We’ve just recently sponsored a few events.  Some smaller very targeted B2B Marketing events, some with about 500 attendees like partner events and then a mega show with over 15,000 attendees.  Here’s what I don’t get – why are we standing at our booths with smiles on ready to go each day at 7:30am?  None of the attendees come out that early looking to be pitched.

Here’s a couple of interesting numbers we’ve collected over the last couple of months.

Targeted show of about 250 attendees, morning networking started at 8am, there were about 10 people on the show floor.  Where was everyone else? Unfortunately they were all looking for their morning coffee and stale bagel.

Partner event with over 500 attendees, partner showcase opened at 7:30 (1.5 hours before keynote), we had 4 people stop by, 2 of them looking for breakfast.

This week we’ve been at the big mamma jamma show, over 15,000 attendees.  Show floor opened from 7:30 – 9:00am with keynotes at 9am.  2 people stopped by, that’s right just 2.

So I’m wondering why?  Why do those hosting events use this morning “networking” time as a part of the sales pitch?  Really, as the host of these events does this make you feel like you’re giving us more for our money? I don’t know about you but I’d rather sleep in, get my cup of coffee, enjoy the stale pastries and be “open” for conversations when everyone else is ready to talk….let’s say AFTER 9am.

If you haven’t noticed by now, we think of Mashable as THE source for all things social media (and generally cool tech stuff).  I came across an interesting article on Mashable by Ben Parr yesterday, Twitter’s Value: 5 Eye-Popping Stats.  Check these out:

1. According to PEDC’s numbers, the price of a single share of Twitter has increased by 239,619%, from a measly $0.00667 per share to a much stronger $15.9824.

2. Twitter’s $100 million round is over 1025 times the amount of money they raised in its very first round of funding. In July of 2007, Twitter raised $97,500.

3. In five rounds of funding, Twitter has raised an estimated $153 million (some peg it a few million dollars higher). Since the day of its initial round of funding, Twitter has been given an average of $187,356 per day by its investors.

4. Using that same time frame and its current $1 billion valuation, Twitter’s worth has grown by $1,223,990 per day. If you start with the day of Twitter’s inception (the first tweet from Twitter’s Inventor and Chairman, Jack Dorsey), then Twitter’s worth has grown by around $772,797 per day.

5. Twitter has yet to make a single cent in profit. We’ll let you be the judge of what that means.

Having worked for more than my fair share of start-ups, these are some incredible stats.  The most unbelievable is the last; they have yet to make a dime.  Lots of Twitter Apps are profiting, so if I am an investor in Twitter, I would be saying “Show me the money!” very soon.  And if their investors are not asking that, then wtf?

Because “platforms” just don’t cut it anymore…

Quake in slack-jawed awe at the bombastic extremism that is….

Superplatform On-Demand

From the press release…
The term “Marketing SuperPlatform” was created by Upshot Institute and has gained fast industry acceptance. The term is applied to solutions offering multiple core marketing technologies, accessed as a single application suite.

Wow.  So where do we go from here?  How can anyone possibly top that?  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned for the next level of one-uppedness, which can only spring forth titles such as:

• Colossal Solutions Hyperplexus
• Marketing Methods of Gaussian Proportions
• Orwellian-Scale Mass Marketing

(any resemblance to companies or products, both real or hallucinated, is purely coincidental)

Want to make sure you aren’t filling your news releases with Gobbledygook?  Be sure to use Gobbledygook Grader.

I am always looking for new ways to find qualified leads for sales and will typically try anything once.  Each quarter we try to add something new to the mix.  For next quarter we looked at couple of virtual tradeshows.  We sponsored one last year and found it pretty interesting even though we didn’t get many real leads from it (lots of international visitors).  It was a good place to cut our teeth on something new.

In the last week or so, we were contacted to sponsor another virtual tradeshow being put on by a major industry publication that seems to be in transition with both their events and their publication, moving everything online.  I was intrigued and wanted more details.  I inquired further about this new event to find out what the cost would be and how many/what kind of attendees they expected.  I got back a very interesting reply.  Sponsorships ranged from $10K to $25K.  Little surprised here since this is typically the cost of live events.  I was still interested…then I found out how many people they were expecting.  I figured thousands, right?  Nope, they’re only expecting about 2500 people.  But how targeted are these people visiting?

With this economy travel budgets are definitely being cut but aren’t tradeshow budgets too?  Not sure about you, but it seems like a hefty pricetag for a very broad tradeshow.  I can think of a lot of things to spend $10K – $25K that will result in more targeted, qualified leads.  What about you?

Ah, to be counter-cyclic.  That holy grail of business performance that is coveted by all but achieved by few.   As our economy attempts to recover from the “off the top turnbuckle” piledriver inflicted upon it by our good friends on Wall Street, recent news in the Marketing Automation sector seems to indicate that things are going just fine, thank you, as evidenced by:

Marketo celebrating their One-Year Anniversary with their 160th customer win

Eloqua announcing their $33M year in 2008, up 58% YoY

Impressive on both accounts and hopefully this trend continues during the rebound.  Interestingly, new findings from the recently released Marketing Outlook study conducted by the CMO Council indicate that 50% of marketers are keeping flat or actually increasing their budgets, but as far as investment in Marketing Automation goes:

“…tactical capabilities and point solutions dominate. The top two target areas of investment for 2009 are email marketing (44.9 percent) and online surveys and research (33.2 percent). Only 10.1 percent are investing in master data, 12.8 percent in marketing operational systems, and 9.3 percent in marketing resource or process management solutions.”

