In a good example of “better late than never,” LinkedIn finally added group discussion functionality to its professional networking network. Here on The B2B Lead I wrote about how much I was looking forward to LinkedIn going social and why I believe it will be so important for B2B marketers.

While commenters on the TechCrunch blog were quick to cry “inadequate,” we at BreakingPoint are happy with the early results and look forward to using the functionality to grow the group and make new connections. BreakingPoint’s Director of Marketing and Engage in PR blogger Kyle Flaherty got the party started right away in the BreakingPoint Application, Network Performance & Security Testing group. He produced this handy video tour of the new features.

So those are the new features. What are the benefits? Well, for week one, I can sum it up with the words: connections, market research, and web traffic. While our LinkedIn group is still very new, membership has grown to 60+ qualified professionals interested in testing tools. We’ve already connected with several influential buyers, shared helpful resources, conducted research, and benefited from a small burst of web traffic. LinkedIn jumped into our top 10 web site traffic referrers in the week following the introduction of user discussions. Notice I didn’t mention closed a few deals?

On the Lessons Learned front, I advise readers of The B2B Lead to set up the rules for behavior on the group right away. Kyle clearly established our group as a Sales- and Marketing-free zone after one newbie launched into a blatant sales pitch. Blasphemy, you say? This is The B2B Lead, after all. Why create a group at all if you aren’t going to use it to market to your customers?

If you are asking yourself these questions, then I recommend you read more of Kyle’s blog. While I sometime tease Kyle about being a social media purist (OK, I actually use the word “boy scout”), Kyle is a perfect example of how to build relationships with potential customers and the community at large by actually engaging in online conversations, providing value, and earning trust. In a recent post he wrote called “Seeking Inspiration” Kyle wrote:

“Inspiration comes down to a measure of trust, which comes from a solidly built relationship.  The same goes for your marketing.  A trusted brand has an easier time inspiring because they have created a relationship with you over a period of time. When a company enters social media they, of course, need a strategy, but the idea of building trust must be in conjunction with building relationships.”

And, when Marketers take this approach, the benefits will follow. If you are looking for real tangible ideas for leveraging social media and want to see exactly how serving your community can deliver big results, have a look at Kyle’s 3 part case study on BreakingPoint’s social media programs.

Here on The B2B Lead I’ll be posting about how we integrated social media into our overall programs along with our laser-targeted direct outreach. Look forward to your first hand experiences with LinkedIn and other community building efforts. Do tell.

This chapter couldn’t have come at a better time.  Leigh Anne and I were just talking about this.  We need to update our ‘News’ page on our site.  It feels so old school and is really due a 2.0 update.

David opens the chapter with a very important message – “…all kinds of people visit your online media room, not just journalists.  Your buyers are snooping around your organization by visiting media pages on your Web site.  Your current customers, partners, investors, suppliers and employees all visit those pages.”  He goes on to say, people go to the online media room to know what’s current about the organization.  I totally agree.  If there’s no updated news does that mean the company isn’t doing well or is stagnant?  Maybe.

As we are about to take on a site overhaul, here’s some of the best practices David suggests that we’ll be implementing:

• Needs Analysis – Before the reconstruction begins we’ll be identifying persona of the people visiting this new media room.  Once identified we will then be sure to include content that meets the needs of each persona.
• Optimized news releases for searching and browsing – gone are the days of the aged list of press release headlines.  When updating we must always consider SEO best practices.  This spot has a wealth of good information, we’ll be sure to leverage this.
• Background Information that Helps Journalists Write Stories – This is often called a press kit and typically includes – company history, executive bios, investor profiles, board of directors, product and service information, analysts information/coverage and links to recent media coverage.
• Multimedia content – some like to listen, some like to read, some like to watch and listen.  We want to make sure we have what their looking for.
• List Executive appearances, conferences and tradeshow participation – we want to be sure the journalists know where we’ve been, where we’re at and where we’re going.
• Don’t forget the bloggers – all news releases going forward will include bloggers distribution lists as well.
• Avoid Jargon, Acronyms and Industry Speak – we’ve covered this in an earlier chapter.  Everyone sees through it and would appreciate us all just speaking in common terms we all understand.

Are we forgetting anything here?  All of these ideas are great, right?  For more ideas for a great media room, check out Hubspot’s Press Room.

“Great Web content is about your buyers, not about you.”  I think David really hits the nail on the head with that line.  The goal of your website is probably not to just be an online brochure but so many sites are just that.  Instead it should be a place for buyers to: find answers to their questions quickly and easily, interact with you and find out how your solution can solve their problems.  Anyone looking to update their company website should ask themselves the following questions:

• Who are my buyer personas? Have I created easy to find, targeted content for each?
• How can I deliver my content in multiple media to accommodate my buyers’ preferred media and learning styles?
• How can I segment my content to deliver targeted new content via RSS?
• Is my web navigation organized using my buyers’/customers’ language?
• Does my offline content match my online content?
• Have I created a path for each buyer persona on my Web site?
• Does my site’s personality match my company’s personality and do my buyers respond well to it?
• Can I add interactive content to my Web site?
• Do I offer content for buyers in every stage of the buying cycle?
• Do I provide content to my current customers?
• Is my content easily available to go viral?

