The B2B Lead » Social Media

B2B Lead Gen Low Down: Gist

Lauren Kincke — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:09:46 +0000

As we run across cool companies that are trying to add value to today’s B2B sales and marketing teams we want to be sure and share them with our B2B Lead readers. Here’s another great idea…

Have you heard of Gist? If not, you should check it out. It might just be the tool your sales and telesales teams have been waiting on!

Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people (prospects) and companies.

Gist enables your sales team to build their ‘network’ from lists of contacts across a variety of sources from LinkedIn, salesforce.com, Outlook, Gmail (or any email service that supports IMAP), Facebook, Twitter to any CSV file. Then, it sets up a Dashboard view of all the “news” going on within your network. Once this is all set up your sales team can prioritize their contacts and outreach (or Gist can do it) based on companies/prospects/people you want to watch.

Something new is going up on the web every second of the day. Can you imagine the efficiencies with just one dashboard of all of these relevant updates?

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LinkedIn for Lead Generation – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #253

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:41:27 +0000

MarketingSherpa just came out with a very interesting how-to on using LinkedIn for lead generation. While most of us have a profile, many marketers are unsure on how to use this new channel as a lead source. MarketingSherpa interviewed Jason Rushin, Director, Marketing at Quantivo on his process and found 6 lessons that all B2B marketers can learn from.

Here are some of highlights from the article:

Lesson #1. Target groups by activity level, not just size

For each group, Rushin spent 15 or 20 minutes reading through recent posts to assess group members’ interest areas, and how much activity each post generated. In the end, he identified 17 groups that matched his needs.

Lesson #2. Join groups under an individual name, not a company identity

Social media is a two-way channel, which makes it especially important to assign a point-person to oversee your social media initiatives, establish themselves as a community member, and respond to feedback.

Lesson #3. Place collateral in the context of a conversation

Every time the team had a new piece of collateral to promote — such as a webinar or a white paper — Rushin looked for opportunities to share that information with the team’s LinkedIn groups.

- For example, when promoting a white paper, he would write a message to the group announcing the new title, sharing a link, and asking group members to provide feedback on the white paper itself.

Lesson #4. Response rate is highly variable

By participating in several groups, Rushin quickly saw that response to his lead-generation offers (in the form of landing page registrations) was highly variable. Each group has its own characteristics and dynamics, which make some white paper or webinar offers highly successful and others relative duds.

Testing content offerings among different groups is essential. Beyond that, Rushin also saw two factors that affected response rate:

- Placement in the weekly or daily update newsletters

- White paper or webinar topic

Lesson #5. Create social media-specific landing pages

Rather than taking LinkedIn members to a standard landing page, Rushin created landing pages that specifically addressed the LinkedIn audience.

The tactic did not require a complete landing page redesign. Instead, the team modified the landing page text to create continuity for visitors arriving from LinkedIn, using phrases such as: “Thank you for your interest in this discussion”

Lesson #6. Quality can be an issue with leads from LinkedIn

To discourage job-seekers, the team changed its registration form to require prospects to use an email address from a company domain — forbidding the use of free email accounts such as Yahoo! or Gmail. The technique backfired, though, when LinkedIn members began complaining to Rushin (and sometimes to their Twitter followers) that the company was preventing unemployed people or independent consultants from viewing their thought-leadership content.

Rather than risk alienating LinkedIn members, you may have to rely on inside sales follow-up or further nurturing to eliminate non-qualified leads from your marketing funnel.

Ultimately lead generation on LinkedIn is the same as any other lead gen channel. Be targeted, stay relevant to your audience, measure everything you can and always go for quality over quantity of leads.

The entire article is open to non-MarketingSherpa members until August 5th, be sure to check it out.

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Social Media Marketing Forecast Looks Sunny

Jason Morio — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:37:47 +0000

Forrester, via Mashable, reports that $716 million will be spent on the social media marketing this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. Granted, it doesn’t appear to break down this forecast by B2B and B2C, but it’s pretty staggering any way you cut it. Another interesting comparison stated in the article:

“At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).”

