B2B Companies STILL Ignore Social Media
May 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment
A new survey from Satmetrix, revealed today that the majority of B2B companies are still not tracking their social media activity and are ignoring customers who interact with brand pages online.
The global survey shows:
- 51 percent of B2B companies have no social media tracking in place, in comparison to 22 percent of their B2C counterparts
- 69 percent of B2B respondents ignored customers who provided feedback via social media because they had no process in place to respond
For those companies that did measure effectiveness of social media:
- only four percent performed sentiment analysis
- while 56 percent simply counted comments and followers
Chief executive officer at Satmetrix, Richard Owen said, “Whilst 77 percent of consumers post about products, 67 percent of businesses have no means of measuring what is being said and less than one in 20 have any insight into the sentiment of what is being said. This is both a huge threat and a massive lost opportunity.”
Converting Content to Conversation is the Key to Thought Leadership
It really does blow my mind that in 2012, we are having the same discussion we’ve been having for the past five years about the value of converting content to conversation online.
I’ve talked to many B2B companies throughout my career and every time we discuss social media, they insist their customers aren’t on Facebook. There are so many things wrong with that statement, it makes my head spin. First of all, Facebook is not social media; it is merely one channel within the social media space. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, G+, the blogosphere – anything peer-to-peer related is social media. (Come on, now, folks, it’s 2012 – surely y’all recognize this, right?!)
Secondly, your B2B customers may be “business buyers” and not “consumers,” but they are still human beings and human beings engage with their peers online to discuss their interests. I assure you, no matter how obscure your trade, no matter how small your niche B2B audience is, your customers are talking to each other and seeking out advice, guidance, case studies and recommendations.
It goes back to the old saying I first coined in 2008 that social media is like the high school cafeteria in that everyone gathers together around their shared interests. For every industry, there is a cafeteria – maybe it isn’t Facebook, maybe it’s Twitter or LinkedIn – but there is a cafeteria and a lunch table within it where your customers are talking. And, if you aren’t listening, you aren’t leading.
As I said in 2011, content creates thought leadership and every B2B company I know wants, nay, needs to be seen as the smartest kid in the class. And, content disseminated through Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ and other social channels equals SEO, something, again, we’ve been talking about here since 2009 and even in 2008 and SEO equals thought leadership.
So, I gotta say, seeing the results of studies like this just makes me crazy because it really is so simple and the opportunities have only grown over the years. Please, y’all, if you are a B2B company, step up to the plate and embrace the conversations happening around you every single day. And, if you don’t know how, connect with me on LinkedIn and I will show you because reports like this just drive me to the brink.
Twitter Launches “Do Not Track” Feature
May 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Twitter announced today it will offer a “Do Not Track” option that will let users opt out of being tracked through the service.
The plan was unveiled at an Internet Week panel in New York Thursday morning via Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission.
Twitter also sent out a tweet stating: “The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.”
Users will be able to implement the new feature by enabling Do Not Track in various browsers that offer it. Doing so will block Twitter from collecting information about users via cookies. Firefox’s feature only works if websites agree to it.
Twitter’s move comes after the FTC released a report in March calling on designers of Internet browsers to stop allowing websites to collect sensitive data about users. The other social media giant, Facebook, does not currently have a Do Not Track feature.
New Domains Allowed: .coke, .nyc, .law to Impact SEO, Security and Branding
June 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Anyone who knows me knows I have two all-time favorite authors: Christopher Buckley (Thank You For Smoking, Boomsday, Little Green Men, Supreme Courtship, etc.) and Max Barry (Company, Jennifer Government, Syrup). Barry’s first novel, Syrup, is currently being made into a movie in NYC and he’s been writing very entertaining blog posts about his new adventures in filmmaking. Syrup, incidentally, takes place in the midst of the Coca-Cola Company’s marketing machine and it is undeniably one of the funniest books ever in the history of the world … or you know, at least tied with everything Buckley’s ever written. (I’m nothing if not loyal.)
Well, today, I saw a BBC article that immediately reminded me of another of Barry’s books, Jennifer Government. In the book, people no longer have their own surnames. Instead, they are identified by their employer: John McDonald’s, Mike IBM, Jennifer Government.
