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.

This is the third post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention and the second post on Qualified Buyers vs. Leads.

Deliberate Marketing programs do not rely simply on prospect titles for targeting potential buyers.

For example, a B2B Marketer purchases a list or accesses a contact database and pulls a list of 1,000 Communications Analysts. How can that marketer be certain that the contacts who match those titles are involved with Network Communications instead of Corporate Communications?

Titles are simply a label of rank, not an indication of the actual role the prospect plays in the organization or in the buying decision. Instead, Deliberate Marketing programs are focused on “roles,” defined by Webster’s as: a function or part performed. They target communications based on organizational role and level in the DMU as well as stage of the buying cycle.

The average B2B marketing response rate is less than 3%, and it’s getting lower every year. It’s easy to see why title-based lists perform so poorly.

Consider a Fortune 500 company with 90,000 employees.
All told, this company has 500 IT staff.
Of those 500, 150 have a title of Manager, Director, and higher.
Only a handful of those 150 is in the right role to buy your product.

But what’s a marketer to do? Using current list technology, you can only get as specific as target title. So you have to market to all 150 people with ‘hot titles’, jamming the inboxes of the majority with an unwanted, off-topic solicitation. It’s simply not a cost-effective model.

2008 has been a big year for B2B Marketers.  The idea of using social media as part of our lead generation programs has become a reality.  Whether it be blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook B2B Marketers are taking on new challenges and figuring out new ways to reach their audience through the readily available social media outlets.  Here’s a list of some great social media posts from this year.  There’s lot of lists and dos and don’ts, if we’ve left a great post out, let us know, we’ll add it to the list.

50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media to Improve their Marketing

10 Aspects of an Effective Social Media Campaign

How to Build a Community of Twitter Followers

Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have

6 Keys to Bringing Up Social Media

24 Things to do When Stuck for a Topic to Blog About

Health Check:  How Trusted is your Corporate Blog?

Internet Marketing Roundup

5 Musts of Business Blogging

50 Social Media & Marketing Predictions for 2009

5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook

If you’re already knee deep in the world of social media, please share some of your successes or experiences.  Are you able to measure real ROI?

Happy Holidays and thank you for following us on The B2B Lead.  We look forward to sharing more B2B Marketing and Sales best practices with you in 2009.

So…you have written white papers and eBooks and they are up on your website. They are probably on the resources page and get their fair share of downloads. That’s good, but with some of the free publishing sites out there you can get more exposure.

I have started to put ReachForce content on some of the sites and wanted to share the results, compare with you or ask if you had suggestions.

Content placement sites:

Scribd – the best content placement site I think. You can publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents. It’s easy to set up…sign up and make an account for free, then just upload your documents. I have uploaded all of ReachForce’s eBooks and have gotten 5476 views as of today. People can add your works to their favorites and rate them. You can join groups an add friends.

Docstoc – provides the platform for users and businesses to upload and share their documents with all the world, and serves as a vast repository of documents in variety of categories including legal, business, financial, technology, educational, and creative. I uploaded all our eBooks and have 300 views and 30 downloads as of today.

edocr – upload your documents for sharing by the professional and business community. I uploaded our eBooks, again, and we have 618 views so far. One of our eBooks was featured on the front page when first uploaded.

whitepapers.org – is “all the world’s whitepapers in one place.” I really haven’t figured out how to see how many views or downloads our whitepapers have had.

The pros of publishing your content on sites like this is that it is free to do and can bring unexpected visitors an exposure. The biggest con I can find is that there is really no way to find out who downloaded our content (with information like an email address). To help with this, we added links to all our whitepapers and eBooks to hopefully drive traffic back to our website.

Suggestions?

Does your sales team ignore the majority of leads marketing passes on?  Marketers must develop a more intimate understanding of their target customer and the market that customer serves to generate qualified buyers that Sales won’t ignore. Marketers must align their efforts with the Sales organization and streamline the Marketing and Sales funnel to accelerate the rate at which leads move through their funnel.

Deliberate Marketing is a proven strategy for putting more qualified buyers directly into the Marketing and Sales funnel to generate faster ROI. It is especially effective in the B2B Marketing space which is characterized by defined target markets, long sales cycles and complex buyer-seller relationships. Over the next few weeks, I will be covering The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing in hopes of helping B2B Marketers start off the new year with a new approach to drive more successes.