I’m a firm believer that email marketing will see its effectiveness reduced to the point of near-extinction within the next 5 years, due in part to social media as well as increasing proliferation of anti-spam technologies that will drive email into an almost completely whitelisted experience. But it’s still unclear how all this social marketing spend is going to manifest itself. The costs and ROI of social media are poorly understood at this point, especially with virtually all the tools and services being free. I’m sure we’ll see more of this develop very soon.

In the meantime, congratulations to CoTweet who closed their Series A round of funding yesterday. Good to see some of this activity happening in that booming hotbed of technology (and the town I grew up in), Hershey, Pennsylvania.

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Twitter Tools for Managing Followers – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip#252

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:22:50 +0000

Now that most of us having been using Twitter for a while, you might have looked at your followers and those you follow and thought to yourself “who are these people”. I came across a great article by Josh Catone, “10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps.” With so many Twitter apps out there, Josh organizes the best ones to manage your Twitter followers:

Find Out Who You’re Following

1. Twitter Grader – Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every user you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them. To me this seems a little tedious but the Twitter Elite tab is very interesting. You can even check out the top Twitter users in your city or state.

2. Twinfluence – Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow. It is kinda like having the biggest nerd in school do your homework for you. Again this one can be a bit tedious to analyze each person you follow.

3. Tweetcloud – One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

I am sensing a opportunity here. All of these apps are great but I don’t have time to look at each person I follow individually. Do you?

Find Your Friends

4. Twitter Karma – Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.

5. Friend or Follow – Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.

6. Qwitter – Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).

UPDATE: We’ve had some reports that Qwitter hasn’t been as reliable lately as it had been in the past. An alternative service that also notifies you when you lose a follower is Twitterless. If you really want to keep on top of when your followers jump ship, it might be a good idea to sign up for both services to make sure you have all your bases covered.

Get Rid of Inactives

7. Nest.Unclutterer – Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.

8. Twitoria – Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.

Manage it All

9. TweetSum – TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (”Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.

10. Tweepler – Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.

I personally like to follow lots of people and then create a group on my TweetDeck that lets me pick the people I want to make sure to pay attention to. Will you make it into my Awesome Marketers group?

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Whitepaper downloads on LinkedIn? Leads you’re willing to pay for?

Amy Hawthorne — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:16:46 +0000

LinkedIn seems to be the most commonly used social network amongst most B2B Marketers. Or at least the one where people seem to be seeing real results. Today we’re able to participate in groups with those we have things in common with, answer questions, and look up contacts/prospects and see how many connections away we are. To date there has been no real way for Marketers to collect leads in a systematic way. Well, it looks like this is changing.

Yesterday, LinkedIn CEO sent out a tweet saying he just downloaded his first whitepaper from LinkedIn.

This new feature doesn’t seem to be available to everyone yet but here’s what we do know:

There will be a form to collect info. from those that download
Looks like costs will range from $40 – $100 per lead
LinkedIn users will not have to pay for whitepapers
Whitepaper ads will can be targeted by title and industry
Content is still king here. People are only going to download interesting content that provides value.
Whitepaper titles are going to be even more important. It’s what’s going to catch your target’s eye.
When someone downloads a form, they are basically opting in for follow up communications.
In addition to the targeted advertising, there will be a whitepaper directory for LinkedIn members to search for relevant content.

Here’s another example of how B2B Marketers are able to mix their social media with direct lead generation. Once this is rolled out, I think we’ll give it a try. How about you?

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10 Things to Consider When Creating a Social Media Policy – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #249

Amy Hawthorne — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:59:30 +0000

One of my favorite social media news sites, Mashable, had a great post a couple of weeks ago worthy of sharing with our readers. Sharlyn Lauby, the post author and president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) put together a list of 10 things to consider when creating a social media policy.