This supports a trend that we see quite frequently, which is that although companies are buying Marketing Automation suites, they really end up using them as email marketing tools and only dabble in the other features.  Perhaps as times get better and budgets open up more, we will see a renewed/newfound exploration and usage of the multichannel capabilities that make these suites more powerful than your average load-and-go email blaster.

In the spirit of my previous post about the signal-to-noise ratio element of Twitter, the edgy, thought-provoking site brainz.org has “a completely unscientific (yet accurate) look at social sites” that lives up to its title.  While the article doesn’t dissect the actual content of the various popular social networks, it does provide a candid analysis of the types of people that are hanging out on sites like Myspace versus Twitter versus LinkedIn, etc.  My personal almost-spewed-diet-coke-on-my-monitor favorite is their classification for 12% of Myspace users, which I will leave for your personal perusal.

There is a litany of other “20 reasons for…” and “30 ways to…” analyses on the site in Drudge Report-style simplicity that are pretty interesting as well, including a fun walk down memory lane with “12 Dead Technology Advertisements“, which conjured up memories of the old big three online service providers: Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL.  Ahh, the good old days.

I’m not a marketing or sales guy per se so please help me understand something here.

As the classic saying goes, “I know at least half of my data is bad…I just don’t know which half”.
Marketing Sherpa tells us that contact data degrades at a rate of 2.1% per month (and it’s probably gone up  substantially given the current rate of job loss), it’s easy to see how this is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having said all that, does it matter you could be sitting on piles of dirty data?

Contact data cleanup seems to experience a run-up of demand at the end of the year when marketers have just enough budget to burn on something small to mid-sized but not enough to do anything substantial with.  Or at least this is what we saw. In fact, we cleaned up some of our own CRM data in December as well.

But come the turn of the new year and new budget, the psychology of “new” is the all the rage.  Sales reps are innately in perpetual want for new leads, but as we say around here, it seems most marketing and sales teams would rather keep building new add-on rooms to their houses than spend the money to fix the basement that is flooded with sewage.

So what is the psychology behind using what you have vs. buying something new?  Is it simply fueled by an unquenchable thirst for “new, new, new” (and the perception thereof)?  Or do you have a more systematic approach to if and when you elect to use what you have vs. buy new stuff?

Is it the same mentality of buying something that is on sale even if you don’t really need it?

I just don’t get it.

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.

Here on The B2B Lead we declared Barack Obama (of course now President Obama) to be Marketer of the Year (and Advertising Age had something to say about that too) on November 5th, after winning the presidency.  He and his team had a marketing strategy unlike any other before him.  They had a clearly defined message of Change and targeted that message to the people by speaking to them in a way and through a forum they already understood.  He understood the power of viral marketing and social media and embraced it, using it to his advantage.  I believe this played a major role in him first winning the democratic nomination and ultimately the presidency.

My question now is – will he continue?  He united many Americans under the promise of Change and reached out to them where they were to deliver his message.  By having a presence on many social networking sites, he seemed accessible, a people’s politician.  I believe that his presidency will be strongest if he continues to communicate with the people the way he did during his campaign.  Don’t we all want a people’s president?

But it seems since the campaign ended, there is little to no involvement in the same social sites that were instrumental in getting Obama elected.  For example, his LinkedIn profile still lists him as US Senator and Presidential Candidate.  His Facebook page still has over 3.8 million supporters and over 500,000 wall posts but little to no interaction from Obama or his team.  His supporters seem to still be interacting on Facebook but without much from the big guy himself.

What Obama did do after the election is create change.gov.  This site was set up to allow Americans “opportunities to participate in redefining our government.”  The site did offer some neat opportunities for Americans to give feedback and their opinions for where the country should be headed.  Unfortunately, as of today, the site has been taken down and directs you to instead visit whitehouse.gov.

The new whitehouse.gov includes a blog as well as the President’s soon to come weekly video addresses (past Presidents did these too, in case you didn’t know, but have always been on the radio).  The first blog post comes from Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House.  It is very informative and gives you an idea of what to expect from the new administration.  I felt the most notable was that they “will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”  You can also sign up for email updates from the President.

The new website went up exactly at 12:01pm today so not everything has been completely fleshed out.  Phillips wrote, “We’d also like to hear from you — what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know. Like the transition website and the campaign’s before that, this online community will continue to be a work in progress as we develop new features and content for you. So thanks in advance for your patience and for your feedback.”

I am looking forward to seeing what else they add.  I hope there is continued involvement in the social networking sites that contributed to Obama being elected to the White House.  Or is his Facebook profile now a matter of national security?

Check out this photo – It’s our VP of Products, Jason Morio, at his sophomore prom in 1991. Someone posted this picture on their Facebook page, tagged Jason and an update was sent to his (Jason’s) friends. Before Jason got back to Facebook the photo had spread like wildfire here at work. So while this provided us with a lot of good laughs, it made me think…

What about those Spring Break 1988 pictures? How about the ones of you when you weighed 300 lbs.? Or even better, the pictures from your friend’s bachelor party? You know the ones.   You thought these old pictures were buried in a box somewhere for no one to ever see again.

With social technologies taking off they way they are, how are you to prevent your old, maybe not to proud of, photos from getting out there?

Looks like you can’t anymore.

You can clearly see why this one falls in the WTF category – what do you think? And how do we as professionals ensure we aren’t mixing up our personal and professional lives? And not just today’s personal life but our lives back when we were younger and carefree?  Is it even possible anymore?