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.

It’s a big day for us here on The B2B Lead.  Today we’re bringing you our 200th B2B Marketing and Sales Tip…well, kind of.  Instead of a tip per se we’d like you to participate in a survey about how your life as a B2B Marketer has changed in this new economy.

This will help us bring you relevant tips and tricks as well as provide you some insight on what your peers are doing.  Also, if you participate, we’ll send you a copy of the survey results.  You want to make sure you are keeping up, right?  Take this 8 question survey and pass it on to your fellow marketers.  There’s value in it for all of us.

Here’s a tiny url to make it easier to pass along: http://tinyurl.com/B2BMarketingSurvey

Thanks for playing along.

Not too long ago a couple of us here attended Eloqua’s Marketing Effectiveness Summit.  One of the most interesting things we came back with was their Marketing and Sales Relationship Map.

Check out this post on one of Eloqua’s new blogs, Marketing Insights. It includes a sample relationship map that “can help you identify gaps in perception and prioritize areas for improvement [between sales and marketing], without pointing fingers.”  The idea is to have sales and marketing separately rank performance in specific demand generation criteria.  Both teams ultimate goal is to drive revenue and this map helps define key metrics and align goals so everyone wins.

I like to think Marketing and Sales here at ReachForce are all one team but I must admit I was a little scared to turn the map over to our Sales team to see how they really felt.

Have you ever done anything like this with your Marketing and/or Sales team?  If so, please share.

I know you have probably read somewhere that even if you aren’t blogging yourself you should at least be out there to see what other people in your space are talking about.  The best way to do this is by reading industry related blogs.  To ensure you are keeping up on a regular basis, set up your Google Reader.  All of this sounds great but where do you find the right blogs to read for your business?

Here’s what helped me:

• Alltop – or “all the top” sites on the web. ReachForce’s space is B2B Marketing and I looked here for “all the top marketing news.” It has all the top Marketing blogs (even including this one!) based on results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us.
• Just Google your space…like “B2B Marketing Blogs.” First on the page was Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs by Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog. And keep moving down the page for more. Other bloggers also compile lists of top blogs in their space. For example, Web Market Central has a list of Marketing-Related Blogs.
• When looking at other blogs, be sure to check out their blogroll. It is a good way to see what blogs someone else follows and recommends.

So…now start looking for blogs in your industry and get into the conversation!

This is the 7th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEITM) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6)

Here is the outline we’ve been following:

1. CEI Initiative Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
5. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
6. (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting

So far we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for scoring to examine three existing customer scenarios as examples:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying CEI-metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building CEI-lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.

Next on the list is to take a look at using CEI response data to help locate, target and engage with net-New prospects.

Reference Account Management

The most obvious and useful way CEI scoring benefits the new sales process is the buttoned down way it sorts advocacy dynamics and pinpoints which current customers would make the best references based on data analysis, not on someone’s opinion. There is nothing more powerful from a news sales perspective than having a well stocked supply of sales ready references. It happens every day across the world, thousands of times a day ― a sales person bursts into the marketing or account manager’s office needing three references to connect with their prospect. Not only is the list of needed attributes arms length, but it all needs to happen before tomorrow afternoon. Sound familiar? Yes it does.

This scenario takes us back to the first exercise we did for determining what a customer’s advocacy rating is. Remember it’s a matter of reading how a customer feels about their entire experience with your company using a scoring schema that takes metrics from both qualitative (loyalty) and quantitative (satisfaction) feedback into account. So if asked to produce recommendations about what customers should be the best sales-ready references we’d produce response scores rendered from a two-step lens build that would look something like this:

Step 1 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

Once each row on the customer list has an assigned CEI Advocacy Score, simply sort this column in descending order and in combination with the column for customer response time to your survey plus overall satisfaction scores, plus Key Weight. This  (if you remember back to the 1st and 2nd posts in this series) is because the survey invitations were sent as an integrated campaign, i.e. first an email, then another, then a phone call reminder from the account manager, then another from an executive, then perhaps another email, etc., thus determining how quick to respond each survey taker was. It stands to reason that someone who responded quickly in combination with high scores from Advocacy, Satisfaction and Key Weight are going to be a good sales ready reference account.

Step 2 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

So the above mentioned sort produces a top 10 list based on:

Next week we’ll cover ways to build rules-based profiles of your most successful customers and your relationships with them and then use the data to score how well new company targets match the rules.

This is the fourth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 3 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads and Role vs. Title.

Deliberate Marketing techniques make it possible for Marketers and Sales teams to predict the results of their efforts because they know their direct marketing programs are focused on the right buyers in the right type of company. Deliberate Marketers do not spray a rented list of contacts with a generic message hoping the right buyers will respond. Instead, they deliver a highly relevant message to a targeted audience.

Based on preparation and research, they know they are using the right messages and the right medium to deliver that message based on the buyer profile (or persona). They also know that they are delivering this message to buyers in companies with a similar combination of characteristics as their best customers so their propensity to purchase is higher.

With this approach, Marketers can rely on repeatable lead generation efforts to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to Sales.

I know not every company has the option to hire someone specifically for online/social media marketing and here at ReachForce I do have other responsibilities, but my main job is to get ReachForce more interactive online.