Leigh Anne and I try to stay pretty active out in the new social world and we often get asked if we have a social media policy here at ReachForce. We don’t have one, but as we continue to grow our team we might consider it in the future.

Sharlyn says, “Whether you’re writing your social media policy from the get-go, or letting it develop organically in reaction to situations as they arise, here are 10 things you should definitely consider. These 10 tips will help you steer clear of pitfalls and allow you to focus on what’s important: engaging the customer.”

Introduce the purpose of social media for your organization- focus on the things that employees CAN DO rather than what they can’t do. it’s all about leveraging the positive to get people to engage and bring value to your social media efforts.
Be responsible for what you write – Your team needs to take responsibility for what they write, and exercise good judgment and common sense. You’d think this is obvious, but better safe than sorry, right?
Be authentic – Include your name and, when appropriate, your company name and your title. People want to interact with other people in the social world, not business (aka sales people). Here at ReachForce, when we’re participating in the social world, instead of including our ReachForce URL, we include a link back here, to the The B2B Lead. We figure it’s more comfortable and gives our audience and followers a better snapshot of who we are personally.
Consider your audience -When you’re out and about remember that your readers could include current customers, potential customers, as well as current/past/future employees, your boss, your board members, and of course your mom. Consider that before you publish and make sure you aren’t alienating any of those groups.
Exercise good judgment – Refrain from comments that can be interpreted as slurs, demeaning, inflammatory, etc. You’d think this was obvious too but remember if it ends up on the internet someone will find it.
Understand the concept of community – The essence of community is the idea that it exists so that you can support others and they, in turn, can support you. You need to learn how to balance personal and professional information, and the important role that transparency plays in building a community.
Respect copyrights and fair use – This should be a no-brainer, but just in case: always give people proper credit for their work, and make sure you have the right to use something with attribution before you publish. i.e. These tips come from Sharlyn Lauby via Mashable.
Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info - Transparency doesn’t give employees free rein to share just anything. Common sense here please, it could cost you your job.
Bring value – share relevant activities or news with your community, fellow bloggers and other social media followers. Do your customers really care what you had for lunch? I doubt it.
Productivity matters – But, your social media usage won’t get you very far if you don’t execute on the core competencies of your business. Remember that in order for your social media endeavors to be successful, you need to find the right balance between social media and other work.

Looking for a sample policy? IBM has published their social media guidelines publicly for anyone to read. It’s a great policy, though rather long.

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Twittering Like a Journalist – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #246

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:00:04 +0000

I came across a great post by Ann Handley on Mashable, “Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School.” She goes over 8 mantras she learned in journalism school and how they apply to Twitter:

1. Make every word count

In traditional news journalism, and on Twitter, you only have so much space. On Twitter, of course, it’s a mere 140 characters. As I learned in journalism school, writing short is a lot harder than it looks. It’s a lot more work to choose your words wisely, and be concise, than it is to ramble on luxuriously.
Keeping a tweet really short – like close to 85-100 characters – also makes your tweet more “Retweet Friendly,” since it allows a little wiggle room for forwarding.

2. Keep it simple

The best news reporters tell a story simply and clearly. Similarly, don’t try to cram too much information into a single tweet. On Twitter, less is often more.
Also: Link directly to blogs or other online sources, and always link to the full story, rather than trying to juice up page views by, for example, linking to the home page. Shorten URLs through bit.ly or similar services. Most Twitter clients will usually condense your links, but I like bit.ly’s rich click-through and retweet stats.
Finally, avoid the temptation to fit more into a tweet by the liberal use of abbreviations. Such shorthand might maximize your character count, but they make your tweet read like a teenager’s text message.

3. Provide context

News reporters do this by plugging in some of the back story on any given news item. On Twitter, offer context by using keywords and hashtags, when appropriate, so that readers can more easily get the gist of a conversation, thread, or topic.

