Are your tweets optimized for Twitter Search?  Last week, I attended the Eloqua User Group event in Austin.  Somehow the conversation ended up on Twitter.  One of the Eloqua folks asked the group, “are you using Twitter?”  I was shocked when only those of us from ReachForce and Eloqua raised their hands (but that rant is for another day).  Steve Woods, CTO and co-founder of Eloqua, was there speaking to us about his new book, Digital Body Language.  He said uses an almost SEO strategy for his tweets.  I would call it more of a TSO (Twitter Search Optimization) approach.

If you are following a large group of people, it is almost impossible to read every tweet in your feed.  More and more people have started using TweetDeck and RSS feeds from Twitter Search to stay up to date on what people are saying about their company or certain keywords.  Following that logic, it makes sense to try to include keywords in your tweets so they will actually be read by the right people.

If you want to employ this strategy, you need to know two things: what other people are tweeting about and keywords relevant to your business (hopefully, you already have this one figured out).  Play around on Twitter Search to see how often your keywords are used (this is also a good way to find new people to follow).  You will find that certain keywords are used more frequently and in a more relevant way.  Keep a running list so you can be sure to use those keywords in your tweets.

I would love to hear from anyone else about how to use Twitter more effectively.  And if you’re not already, be sure to follow all of us on The B2B Lead:

• @ahawthorne
• @LAWallace
• @ReachForce

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.

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.

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.