Podcasting and video can be very scary to use…buying new equipment and software, and then learning how to use it all. The procedure might be a little more difficult than just writing text, but the outcome of engaging your audience is worth it. And if that doesn’t sell you, then what David has to say about it will. It sold me!

“The potential to deliver information to buyers in new and surprising ways is greater when you use a new medium. And while your competition is still trying to figure out ‘that blogging thing,’ you can leverage your existing blog into the new worlds of audio and video and leave the competition way behind.”

Who doesn’t like to watch a short video (mostly if it is funny) while reading a blog post? I won’t speak for everyone, but I am willing to bet the majority does. And it might seem scary at first, but putting a podcast or short video together really is not all that hard. Luckily, David has some tips for us to use as well:

For Podcasting

• Show preparation -gather ideas and create a script
• Recording when you are near your computer -use a microphone that delivers audio into your computer (need software here)
• Mobile recording gear – is required if you are going to be moving around interviewing people at different places
• Phone interviews – require a digital recording switch device that connects to your telephone
• Editing your audio files – optional
• Postproduction editing – sometimes includes running a noise-reduction program and sound compression
• Tagging the audio -adding text-based information about the audio to make it easier for people to find
• Hosting and distribution – so people can easily obtain your podcasts
• Promotion – you must provide links to your show
• A companion blog – to discuss the content of each show, and will also help to be indexed by search engines

For Video

• Posting to video-sharing sites – like YouTube, just shoot and upload
• Developing an online video channel – usually used with a unique URL
• Attempting stealth insertions to YouTube – dangerous, YouTube will find inauthentic video
• Vlogging – “video blogging” by embedding a video into a blog post
• Vodcasting – a podcast with video tied to a syndication component
• Inviting your customer communities to submit video – to help generate viral marketing interest

Our friends over at HubSpot recently posted a really funny video about imbound vs. outbound marketing that was a real success. They told us it only took an afternoon to come up with idea, write it, shoot it an edit it. See…worth it!

Attention Conservation Notice: The post below is a rant about having it all (work-life balance and a high Twitter Grade) with only one useful nugget of information. Read at your own risk.

First, let me apologize. With the exception of a few posts like the ones on LinkedIn’s new Social features and a Hitler Twitter video, I have been MIA for most of August and September. It was a busy August for this Mom and B2B Marketer, and I’m feeling restless and disappointed that I haven’t been posting, sharing results, and then sending out Tweets to let followers know the posts are live.

We had the most amazing B2B crisis communications case study on how our Twitter following came to our defense when a writer hyped up a security story without regard for the facts. Yet, I haven’t had the time to document the story. And, we’ve cooked up a killer little direct mail campaign involving warm cookies that I’d love to write about. But alas, children, pediatricians, Steiner Ranch elementary, and the demands of my position at BreakingPoint call.

So, while I manage to squeak out a blog post here and there, my Twitter feed has suffered badly. I haven’t been able to keep up with all of the messages each day, despite having Twitterific on my phone. Every day that goes by without sending a Tweet makes me feel more inadequate. Which got me to thinking, can we have it all? Super Mom? Super Marketer? Super Tweeter?

Apparently not.

The extremely smart and innovative folks over at Hubspot have launched a clever new tool for assessing your Twitter mojo. I believe this gadget was conceived for the sole purpose of pouring salt into my wound. It’s called Twitter Grader. My score: 52. My hope for significant improvement: 0.0.

You see, one of the most important of the grading criteria appears to be frequency. Another – the power of your followers. While I don’t want to name drop, I do have a few very impressive Twitter friends. Just a smaller circle. Must make me a true Introvert.

But on the frequency part, I am doomed. I often feel like I don’t have that much to say. Do you really want to know what I had for lunch or that I’m frustrated by the traffic on 360? So, I try to reserve my precious Tweet time for suggestions, ideas, and other helpful information. Not just updates on how my day is going.

On the positive side, I have yet another glorious metric for measuring the performance of BreakingPoint social media programs.

The Web, of course, has made getting in touch with the media much easier. However has anyone had luck with emailing a journalist (you don’t know) a story and actually get published? If so, what is your secret? In most cases however, (in the words of David) “PR people are spamming journalists with unsolicited and unrelenting commercial messages in the form of news releases and untargeted broadcast pitches.”

Don’t worry, David is here to help with The New Rules of Media Relations:

• Nontargeted, broadcast pitches are spam.
• News releases sent to reporters in subject areas they do not cover are spam.
• Reporters who don’t know you yet are looking for organizations like yours and products like yours-make sure they will find you on sites such as Google and Technorati.
• If you blog, reporters who cover the space will find you.
• Pitch bloggers, because being covered in important blogs will get you noticed by mainstream media.
• When was the last news release you sent? Make sure your organization is “busy.”
• Journalists want a great online media room!
• Some (but not all) reporters love RSS feeds.
• Personal relationships with reporters are important.
• Dont’ tell journalists what your product does. Tell them how you solve customer problems.
• Does the reporter have a blog? Read it. Comment on it. Track back to it (send a message whenever you blog on a subject that the reporter blogged about first).
• Before you pitch, read (or listen to or watch) the publication (or radio program or TV show) you’ll be pitching to!
• Once you know what a reporter is interested in, send her an individualized pitch crafted especially for her needs.