4. Lead with the good stuff

In journalism, the “inverted pyramid” style places the most important information at the top of any story, and then the ensuing narrative explains and expands on it. In other words, the first paragraph should contain enough information to give the reader a solid overview of the entire story. Approach sharing links or information on Twitter in a similar manner, giving the strongest and most compelling bit in the tweet, and then link to the rest of the story elsewhere.

5. Write killer headlines

Headlines “sell” a news story or a blog post much like a great tweet invites a reader to click. Author tweets that are short, punchy, and are compelling, either because they tell the reader precisely what you’re offering (”How to…” or “27 Ways…”) or because they’re clever or funny.

This applies to so much for B2B marketers – subject lines, blog posts titles, Press Release headlines, etc.

6. Graphics expand on the story

A good image or graphic complements a news story. Similarly, a picture on Twitter tells a story with far more impact.

7. People make things interesting

News reporters often focus on how people are affected by a given situation or event. On Twitter, it’s also the people that keep it interesting. That means talking to (or “@ing”) folks liberally, as well as adopting a conversational tone and community spirit.

And this applies even when you are representing a brand. This can be hard for B2B Marketers to remember but never forget that people buy from people. Personal outreach from your brand makes people feel like they are really connecting to someone.

8. Consider the reader

Journalists spend a lot of time coming up with the right angle for a story. On Twitter, be similarly thoughtful in your approach. The immediacy of Twitter might tempt you to dash off a tweet with little forethought. But if you respect your audience of followers similar to the way journalists consider their readers, you’ll spend more time thinking about what to tweet, than you will actually doing it. Believe me, your followers will appreciate your efforts.

A good question to ask yourself before you tweet – “Will anyone care?” If it is what you ate for lunch, probably not. If you ate the best buger of your life, maybe so, of course not if all of your followers are vegitarian.

For examples of each mantra be sure to check out the full article.

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Retweeting to Build Your Following and Your Brand – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #245

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:20:24 +0000

Notice: If you are a professional Twitter user, you probably already know this tip so please take a minute to share your favorite Twitter tip with The B2B Lead followers.

Now for those just getting started on Twitter, here’s a simple tip on retweeting.

When you are just getting started on Twitter, building your following and having quality tweets are two of the biggest challenges. A great way to solve both is retweeting. See a great tweet? See something interesting worthy of sharing? Think that your followers would be interested in it, retweet it!

Proper Twitter etiquette dictates that you begin your tweet with RT followed by the original tweeters handle. Example: RT @ReachForce: Building a Sales Enablement Playbook Part 1 – http://tinyurl.com/qotz4f.

When you retweet someone else, they are likely to start following you and there is a good chance they will retweet you in the future. When you are retweeted, your message is now seen by a new audience also creating a situation where you could gain more followers and build your personal brand.

Looking for a specific topic to tweet about? Try searching for it on Twitter first. If it is a hot topic, you might see a few people with similar tweets. Be selective about who you retweet when building your lead generation Twitter brand. Think thought leaders in your industry, prospective customers, customers and partners. This will help with general awareness as well as help demostrate your participation and thoughts on the topic.

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Tips for Follow-up on B2B Content Offers – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #244

Amy Hawthorne — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:21:29 +0000

Here at ReachForce we use a lot of best practice type content offers as part of our multi-touch outbound marketing programs. I’ve heard my sales team say more than a couple of times that they don’t seem to get a lot of traction with people from the content downloads. Even with prompt follow up, nothing.

After giving it some thought, I came to the conclusion that either people downloading content are in an education phase and aren’t ready to speak to a sales rep. or that these people consume information in a way that does not involve interaction…yet. Neither of these conclusions provided a solution though.