There are many reasons companies aren’t taking on social media initiatives – they’re scared, they don’t have the time, they don’t understand the value, etc.. And you already have enough work as it is, right? All true, but as you have probably heard by now…social media is worth investing some time into. To help, I have listed below what I do at least once every day (I have sort of made my morning routine around it), and hopefully you can pick out some things you can start doing on a regular basis too so you can get started online.

Google Reader – This is most important to get started in social media. Every day I read our Google Reader we put together with blogs in our space. I go through reading (skimming) and pick out posts I think would be good for us at ReachForce to comment on.

Twitter – I have my own account and ReachForce has a company account that I update a few days a week. If you aren’t twittering today you should at least be checking out search.twitter.com to see who is talking about your company.

LinkedIn – I scan LinkedIn Answers for ones I think ReachForce can help with or we may have an opinion on. And there are many times our Marketing Director (Amy) is able to offer some good marketing advice. This process has been made easier with the help of groups I have joined and the weekly email I get with discussions, and with inbound marketing system HubSpot.

Facebook – We have a ReachForce corporate page. When needed, I upload photos or videos, put our events coming up or send a message to our fans. I usually always have to update our RSS feeder from our blog…for some reason it doesn’t do it on its own? Anyone else having this problem?

Social Bookmarks – I use Digg and StumbleUpon the most. I feel right now we get the best traffic from them. I recommend using it for your own blog if you have one, or recommending other people’s post you like. (Use your Google Reader to find these)!

Blog – At ReachForce we do have a blog and we post at least 4 times a week. I don’t write all the content, but I do manage it.

To help stay on top of what is going on in the social media realm I look at mashable.com and subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog and newsletter as a start.

Okay, so this is most of my morning routine (yes it is a little time consuming, but this is what I was hired on to do). Hopefully you can pick out bits and pieces and start putting it in your routine. For those of you who do use social media on a daily basis, what else do you do every day?

On with the 5th drop in a series (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback. All questions and comments are extremely welcome and I do appreciate those who have already jumped in.

Working our way down a list of six areas:

1. Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. (We are here) Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
5. Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting
6. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions

In the last installment (#4), we rolled out some quick analysis of data from a recent ReachForce Customer Experience survey ― zeroing in on the different angle we took by measuring prompted versus non-prompted advocacy  — and what differences exist between companies that are a reference account (92% spending x amount) versus a full blown advocate (73% spending y amount).

It is, glory be, nice to have such high numbers for both reference accounts and advocates at ReachForce. And it’s even nicer to know that as satisfied customers (x) evolve into proactive advocates (y) they also tend, as explained last drop, to buy software and services more often, and in greater amounts (#4). So as a Customer Success team planner it becomes imperative to first figure out why it happens – and set out a continuous plan of improvement to make it more predictable.

To get there, we first establish the Key Weight – or how long and how often does a customer “experience” your company? I have been scolded for this approach in the past by people who say it’s not fair or smart to weigh qualitative feedback from new or infrequent customers more lightly than older ones, and I understand the concern. But I don’t think of it as lower weight = less important (all feedback is important) ― rather, lower weight = less sure.

To work a very simple example, if planning 2009 MBOs for our project managers requires a comparison of two key accounts assigned to the same Project Manager, the following analysis might be used to help step us in the right direction:

For key account planning these numbers tell me the project manager (PM) assigned to these two customers is delivering high marks on both quantitative (data accuracy?) and qualitative (expertise?) fronts ― and with two very different scenarios (new customer/once per month and old customer/once per week). This is good. But because the lower of the cross tab scores are from the (quantitative) ‘PM expertise?’ question, I can foresee the MBOs assigned to the PM in the case of both customers will be warm, fuzzy and relationship directed in order to bolster the customer’s perception of the PM’s expertise. Or maybe the PM gets more training. And closing the planning loop, I’d probably use “Moving Customer 2 up to weekly engagement” as another measurable objective. A higher level of meaningful contact would help.

And as you can see by looking at the % Analysis Scores above, without factoring the Key Weight in the above example, you’d only be fooling yourself about Customer 2 data accuracy and PM Expertise ratings, because you would not be taking newness, or lower frequency metrics into account and an important danger or opportunity might be overlooked. To some, planning account by account MBO strategy this way may seem overly analytical, but I have found no better way to customize and create MBOs to and pinpoint action plans right where the rubber hits the road.

To get some ideas about which cross tab questions to use as lenses for various situations, think of it in terms of Value Delivery (quantitative) versus Obstacles for Value Delivery (qualitative) ― as in our example of Data Accuracy versus Project Manager Expertise ― wherein bad Project Management would be an obvious obstacle to delivering high Data Accuracy.

I’d be happy to provide further example scenarios here, but I think you get the drift. Remember, I think it’s less of a service to create some sort of template, than it is to just spark some thought and let folks craft CEI indexing tools that mean the most to your specific world.

Next week we’ll look at a few more of these CEI ‘planning lenses.’

Hope you enjoyed this quarter’s Book Club series.  Just in case you missed an eBook or whitepaper we read and discussed, below are the links to them and what we had to say about each of them.

• Dianna Huff’s Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now
• What we had to say…

• Brian Carroll’s Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation
• What we had to say…

• HubSpots’s Get Found Online
• What we had to say…

• Marketo’s Best Practices in Lead Nurturing
• What we had to say…

• David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Viral Marketing
• What we had to say…

• ConnectDirect’s How to Choose your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
• What we had to say…

Happy Reading.  We look forward to sharing even more B2B Marketing and Sales tips with you in 2009.