Lose Control of Your Marketing is the latest eBook from David Meerman Scott.  It is mostly composed of excerpts from his new book World Wide Rave.  Readers of The B2B Lead already know I am a huge fan of Mr. Scott, especially his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.  However, the ideas presented in this eBook were a little hard for me to accept whole-heartedly.  As the name suggests, he encourages marketers to take down any barriers to their content and lose control to allow their ideas/content to spread.  As a bit of a control freak and one who lives by the mantra that everything marketing does must be measured, I had a bit of an internal struggle while reading this eBook.

According to David, You need to think in terms of spreading ideas, not generating leads. A World Wide Rave gets the word out to thousands or even millions of potential customers. But only if you make your information easy to find and consume.

One of the most difficult ideas for me to accept is the idea that sales leads are the wrong goal.  Isn’t my number one goal as a marketer to provide qualified leads to Sales?  David’s most compelling argument is that he has seen content downloads multiply by as much as a factor of 50 when a registration form was taken off.  I don’t know that I could ever take down every form on my website, but it is worth a shot on an eBook or two, just as a test.

The last part of the eBook focuses on how organizations should create a social media policy for its employees.  At ReachForce we are very open to allowing all employees to participate in social media, but if you are trying to create your own social media guidelines, David gives some great tips.

Helpful hint: if you are strapped for time you can probably skip pages 16-21.  And if you really don’t have time to read this eBook at all, let me leave you with David’s main point: The biggest requirement is that you change your behavior, so let me remind you of the most important strategies for successful marketing in a world of social media:

• Stop obsessing over the old measurements of sales leads and marketing ROI.
• Make your valuable online content free and registration-less.
• Give away lots of good information (videos, photos, data, graphs, audio, blogs, e-books, and the like) to enthusiastic or curious people interested in your products and services.
• Encourage an organizational culture of sharing.

After a couple of days out of the office I’m finally catching up on my Google Reader.  Mashable, one of my favorite sites, always comes through with great social media tips.  Twitter is definitely getting its fair share of airtime these days so for the Twitter obsessed, here’s a couple of options for searching Twitter to find what you need or want.

6 options for searching Twitter –

• TwitterSearch – this one seems to be the most common as it is hosted by Twitter. Results show the sender’s avatar, a link to the original tweet, and a link to Twitter.com to reply…

• Twazzup – this is Twitter Search on steroids. For any given query string, you can see results down the left column that are updated in real-time.

• Tweetzi – Perhaps the best element it has that neither of the above applications do, is the ability for real-time playing and pausing. See the blue “Play” button? If you click it, you can watch your trending topic gather steam; and you can hit Pause whenever you want.

• Tweefind - If you want a basic search utility, Tweefind is it.

• Twitterseach/Zeitbase – looking for something really simple, this is it!

• Flaptor – the key difference here is an RSS link, one click and you can get an RSS link of your results.

Of course you can find screen shots and more details of each of these on Mashable.  Thank you Mashable for the keeping us up-to-date and in the know on our ever changing world of social media!

Are you using any of these to help with your lead generation efforts?  If so, please share.

Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close.  Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out.  Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.

According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.   Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.   Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?

This makes me wonder.  Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.

Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:

• Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is.  Marketing leads are different than sales leads.  Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.

• Ask the sales team what is working for them.  Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies?  Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.

• What programs deliver the best leads?  And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers.  Does this align with what sales says?

• Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine.  Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.

• For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing.  Budgets and project timelines change all the time.  Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).

At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team.  We know one can’t be successful without the other.

B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

Do you keep track of what is being said about your company online?   If you don’t, you should.  I am certain that the folks at Mzinga were shocked by what Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Analyst, said about them in his post on Monday.  Thankfully they were monitoring and able to respond.  He chose one of the most public forums at his disposal to publicly bash the company.  He says, “Why this post? It’s my obligation to have my clients best interest in mind, and this is the fastest way for me to reach them, by using the tools where we’re already connected.”  I find that a little hard to believe.  My guess is that email is the fastest way to reach his clients, not a public blog post.

I have a real problem with anyone using a public forum to bash a company before actually speaking with someone at the company directly or at least reaching out to the company directly.  Why do we feel in this online world that we can post something to Twitter, LinkedIn, or our own blog about another company without ever having taken the time to find out if our accusation is true or to resolve conflict we may personally have.  Jeremiah obviously has connections to the folks at Mzinga. Why not pick up the phone and chat with them first to confirm or deny the rumors he has been hearing.  When they gave him the answer that they would be making a public announcement in a week (in response to his tweets, not his direct reaching out), why couldn’t he wait?  Or if he felt this was truly something his clients needed to know, why not inform them privately?  (Sorry if I have gone on a bit of a tangent, but I fell very strongly about this subject.)

Jeremiah did respond with an apology on his blog.  But like one commenter said, “After reading that “apology”, it wreaks of: ‘I have been asked by my employer to write something, but do not believe that I am in the wrong.’”  I have to agree.  Read the post and apology and decide for yourself.

Lessons learned:

• Track what others are saying about you online – Google alerts is not enough.  Make sure you are tracking what is being said on Twitter (set up an RSS feed of your company’s name on Twitter Search) and LinkedIn.
• Respond quickly and pleasantly to everyone, analyst/blogger/customer/prospect
  
• If you don’t have something nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all – I think we could all use reminding of this wonderful phrase our mothers used to say to us.

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:

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!

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?

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.”