I love that David is now giving us actionable things to think about for our own businesses.  So many times we read business books with a lot of commentary but no real action items or ideas on how to incorporate these things into our existing strategies.  In this chapter he lists 8 ideas on creating thoughtful content.  Here’s a few I really liked –

• Do not write about your company or products.  Thought leadership is not advertising.
• Based on your goals, decide whether your content should be free or behind a form.
• Write for your audience.  Use examples and stories.
• Choose a great title that grabs attention.
• To drive  viral marketing effects, alert appropriate reporters, bloggers, and analysts that content is available for download.

Are you already using some of these ideas or is there anything else to add to the list?

Next week we will be discussing chapters 12 and 13 on how to write for your buyers and how web content influences the buying process.

Do you know anyone who is not online? I even know an 87-year-old who uses eBay. The fact of the matter is that everyone is online. The question is – are they talking about you and do you know what they are saying? David Meerman Scott gives some great examples of how different companies responded to negative comments on forums and blogs. I think there are two great lessons to be learned from these examples:

1. You need to know what people, especially your customers, are saying about you
2. You need to respond swiftly and genuinely directly to your audience. Do not do what Sony BMG did and respond to bloggers by going on the radio, respond where your audience is, online.

Hopefully most of you are already using Google Alerts to help you monitor blogs and news stories but it will not catch everything. Here are some other monitoring tools you should check out:

1. search.twitter.com – you can search on any keyword, like your company name, to see who is tweeting about you
2. blogsearch.google.com – again you can search on any keyword and add an RSS feed of it to your Google Reader. Tip: you can exclude your own blog or website by adding -site:yourwebsite.com after the keyword. So if I want to see who is talking about ReachForce I would search: reachforce -site:theb2blead.com.

I have discussed this before on The B2B Lead, but you should also monitor an RSS feed of blogs and forums that are in your space. These are the most likely targets for your customers and prospects. Have someone in your company who can add value to the conversation be involved. This is not always easy, but can have great benefits.

The point is:

• Be involved online and know what people are saying about you
• If you see something negative, don’t go dark, respond to try to make it better and admit when you have done something wrong. Everyone appreciates an apology when it is genuine.
• You can gain credibility by having an in-house expert active on forums and blogs – remember no sales pitches

What have you found to be successful online. We would love to hear any success stories. Know of any good monitoring tools? Please share.

Stay tuned next week when we will be covering chapters 8 & 9 on going viral and content rich websites.

Search engine marketing just got a little bit more complicated. According to a story in the New York Times today, former Google employees have just launched a new competitive search engine called “Cuil” which is pronounced “cool” that is supposed to be easier to use and more comprehensive than the search giant. If this takes off according to expectations, B2B Marketers could have another search engine to consider when optimizing their websites. With Google’s domination of the search market, it seems unlikely to be a huge threat, but many experts are touting its advantages. According to the Times story:

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

I think Cuil has many nice things going for it although my initial attempts to use it yielded mixed results – poor recognition of long-tail terms, and some performance delays (probably a result of the New York Times article and subsequent load.) But the things I like most about it are the categorization and formatting of results, the 3 column view and the ability to configure it. What’s more, BreakingPoint’s SEO seems to be working on Cuil as our rankings seem to be fine (unlike our leading competitors). Maybe that bodes well for the future of our SEO efforts. I hope so, as I am certain the complete lack of advertising on the site will appeal to my target audience so SEO will be the only option.

Overall, I’m happy to have another streamlined, high performance option for search and hope that Google will get a bit of competition. So, despite the fact that Google is a pervasive presence in my life, I think I’ll continue to use it despite the un-cool name.

What do you think? Will this be good or bad for Marketing and SEO?

Would you be offended if you got an email with ROI – Up Yours as the subject line? Personally I think I’d giggle and check it out. If nothing else to see who is sticking their neck out there like this.

Well, we tried it here at ReachForce. The email content was all about Upping your ROI, so we were being relevant. We got mixed results on our risky move. We had about ½ dozen people email us to tell us we had offended them. Not many but it made us wonder how many more people we might have offended that just chose to delete the message instead of responding back.

On the flip side we had about dozen people reply back that they “loved” the subject line.

So where exactly is the line on going to far to get some attention?

For us, my Sales team asked for the subject line to be changed, so we did it but I must say that campaign doesn’t deliver near the results it used to…

Yes, you read that right, I did actually use the words “Blog” and “ROI” in the same headline. But this isn’t a post about how to calculate the ROI of your blog. If that’s what you are looking for, reading further will be a frustrating exercise.