These questions should help you to organize and create content when redesigning your site.  Please do keep in mind that there are definite SEO implications to be factored in to a full scale site re-design.

What else do you consider when doing a re-design?

Next week we will cover chapters 14-16 on How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly, The Online Media Room and The New Rules for Reaching the Media.

Thinking about how to make the biggest splash with your next mega-launch? Think again. Emerging companies are getting smarter about how they “launch” and opting for a slower community building process that takes place over the course of months. Turns out it is not only less expensive but it proves to be more valuable over the long term.

The process involves getting out months ahead of your product availability and building relationships with key influencers, contributing relevant valuable content to your market and attracting a loyal following with a blog or community. We did something like this at BreakingPoint, although it happened in a far more condensed time frame, and it has indeed been very valuable for reaching our hyper-niche market.

There’s been lots of controversy on the topic of launching at Tech Crunch 50 vs. DEMO lately. Robert Scoble triggered a firestorm of commentary when he posted a blog series about how “companies launching at DEMO suck”. (Why is it that blog posts that include the word “suck” always generate so much buzz?) This triggered Paul May of BuzzStream to blog about the economics of launching a startup at TechCrunch 50 or Demo. According to Paul:

“The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin.  Let’s look at an example.  My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago.  In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:

1. Devote 80 hours to prep time.  At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
2. Speaking coach – $5K
3. Travel – three nights for three people – $6K
4. PR rep – $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
5. Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. – $3K to $5K”

Wow, that’s a hefty price tag for a startup—bootstrapped or funded. Years ago when I launched a startup at Demo, it was well worth that investment. Why? Those were the early Internet Boom days when startups had to shell out $30,000 to $50,000 per month in retainers to PR agencies. We netted 17 pieces of very high profile coverage from our Demo participation in major trade publications and even The Washington Post. It was such a success that I actually considered going this year with BreakingPoint.

Today, however, most of those publications are no longer around—at least in print. Buyers get their information in different ways and focusing your efforts on laser targeted database marketing combined with a strong push for building a community using social media are the keys to success for startups. If you have a B2C play, those events may make sense for you. But for us, I had to pass.

So, back to the topic at hand: launching your company online. There’s absolutely no reason to wait until you have a product to launch to get started. Why not start engaging with your customers now? Reach out and conduct a little market research. Build tight relationships and a nice following for your blog. Funnel your money into building a detailed, role-based database of your target market. Hire an intern to discover the top thought leaders and start building tight relationships by interacting with them in social media circles.  Start generating a slew of inbound links so that you will rank at the top of the search engines when you introduce your product or service. The possibilities are endless.

“What are your organization’s goals?” For most B2B marketers the answer is increasing revenue. David says that leads and website visitors are the wrong things to focus on. I have to disagree. At ReachForce, we are all striving towards the same goals (proven by the fact that all of our bonuses are tied to revenue and bookings goals). But, each department sort of reverse engineers what they individually have to achieve in order to meet those goals. We measure everything, so I know exactly how many new leads need to be delivered to sales in order to for them to reach their bookings numbers. I cannot make a sale or generate revenue directly, so I have to focus on goals I can achieve.

I think a great question you have to ask is “what is the goal of my website.” I touched on this some in my last post, but it is even more relevant for this chapter. Is the goal of your website to:

• educate buyers about your products or services?
• get buyers to download a white paper, eBook, webcast, etc?
• get buyers to contact you?
• get buyers to request a demo?

Most executives will say that they want all of the above. In my opinion, you can’t have it all for every persona. Your website should lead buyers down a path. The better goal may be that you have a different goal for each persona. That way your website is reaching all of these goals but each persona is traveling down the best path for them. Now I would love to tell you to check out the ReachForce website as a great example, but I don’t think that it is. Check back in a few weeks though because we are making lots of changes in this direction.

David spends a lot of this chapter talking about personas. Our own Pam O’Neal has blogged about personas before. I find that the best way for me to think about my different buyer personas is defining the different members of the decision making unit. I already segment my database that way and have different offers for different roles, shouldn’t my website be the same?

Anyone had any success using personas to drive their web design?

In this chapter, I didn’t really feel like David was talking to me. He gave great examples of a non-profit who used their website to spread their ideas and increase awareness as well as a large company who has policies and procedures to make sure all of their business units’ websites are aligned. And while I absolutely agree that content is key, I could not really relate to his case studies. Maybe I am just lucky that I work at a small company where I, as a marketer, am in charge of our website. I am amazed that I still meet marketers who work for much larger companies than ours and have no control over their website. I have to ask that company, “What is the goal of your website?” Because if the answer is to reach buyers, marketing should be the ones creating the content.