Now your rate of getting noticed will hopefully be much more successful when you use these tips. And now let’s fast forward a bit, you have used the New Rules and started building relationships. How do you pitch to these journalists now? David has a few tips on this as well…woo hoo!

• Target one reporter at a time.
• Help the journalist to understand the big picture.
• Explain how customers use your product or work with your organization.
• Don’t send e-mail attachments unless asked.
• Follow up promptly with potential contacts.
• Don’t forget, it’s a two-way street-journalists need you to pitch them!

Mainstream media is still very important and hopefully you will follow the New Rules and tactics to start getting noticed. To close the same way David did, “you need to be smart how you tell your story on the Web-and about how you tell your story to journalists.”

Next week we will cover chapters 17 and 18 on Blogging to Reach Your Buyers and Podcasting and Video Made, Well, as Easy as Possible.

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.

In Chapter 5 we learned the New Rules of News Releases and how news releases should be written for your buyers. Building off of the New Rules, after you have written for your buyers, now you need to reach them. David gives tips on how to develop a news release strategy in order to reach buyers directly.

Here are some of his tips:

Write about pretty much anything that your organization is doing.

• Have a new take on an old problem?
• Serve a unique marketplace?
• Have interesting information to share?
• CEO speaking at a conference?
• Win an award?
• Add a product feature?
• Win a new customer?
• Publish a whitepaper?

Publish news releases through a distribution service.

• Business Wire
• Market Wire
• PrimeNewswire
• PR Newswire
• PRWeb

We have been using PRWeb for our latest news releases and have gotten descent response. What service have you had success using?

Use RSS feeds.

• Many distribution services provide this to make your news release available to other sites, blogs, journalists and individuals.

Simultaneously publish news releases on your web site.

Link wherever possible.

Focus on the keywords and phrases your buyers use.

• Think about your buyer personas.

Include social media tags.

• Like Technorati, DIGG and del.icio.us

Tell the media, your clients and your prospects.

• Repurpose content for all audiences.
• Example: Tweak content for use in company newsletter.

I’ll close with what David said about the importance of reaching your buyers.

“Implementing a news release strategy to reach buyers directly is like publishing an online news service – you are providing your buyers with information that they need in order to find your organization online and then learn more about you.”

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.

B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right?  The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth.

We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe…

With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch.

Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth.

• # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs)
• # of inbound requests
• # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info.  (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page)
• # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages)
• # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs
• # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline
• # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing

Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it.

Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on.  It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs.

Do you measure anything not on this list?  If so, please share.

For awhile now, B2B Marketers have been caught in a bit of a Catch-22. Our community of B2B professionals are very well represented on LinkedIn. And, it’s fairly easy to set up a topic-oriented group on LinkedIn. However, there’s not much you can do to spread the word about your group to recruit members.  And, worse, once you build your group, you can’t do much for them. There’s really no way to share information or gather feedback.

Facebook, on the other hand, offers a much more “social” atmosphere and once you create a group, you can not only spread the word but actually interact with your members. Seems sort of obvious. I mean, isn’t that what a group is for? Unfortunately, in my situation, test engineers and other IT professionals just  don’t seem to use Facebook. It’s been frustrating because we’ve seen our LinkedIn group grow very quickly without much recruiting, and it’s a very qualified group of the professionals but we simply cannot engage with the members as a group.

Well, at last, LinkedIn has responded with the ability to interact with the members of your group!  They just sent out this email to Group managers:

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

Thanks LinkedIn! Look forward to growing with you.

When I started at ReachForce, one of the first things I did was set up my iGoogle page. With iGoogle, I created my own customized home page that included my personal interests, like sports and entertainment news, and access to everything I ever wanted to know about B2B Lead Generation. I think of it as a one-stop-shop for everything I need.

iGoogle pages can include things like today’s weather and news, RSS feeds you’ve signed up for and B2B gadgets or widgets. If you didn’t know they were out there, you should check out these B2B gadgets. Appirio has a tool to make widgits for key points for salesforce.com users, VerticalResponse to get your email and direct mail statistics real time and Etelos can help manage your CRM through Google.

Anyway, iGoogle is a fast and easy way to keep up with the new trends and information in your space. It is also very easy to set up and update. To set up your iGoogle page, go to Google.com and start with an account (you don’t have to use gmail), and then check out all the gadgets and themes that interest you. This short video can help explain iGoogle and all you can do with it.

If you already have an iGoogle page, what’s your favorite gadget?