Principle #1: Intention vs. Attention

Do you know if your marketing programs are gathering intention or attention?  Intention means you have hit the right audience with the right message and they have responded to your call to action.  Attention means they looked at your message but they may not have been your buyer and there was no call to action. By focusing on intention vs. attention, you may have fewer leads to pass onto sales but those leads will be more qualified.

Deliberate Marketing involves researching your customers in order to build insight into their pain points and the medium through which they respond best to marketing messages. This research enables Marketers to deliver laser-focused messages and programs that convert buyer interest to buyer intent. It is not about spreading high level marketing messages to a broad audience via advertising or public relations hoping to garner attention for a product or company.

Rather, Deliberate Marketing is focused on converting a targeted segment of prospects into qualified buyers with an interest in purchasing a product or service. This involves knowing far more about your target audience than any list buy, database or telemarketing firm can ever provide.

This week The Funnelholic had a great tip for marketers getting ready to go into 2009, and we wanted to pass it on to The B2B Lead readers.

“Do ‘ride-alongs’ with sales as you consider your marketing plans.”  So often we are busy putting programs and campaigns in place without even asking sales (our customer) if it’s what they need to move leads to opportunities and opportunities to customers.  “If you really want to add value as a marketer, you have to identify the ‘have-to-have’s’ for your customers, the sales team. The best way to do it, is to see for yourself.”

He then goes on to list a couple of great ideas on saddling up with your sales team to help do your job better and drive more measurable results.

Check it out and thanks to The Funnelholic for the great tips.

We are big fans of Mr. Scott and his eBook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing, which gives tips on how to spread your ideas for free using word-of-mouse. Or in other words, “one person sends it to another, then that person sends it to yet another, and on and on.” With the internet, it is now easier than ever to start a viral campaign, but “marketers need to learn how to harness the amazing power of word-of-mouse.”

This eBook is full of case studies and other “people’s success so you can apply some of their ideas and lessons in your own word-of-mouse efforts.” Most of this is at the beginning, so if you are short on time I would start on page 14 for the real meat.

David’s formula for success:

“A combination of some great-and free-Web content (a video, blog entry, interactive tool, or e-book) that provides valuable information (or is groundbreaking or amazing or hilarious or involves a celebrity), plus a network of people to light the fire and links that make your content very easy to share.”

To help achieve this success, David provides specific advice on how to launch a viral campaign using YouTube videos, e-books and other techniques. I’ll pick out some points I thought interesting (or that I haven’t thought about before) and list them here, but make sure you go back and read the eBook for all the tips.

How to help your eBook get shared:

• Present you eBook in a landscape format, rather than the white paper’s typical portrait format. This makes it easier to read and signals to the reader that the content is interesting.
• Consider writing in a lighter, more conversational style than you would in a whitepaper, marketing brochure, or Web page. Think of the writing in an eBook as you would write for a blog.
• eBooks should always be free and should never have a registration requirement.  (This has been hotly debated for a while now on how to balance capturing leads and distributing content.  What do you think?)
• Put a Creative Commons license on the content so people know they can freely share your copyrighted material.
• Create a landing page from which people can download your eBook. (All of our eBooks and whitepapers have landing pages set up on the ReachForce Resources page on the website.)
• To drive viral marketing, (you have to read the eBook for the rest of this great tip)!

9 tips for using YouTube (here are a few)

1. Your video should be no longer than three minutes. (Come on, who has time to just sit and watch a 10 minute video…unless it is really funny or something). If you have a lot to say, consider creating a series of posts.
2. Don’t attempt “stealth” fake customer insertions. Be authentic and don’t try to sneak in company promotion where you can. (YouTube itself can catch unauthenic video and that might cause harm to a brand).
3. Make sure bloggers know about the video. The best way to do this is when you are reading and commenting on blogs in your space, next time you comment link to your video (if it makes sense to).

Other tips he mentioned:

• Use interactive tools (like Hubspot’s Website Grader)
• Don’t break the bank with expensive advertising
• Don’t beg mainstream media to write about you

I have left some really great tips and specific advice out, so go back and read what all David has to say about viral campaigns. Have you had success with viral campaigns? What did you do?

David Meerman Scott is an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist. The programs he has developed have won numerous awards and are responsible for selling over $1 billion in products and services worldwide.

This is GREAT! We are both customers and big fans of Hubspot, and they released a new video yesterday and we wanted to be sure readers of The B2B Lead saw it. It already has over 200 diggs and is Number 1 in YouTube when you search “marketing.”