Whenever I speak about social media and blogging, the questions always follow the same path from cynical challenges to reluctant how-to questions. Sort of like the 5 stages of grief (disclaimer: I am not a clinical psychologist and really have no idea if these stages are even accurate):

Shock – “Is a blog right for my audience?”
Denial – “How can I justify the value of a blog, I can’t measure the ROI, can I?
Bargaining – “How can I justify investing in such a time-consuming exercise? Isn’t my time better spent elsewhere?”
Anger – “Where do I even start? Social media is out of control.”
Acceptance – “How often do I have to post?”

Just like death and taxes, blogging is inevitable. It helps you establish a closer relationship with your customers. It gives your company a face and a personality letting you share your evolving philosophies and lessons learned with your readership. And, it helps with search engine optimization so that buyers can find you. For all of these reasons and so many more, you will eventually be forced into embracing blogging. I mean, when was the last time a journalist or blogger wrote a wildly exciting post linking to your web page? Not happening? You’re not alone. People don’t get excited by web copy. But they do get inspired and passionate about blog posts—if they deliver value.

I recently read an extremely interesting post by Phil Baumann’s entitled Blog ROI: It’s About Value, Stupid!, in which Phil makes an excellent case for why hospitals should have a blog. His reason: “value.” According to Phil:

“Until someone establishes a standard measure of Blog ROI, I think it’s helpful to focus our lens on a fundamental question: What information is needed to decide whether a blog is worth its cost. There’s probably a complicated answer to that question, one which depends on the economics of your particular organization. In its place, I’d like to offer up three simple intuition pumps:

1. Value drives ROI
2. Price is a function of Value
3. Value-Multiplied is replacing Value-Added”

Now, here’s the real genius behind Phil’s post. He claims that: “Value-Multiplied is Replacing Value-Added” – And that’s where intelligent applications of social media come into play. Can you think of a better way to multiply the shared values of your going concern? Word-of-Mouth (WOM) was always king. But know the kingdom of WOM has come. Know thy king. He’s a little different this time around. He’s wearing new clothing: a crown of truth, a cape of respect and a staff of democracy. In fact: he’s you! If you lay down the tracks for your customers’ value-train then ROI will come chugging along.

Ready to get started delivering value? Check out Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Blogging for tips and resources.

Keyword optimization on your website has become standard operating procedure for most marketers. But are you optimizing your press releases with keywords? Here are a few reasons why you should:

• If you are posting your press releases to your website (and you should be), it is probably the freshest content. Google gives precedence to new content (that is why blogs rank so highly in search engine results).
• Press releases and news articles rank very highly on Google. The more keyword rich your press releases are, the better they will rank in Google.
• Press releases are not just for the press. Make it easy for prospects/bloggers/analysts/media to find you wherever they are searching.

Don’t know where to start to find the right keywords? Check out these tips from MarketingProfs: Four Steps to Writing Search-Engine-Optimized Press Releases (I highly recommend the entire article) by Kim Cornwall Malseed:

• Find out what keywords successful competitors are using
• Read articles written by target journalists
• Survey your PR and Marketing department personnel
• Survey your Web site development team
• Survey product development personnel and executive management,
• Many press release distribution services (PRNewswire, MarketWire, etc.) have SEO features. Use them a few times (the companies usually permit you to do a free trial) and track results to get an idea of which keywords are most popular.

Also, be sure to avoid gobbledygook, those over-used industry words like “flexible,” “scalable” and “market-leading” so aptly named gobbledygook by David Meerman Scott.

After you have written your press release and think you have optimized all necessary keywords, put it to the test. HubSpot recently announced Press Release Grader, a free online tool to rate your press release. “Press Release Grader rates a press release based on a checklist of criteria – from content and structure, to search optimization and link analysis. The free tool is designed to optimize a press release so it can be found more easily by media, bloggers, customers and prospects. Press Release Grader provides an analysis and recommendations that will help you improve the way your press release is structured.”

As it is for most marketing tactics, in the end it is all about testing and re-testing to find what works best for your audience. I am sure I am missing a lot here. Anyone have any more tips?

One of the best ways to increase your SEO rankings is to attract inbound links to your blog or website.

Traditional link building efforts involve asking for links, link swapping, or link buying. This process is extremely time consuming and can get expensive if you are buying high quality links. Really, in this instance, is there any such thing as a quality link? After all, Google has made no secret that it is actively seeking ways to weed out this practice.