Today, it’s been reported that the .com, .net, .org format is about to be opened up to more generic top-level domains ranging from .law, .nyc or, you guessed it .coke. It seems the Global Internet Regulators and ICANN met in Singapore this morning to finalize the rules of this expansion.
“Today’s decision will usher in a new Internet age,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN’s Board of Directors. “We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration.”
For many years, ICANN has been lobbying for brand named suffixes and now they may finally get their wish. Early this morning a plan was approved that will open the floodgates in January for hundreds of applications for new highly-coveted domains. Corporations and cities will be the first accepted.
It will cost $185,000USD to apply for the suffixes, and companies would need to show they have a legitimate claim to the name they are buying. The money will be used to cover costs incurred by ICANN in developing the new gTLDs (generic top-level-domains) and employing experts to scrutinize the many thousands of expected applications. A portion will be set-aside to deal with potential legal actions, raised by parties who fail to get the domains they want. Applications will start on 12 January.
Most organizations have been quiet about their petitions, but a few .nyc, .paris, Unicef, Hitachi and Canon have been petitioning for a branded domain for years.
Obviously, this new domain format will be a great coup for the companies and cities that obtain them. And, as a known brand name, I can see their right to it.
But, will this be the beginning of even more generic domains? And, if so, who gets .socialmedia or .marketing? What about .news? Or, .music or .movies? They mentioned .law in the BBC article as an example. Well, I can think of oh, a few million people who could make a legit claim to the domain. Who will get it and why?
What about brand names that are the same? Remember the big dispute between Apple, the computer company, and Apple, the record label over the .com domain? Surely, that’s gonna happen all over again. CNN raised the issue of cybersquatting, but if you have to fork over at least $180,000 for the initial buy and get approval from the ICANN committee, I think the process will be a bit more difficult than a few clicks on godaddy.
One of ICANN’s rules is that no domains that are “confusingly similar” will be allowed and that could actually complicate similar or same brand arguments even more.
In the meantime, here’s hoping the branded domain names limit themselves to the web. Although, in my case, Jennifer Anderson Jones PR doesn’t sound too bad. Although it would make a helluva monogram.
Content Marketing Creates Thought Leadership
April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Some of you emailed me after my last post asking for recommendations around the type of content to create for your clients. Obviously, this is a difficult question to answer in general terms. After all, the whole point of my last post was the value of the context of your content. So, it would be difficult for me to give you contextual advice without knowing more about your clients, their audience and competitive space. 
That said, I will offer up some general guidelines and further discussion around the value of content marketing.
First of all the type of content you create should be driven by the type of audience you are after. Consumers spend a great deal of time on YouTube and Facebook. B2B audiences tend to focus more on LinkedIn and SlideShare. And, Twitter, podcasts and Blogs fit both … as long as what you say is relevant and useful.
Consider this:
1. Content establishes thought leadership: 79 percent of content curators listed thought leadership as the primary objective. Creating valuable content around your category establishes you as an expert, period.
2. Consistency breeds familiarity. It takes anywhere from 5 to 12 exposures for a new idea to stick. The more consistent you are with your value proposition in your content, the more people will connect your brand to your message.
3. Content brings brands and customers together. This is especially true when there is an interactive element to the content, like comments in a blog, LinkedIn Q&A conversations or user-generated content campaigns.
4. Aggregation can set you apart. There is a flood of information online and Google can only give you a best guess at the most relevant, but there are millions and millions of pages returned for any search result. Aggregation sites like social bookmarks can help you connect your content with key audiences seeking it out.
5. Mashups can give you a unique edge. Merging existing content to create a new point of view can be a great way to leverage popular content. Taking multiple points of view on a particular issue and sharing it in a single location can be a terrific conversation-starter. More broadly, mashups can offer a way of creating something new while still using content curation as a basis for it because you are building on existing content.
6. Chronology is becoming more important as industries are evolving. We have seen incredible changes in so many industries in the past several years. Within marketing alone, we’ve seen the mashup of marketing disciplines like advertising and PR. One of the most interesting ways of looking at your content is to track the evolution of information is over time – and how our understanding of topics has changed over time.
Whether you are creating podcasts, blog posts, videos, SlideShares or participating in category-specific Q&A, the most important thing (behind context) is consistency. If you want your voice to have power, you have to power it with consistent content.
