Try saying that five times really fast!  If you’re like us and are running a blog, you’re always trying to find new ways to get the word out to drive more traffic your way.  One interesting method that we are partaking in is to create widgets for your blog.  These widgets are little web-based trinkets that make your blog content available for people to access through popular “start pages”, such as Google IG, Pageflakes, and my personal favorite, Netvibes.

It’s really easy to create one and there are a number of services out there that will walk you through the process, but probably the easiest one I’ve found is the Widgetbox Blidget service.  There is no coding required and all you have to do is provide it with the URL to your blog and then optionally configure some standard theme elements and off you go with your very own blidget within 5 minutes.

Widgetbox also hosts a gallery where you can publish your blidgets and it automatically draws in any meta keywords you have setup in your blog and will use them as the default keywords for people searching through the Widgetbox gallery to find your blidget with.

Check out our blidget to see what the finished product looks like.  There are also over 60 other B2B-related widgets and blidgets already published out on the Widgetbox gallery, so no guinea pigs here!

With any luck, your blog could end up on The 25 Most Valuable Blogs list next year!

Is it better to have a lot of social bookmark icons on your blog, or ones that are relevant to your space? I have heard (and seen) different opinions on this. What do you think?

I personally think you only need to have ones on your blog that are relevant to your audience.  So how do you going about finding these?

I don’t know if there is an easy way, or if it depends on what you are looking for, but I used sites like Social Poster to look up social bookmarks.  Then, I went through them individually and searched “marketing” to see if there was anything. That’s how I made the decision of what is on this blog as of now.

Any ideas or know where to find other applications like this to help B2B Marketers?

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.

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!

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?

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?

Hope you enjoyed this quarter’s Book Club series.  Just in case you missed an eBook or whitepaper we read and discussed, below are the links to them and what we had to say about each of them.

• Dianna Huff’s Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now
• What we had to say…

• Brian Carroll’s Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation
• What we had to say…

• HubSpots’s Get Found Online
• What we had to say…

• Marketo’s Best Practices in Lead Nurturing
• What we had to say…

• David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Viral Marketing
• What we had to say…

• ConnectDirect’s How to Choose your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
• What we had to say…

Happy Reading.  We look forward to sharing even more B2B Marketing and Sales tips with you in 2009.

2008 has been a big year for B2B Marketers.  The idea of using social media as part of our lead generation programs has become a reality.  Whether it be blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook B2B Marketers are taking on new challenges and figuring out new ways to reach their audience through the readily available social media outlets.  Here’s a list of some great social media posts from this year.  There’s lot of lists and dos and don’ts, if we’ve left a great post out, let us know, we’ll add it to the list.

50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media to Improve their Marketing

10 Aspects of an Effective Social Media Campaign

How to Build a Community of Twitter Followers

Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have

6 Keys to Bringing Up Social Media

24 Things to do When Stuck for a Topic to Blog About

Health Check:  How Trusted is your Corporate Blog?

Internet Marketing Roundup

5 Musts of Business Blogging

50 Social Media & Marketing Predictions for 2009

5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook

If you’re already knee deep in the world of social media, please share some of your successes or experiences.  Are you able to measure real ROI?

Happy Holidays and thank you for following us on The B2B Lead.  We look forward to sharing more B2B Marketing and Sales best practices with you in 2009.

So…you have written white papers and eBooks and they are up on your website. They are probably on the resources page and get their fair share of downloads. That’s good, but with some of the free publishing sites out there you can get more exposure.

I have started to put ReachForce content on some of the sites and wanted to share the results, compare with you or ask if you had suggestions.

Content placement sites:

Scribd – the best content placement site I think. You can publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents. It’s easy to set up…sign up and make an account for free, then just upload your documents. I have uploaded all of ReachForce’s eBooks and have gotten 5476 views as of today. People can add your works to their favorites and rate them. You can join groups an add friends.

Docstoc – provides the platform for users and businesses to upload and share their documents with all the world, and serves as a vast repository of documents in variety of categories including legal, business, financial, technology, educational, and creative. I uploaded all our eBooks and have 300 views and 30 downloads as of today.

edocr – upload your documents for sharing by the professional and business community. I uploaded our eBooks, again, and we have 618 views so far. One of our eBooks was featured on the front page when first uploaded.

whitepapers.org – is “all the world’s whitepapers in one place.” I really haven’t figured out how to see how many views or downloads our whitepapers have had.

The pros of publishing your content on sites like this is that it is free to do and can bring unexpected visitors an exposure. The biggest con I can find is that there is really no way to find out who downloaded our content (with information like an email address). To help with this, we added links to all our whitepapers and eBooks to hopefully drive traffic back to our website.

Suggestions?