In contrast, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by leveraging social media to convince others to link to your content. The challenge is coming up with link-worthy material and then spreading the word via Twitter and other social media tools. Fortunately for those of us with little time and fewer resources, the process of building this content just got a lot easier. You no longer need to embark upon a lengthy research project or write a 10 page white paper. These days, successful link bait is taking the form of widgets or mashups or other forms of rich media content. The prerequisite is that the content should be helpful, clever, funny, or remarkable enough that others want to write about it or include it in their roundup of free tools.

The process of building a widget or mashup used to require Web development skills or enough budget to farm out the work. I’ve been reading about a number of free tools that allow just about anyone to create their own widgets but have not found the confidence to try them. Prodded by a “tweet” from one of the more influential Twitterati (did I really just write that?), I decided to check out, Sprout, an extremely cool and easy to use site to help you build widgets or other informational tools that can be embedded in your blog or web site. http://sproutbuilder.com/whataresprouts.

Sprout looks easy enough to use and I’m ready to check it out. Now, I just have to come up with the “killer app” for our blog readers. To get ideas, the first step will be to reach out to the community reading the BreakingPoint blog at www.breakingpointlabs.com and then do a bit of brainstorming.

More on this in another post.

As we are fast approaching mid-year, it is a good time to look back at the investments you have already made this year and look for new ways to leverage these investments.

This is a time to make the invisible visible.

Most B2B Marketers have invested in either search engine optimization, paid search advertising or both this year. My guess is you were probably hoping for more quality leads from these investments. Have you considered these ideas to get more bang for your buck?

• Identify visitors that didn’t announce themselves (the companies they originated from). Your web analytics tools can help with this or check out ReachForce Convert for more segmentation level data and visitor patterns.
• Now that you’ve got the companies identified, do you have the right contacts to reach out to and play offense? Consider reaching out with an offer call to action relevant to the pages they viewed.

How about your current customer marketing? Are you doing everything you can to get more from what you already have?

• Is your customer database up to date and complete? 2% of data goes bad every month. Which 2%? Who knows. Your customer database is a great place to start a data refresh project.
• While you’re refreshing, do you have the right buying contacts for additional products or services? If not consider adding these to the customer records so you are ready when you have new or updated product offers.

Many of you invested in events in the first half of ’08. Have those leads been followed up on? According to SiriusDecisions, only 10% of trade show leads are followed-up by Sales. Are you, as a Marketer, nurturing the other 90%?

• For those leads that are non-responsive, make sure that you have the right contacts in those companies. Think about the role of the person you are targeting? Think about the multiple folks involved in a purchase process at your target and their role. You might need different offers or calls-to-action for each member of the decision making unit.
• Continue to nurture leads not ready for sales – dialog is important, it takes 5 to 7 touches to turn a lead into a prospect.

Webinars seemed to have only increased in popularity in 2008. Although the event happens live, the recorded content can be repurposed.

• Did you record the webinar and post on your website? Are you campaigning around the event even though the live version has already happened?
• Have you considered using services like Insight24 to syndicate your webcast to over 13 million viewers?
• Don’t forget about the podcasters. You can easily turn a webinar into multiple podcasts. Make sure short, bite sized content is available for those always short on time.

Summer is often “down-time” for marketing and a time to plan for the blitz of lead generation post Labor Day. This summer instead of “getting ready for what’s to come”, consider spending a little time repurposing what you’ve already done, in between the down time of course.

As I was getting ready to start building out a few landing pages for some newsletter advertising I decided to Google landing page best practices. As expected, lots of both organic and paid options came up. I noticed Marketo had an ad out there, so I clicked on it. I’ve seen their stuff before and was very impressed, so I thought I’d start here with my landing page inquiry. After a few clicks I got to an eBook – “Building Effective Landing Pages”. This eBook had some great tips that were B2B Lead worthy so I wanted to share and give Marketo a shout out too. You can get this great eBook as well as others at http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/best-practices.php.  For now, here’s a few tips that really stood out:

1. Focus on a single call to action, such as a download or a demo. Distractions kill conversions.
This is really important; offering too much information muddies the waters. You want your call-to-action to stand out. Remember we are not trying to complete a sale via an email program. We are educating our prospects and highlighting pain points in bite size chunks. Warming leads up to better qualify them for Sales.

2. Content – Give it to them straight.

• Make it clear and to the point, but give your prospect a reason to give you his information.
• Setup the problem
• Talk about the solution (your offer)
• Deliver the goods (such as a white paper, video demo or webinar registration)
• And use bullet points – they are easier to read

Emails seem to be most effective when they are 2-3 short paragraphs with a link to a landing page/offer as close to the top as possible. Remember a lot of people view emails in a preview pane. This may be your only opportunity to present your message, so make sure you get straight to the point.