Then I ran across this blog post, Forgettable Follow-up on B2B Content Offers, from Ardath Albee at The Customer Collective. This one is a MUST read for all sales and marketing teams. Here are some of the highlights:

Here are some examples of how B2B follow-up becomes forgettable:

Example:
[Company] Hello, This is Sam from [Company]. I noticed you downloaded our paper on whiz bang issue 57 and I’m interested in helping learn more about how we can help solve your problem.
[Prospect] I’m just researching.
[Company] Well, do you have a project planned that we can discuss?
[Prospect] No, I’m just doing some research. [I knew I shouldn't have answered the phone.]
[Company] Okay, I’m going to send you some product information so you’ll have it on file for when you need it.
[Prospect] Thanks. You have a nice day. [click, buzz, delete]

Example:
Email follow-up message – Thank you for requesting the [Recognizable Name] white paper. As you may know, [Our Company] is a leader in [whiz bang whatever] and we sponsored the white paper. I’d look forward to learning what initiatives you’re working on to see if [Our Solution] is a fit. I’d like to schedule a fifteen minute call to discuss your goals in [whiz bang whatever]. Please let me know when is a convenient time to talk.

This is such a waste of time. Approaches like these do absolutely nothing to elevate your company’s trust level or credibility. Instead, you’re seen as self-serving and, ultimately, forgettable.

Now you need to give them a reason for continued involvement. Here are some ideas on how to improve the response to your follow-up:

Have a business reason for the follow-up. Just touching base isn’t good enough.

Have an additional offer ready that builds on their expressed interest. An exclusive report, an article not publicly available, an invitation to a webinar on a related topic, etc.

Know exactly what they downloaded and be specific to help them make the connection. People are busy. They download a lot of things. Expecting them to remember yours when you call/email out of the blue is just silly. If your follow-up is in relation to content you sponsored, they likely downloaded it because of the source, not you. So have something compelling to say if you want their interest to transfer to you.

Follow-up promptly. Waiting a month means you’re likely forgotten and someone else now has their attention.

DO NOT:

Ask them to educate you.

Put them on the spot.

Be ignorant of the interaction that prompted the follow-up.

Push product information on them. Lead with “blah, blah, blah” about your company

Use buzz words and jargon in the description of your company.

Forget to use a value proposition for the communication that’s all about them, not you. The key is to get the prospect to take another step with you because you’ve got something valuable to say or share that they need to know.

After reading Ardath’s post (which I again recommend reading the entire thing, there are more examples and tips) I immediately forwarded it to my sales team and I’m joining their weekly meeting today to make sure everyone “gets it”.

We write new content for many reasons but our #1 reason is to support lead generation programs that convert leads. Hopefully this helps and we see more content download leads in our opportunity funnel.

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Time for Summer School – Learn How to Move Leads Through the Funnel Faster

Suaad Sait — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:55:54 +0000

June is a big month. School is coming to an end, it’s the beginning of summer and vacation season is in full swing. For many businesses, June marks the end of the first half of the year and a slow couple of upcoming months.

With all of the summer distractions lead generation teams must have a plan to stand out in the crowd and be able to demonstrate value clearly and quickly. To help you jumpstart your thinking about your marketing and sales aligned programs and initiatives we’ve got 2 upcoming events you won’t want to miss.

June 4th, 3pm EDT – Join ReachForce and MathMarketing for a webinar to learn 3 strategies to better align Marketing and Sales teams to create a funnel that delivers.

We’ll also share a few surprising do’s and don’ts that debunk the classic understanding of the roles of Sales and Marketing. Things like: DON’T measure salespeople on proposals closed. Surprised? We were too.

Join us on June 4th at 3pm EDT to find out why successful companies DON’T use this as a metric and have increased growth as a result. Register Now

Then we’ll be in San Mateo on June 23rd -24th with Hugh Macfarlane, author of The Leaky Funnel, for a 2-day Funnel Academy. This 2-day in-person event will explore the following topics:

Selecting a strategy based on the way your markets buy
Aligning and allocating resources for multiple markets
The buyer’s journey – understanding how buy and creating your strategy around your buyers
How to build a model funnel and resolve disconnects
How to plan campaigns that move buyers

Click here to learn more and to register.

For many businesses, the upcoming summer months can feel like they drag on forever. This summer use this time to set up for bigger success in 2009.

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