As I myself am heading towards a redesign I am asking the same question. We have so much content that we could put out there but the way we organize it varies based on our goals. Also something that David did not touch on is that great content leads to better SEO. So, if one of your goals is to improve SEO, should you put your best content behind forms? This is a battle I face everyday. Is it more important to get your content out there or know who is downloading it?

Next week we will be discussing chapters 10 and 11 on Building your Marketing and PR Plan and Online Thought Leadership.

Google has captured the hearts and minds of most of the civilized world, so the company really doesn’t need to advertise. Although I, for one, wouldn’t mind if Google would reach out and update me on their latest “toys.” So, just what would a television ad for Google look like? Check out these hysterically funny YouTube videos produced by The Vacationeers, here is Part 1 of “The Googling” be sure to check the entire series.

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.

Happy Birthday to The B2B Lead! Last Friday, The B2B Lead turned 1. We celebrated with the entire ReachForce team and threw a little party as you can see in the pics. We launched The B2B Lead a year ago with hopes of delivering great content to our prospects, customers and other smart marketers but had no expectation on what it would deliver back to us. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we have learned so much from our readers and hope that they are learning just as much from us. We are proud to have brought you now over 140 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips. I hope you will keep coming back for more.

Here are some of the best posts from the past year:

• Are You a Viral VIP? – The Definitive Guide to Viral Video Success
• Don’t Forget About Customer Marketing
• Lead Generation Using Email Marketing
• Using Surveys for Lead Scoring
• How to Get 3,190 People to Watch a Demo at a Tradeshow
• 10 Signs You Picked the Wrong Web Design Agency – Marketing WTF?
• Invest in the Right Tools to Track the Metrics That Matter
• Even Hitler Got Twitter – Marketing WTF?
• Trade Shows – Branding or Demand Gen or Waste of Time and Money?

You can also download 101 Sales and Marketing Tips from The B2B Lead. The first two volumes have been released with 3 more coming soon. The first two volumes cover the best tips on Online Marketing and Direct Marketing. I hope you will stay tuned to see what we will bring you next!

How many B2BLead readers are bloggers? Do you have a corporate or company sponsored blog? If so, do you have set goals for the blog?

Chapter 4 is all about blogging. David (I feel like we are virtual friends now, so I’m referring to him by his first name) talks about the history of blogs and outlines a few different ways to use them. In this chapter David tells a story of Alacra, a company that creates online technology and services for financial institutions. The CEO of Alacra said and I absolutely echo the thought, “We didn’t know what would happen, but we wanted to try it.”

This week The B2B Lead turns a year old. In fact, we’re having a birthday party to celebrate. We’ll be sure to share the pictures later this week. Anyway, back to the book…

When we were putting together our ideas for what the B2BLead would be we knew we wanted a place where we could interact with customers and prospects about their day to day jobs as Marketers. This was not going to be a place for ReachForce promotion (although I do try and slip it in every once in awhile). Our goal was to serve up bite size tips and tricks that could be used in our real jobs.

Still not sure how this was going to increase ReachForce awareness or drive more leads, we jumped in with both feet. And much to my surprise, The B2B Lead has taken off. Here’s a few exciting things that have happened to us since launching the blog –

• We have connected with key industry influencers that we’d been trying to reach for over a year.
• We are able to engage with and leverage our partners via joint thought leadership
• One of our tips was picked up for MarketingProfs newsletter (we didn’t pay for this)
• A post about us was ranked #1 on Sphinn
• Provided us an opportunity to be seen as thought leaders in our industry
• As bloggers, we’re building out a Twitter following
• The B2B Lead was added to Guy Kawasaki’s Marketing Alltop list
• Through this book club, David Meerman Scott now knows who we are

In addition to the external PR, we felt like we’re putting great content out on The B2B Lead and we wanted to be able to leverage it in different ways. We’ve now also developed programs around repurposing the stuff out there. Here’s a few examples of what we’re doing.

• We use The B2B Lead content for our lead generation programs.
• We use blog content in our newsletter.
• The blog is now also integrated with other programs, both lead generation and PR.
• We now get net new leads every week from the blog.

Since we tend to share Tips on The B2B Lead, here are a few tips that have contributed to our success.

• Don’t use your blog as another version of your website or a sales pitch.
• Don’t just post boring press releases.
• Humanize your authors, provide some color around them, their experience, what they are going to contribute, etc.
• Good content will take you a long way.
• We try to post at least 3 times a week (usually more like 5 or 6). We don’t want people to forget about us.
• Linking is REALLY important.
• Set goals for the blog and stick to them.
• Don’t be everything to everyone. Know your audience and speak to their needs. It is better to have the right readers rather then just a lot of readers.

If you’ve got a blog, how are you using it? Any big successes you’d like to share?