3. Call to Action – Forms – Remember not to ask too many questions up front.
You don’t need everything they first time a prospect engages with you. Remember you are building a relationship. Collect more information as the prospect continues on the journey with you.

4. Confirmation/ Thank Yous – It’s just plain good manners to say thank you. Do you have something else they might be interested in? Make another offer.
I think this might be one of the most important tips on the list. Saying Thank You never goes out of style. And, I agree with Marketo, put another offer out there, see if they bite. Taking you up on a second offer could be a sign of a cold lead moving to warm.

5. Page URLs – The name of the page, along with the rest of the URL path, is weighed fairly heavily. You can use 1024 characters, so you don’t have to be stingy. And use dashes between words, not underscores – search engines like that better.
Marketo example: www.marketo.com/building-effective-landing-pages.html
Don’t forget your Google juice with every landing page you build. Remember to use your PPC keywords here too.

Again, thanks to Marketo for the list of landing page tips. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the list at Marketo’s B2B Marketing Best Practices.

I’ve just emerged from a very difficult web site redesign project with a local agency that hasn’t yet moved into the Web 2.0 world. After living through the ordeal, I thought I would share some of the lessons I learned during the process to help others avoid the same nightmare. (I’m also hoping the process is somewhat cathartic for me too.) Fortunately, most of these signs are easily identifiable during the review stages. If I’ve missed any, please share your ideas.

1. When you ask about multi-browser testing, you’re told “Well I have a Mac and so and so has a PC, so I’m sure we have it covered.” Sadly, there is no one browser standard and today’s websites must look great in the top browsers-Firefox, IE, and Safari, at the very least. That requires a systematic plan for multi-browser testing and attention to detail.
2. There is no upfront information discovery session to determine your goals and objectives for the site. No one asks about the personae of your target audience or your sales process. It is absolutely vital to start your website design with careful consideration of your target audience and how you engage with them. It’s also wise to map your conversion strategy prior to design.
3. When you mention in the first meeting that the site design needs to support your SEO efforts, the instant response is “Oh we don’t do SEO.” Designing a website without considering your future SEO efforts is extremely dangerous. Hard coded H1 tags, too many graphics, failing to redirect valuable inbound links, and a difficult to update site will hamper your efforts.
4. Your agency’s idea of a project plan is a list of dates for a design template, copy drafts and a go-live date. Marketers really need to approach a website design or redesign like a software development process with a solid project plan that takes into consideration the need to iterate and fully test.
5. After several attempts to come up with a design, you have to supply “inspiration” sites to get them on track. Well, this one really should go without saying but sadly it still happens. If you find yourself stuck with an agency that can’t figure out how to design to your satisfaction despite being given brand guidelines, target personae, a site architecture, etc. you can pull the project out of the ditch by giving them some other sites that you like to help them get on track. If the right work has been done upfront to understand your business, however, you shouldn’t have to do this.
6. You realize that when the home page design is reviewed on a normal size monitor, the flash movie takes up the entire monitor screen pushing your core content below the fold. Just like multi-browser testing, monitor size is critical. It is vital that you look at the site on different monitors to ensure visitors can get to the content they need.
7. Once the home page is designed no further design goes into the layout and graphics elements of the subpages. This is like walking into a gorgeous store with a beautiful façade and stepping into a bare warehouse. Put the same care and attention that went into the home page into the subpages to make sure you provide content and next steps for your visitors.
8. There are no status checks or project meetings. In fact, it is extremely difficult to get a return phone call from your project manager. Designing a website is a team effort requiring lots of different team members to contribute. And, that requires coordination and conversation. Make sure your agency schedules frequent project update meetings and discussions to make sure you are on track.
9. You are ready to go live with the new site, your project manager is nowhere to be found leaving you to work with a developer. This is a biggie. Always make sure you have a plan for go-live, a backup plan in case something goes wrong. And, go live in the middle of the night or over the weekend, just in case there are problems no one will see them.
10. You must conform to the agency’s process of logging in all processes, errors, changes and questions to an Extranet with no training on it. You find that you still must post those changes multiple times before resolution. OK, you got me on that one, it was just a rant.

Today’s B2B Marketers need to have a well thought out site architecture, succinct and compelling messages for their target audiences, engaging designs, and an error-free site that supports search engine optimization. And marketers should select their agencies carefully, building in strict contractual demands for things like multi-browser testing, and SEO-friendly structure, clean and well-designed page layout, and tight security lockdowns. Pick your web designer like you would pick a software development shop.

Wow, I feel so much better now.