online surveys and research (33.2 percent). Only 10.1 percent are investing in master data, 12.8 percent in marketing operational systems, and 9.3 percent in marketing resource or process management solutions.”

This supports a trend that we see quite frequently, which is that although companies are buying Marketing Automation suites, they really end up using them as email marketing tools and only dabble in the other features. Perhaps as times get better and budgets open up more, we will see a renewed/newfound exploration and usage of the multichannel capabilities that make these suites more powerful than your average load-and-go email blaster.

Tweet This Tip – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #212

Jason Morio — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:59:27 +0000

For those of you conversing out in the Twittersphere on your company’s behalf, here’s a little tip to leverage your web site visitors to get the word out about you on Twitter. Create a simple link on your home page that links to the following url:

http://twitter.com/home?status=[whatever+status+you+want]

Be sure to replace the [whatever+status+you+want] with, well, exactly that. For example:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Checking+out+ReachForce

To be safe, you’ll want to use the “+” character in place of any spaces in your status text. When someone clicks on your new Tweet This link, it will take them to their Twitter login page and then automatically populate the “What are you doing?” box with the text that you put after the “status=” part of the link. Below is an example of what happens when clicking on the link above:

Who’s Really Out There Being Social? – Marketing WTF?

Jason Morio — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:07:40 +0000

In the spirit of my previous post about the signal-to-noise ratio element of Twitter, the edgy, thought-provoking site brainz.org has “a completely unscientific (yet accurate) look at social sites” that lives up to its title. While the article doesn’t dissect the actual content of the various popular social networks, it does provide a candid analysis of the types of people that are hanging out on sites like Myspace versus Twitter versus LinkedIn, etc. My personal almost-spewed-diet-coke-on-my-monitor favorite is their classification for 12% of Myspace users, which I will leave for your personal perusal.

There is a litany of other “20 reasons for…” and “30 ways to…” analyses on the site in Drudge Report-style simplicity that are pretty interesting as well, including a fun walk down memory lane with “12 Dead Technology Advertisements“, which conjured up memories of the old big three online service providers: Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL. Ahh, the good old days.

Blog Bling by Blidgets – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #207

Jason Morio — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:24:12 +0000

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!

Dirty Data – Do You Care? – Marketing WTF?

Jason Morio — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:23:51 +0000

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.

Twitter CRM? – Marketing WTF?

Jason Morio — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:37:58 +0000

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.