Are you taking advantage of LinkedIn Groups? We recently ran across an article that gives these helpful 5 tips for doing so 
effectively.
Read Join the LinkedIn Party: Five Tips for Using LinkedIn Groups Effectively in it’s entirety here.
My following post was recently featured on Social Media B2B:
Most of our B2B clients have staked a claim on Google+, but they don’t invest in it. Why? Because they consider it a ghost town. They say Google+ is irrelevant. They invest in Facebook and Twitter and (more and more) in LinkedIn. But you know what? Recent studies indicate that, while many companies were asleep at the switch, Google+ has emerged as the killer platform for B2B social media marketing.
B2B marketers need to understand these four reasons that Google+ is the next killer platform for marketing, and why it should be an important part of your B2B marketing mix.
According to GlobalWebIndex, Google+ now has 343 million active users, more than any other social network besides Facebook. Google+ is far ahead of Twitter, and light years ahead of LinkedIn.
Notice that qualifier: “active” users. The 343 million number is not a measure of the number of people who signed up for Google+ accounts, and who may or may not ever log on. Rather, it is a measure of the number of people actively participating on Google+. Over a very short period of time, Google+ has confounded critics and become a platform that cannot be ignored.
Google+ circles enable you and your B2B company to market in a more intimate way to people who are following your company.
Consider this: because Google+ users can circle your company page, it means they have opted in to receive information from you without having to fill out any forms or communicate via email. That’s true on other social networks, of course, but what’s different is how you can then interact with them.
On Google+, you can do research on the person who has circled you, circle them back, and (most importantly) add that person to unique circles based on how that person fits into your target market. This means you can provide that person with highly useful and specific information, instead of just a general communication blast.
Furthermore, B2B companies can begin to interact with that individual in other, more personal ways. And this means that, in addition to creating a better communication channel, you can make those users feel like you notice and care about them. For example, by sharing that individual’s content and inviting them to private communities, private events, and private hangouts, you don’t just send them a message; you build and strengthen a relationship. And this is a cornerstone of any marketing mix.
Martin Shervington provides a more detailed description of circlecentric marketing.
In Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s upcoming book, The New Digital Age, he is quoted as saying: “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
This is the clearest statement yet from Google (which tends not to be very clear) highlighting how authorship is becoming extremely relevant in search results on Google.
This essentially means that if you are posting on Google+ correctly, your content will be ranked higher than content posted elsewhere. Furthermore, because of Google+’s tight integration with the Google search engine, your posts are treated much like regular webpages (unlike posts on other social networks), and will therefore rank higher in search results.
Google+ is a social destination and a social layer across all Google properties. The integration they have made is breathtaking. It places a social layer upon:
What Google is really saying is that “Google+ is Google.” And this integration will only go deeper and become stronger over time.
It’s no secret that Google’s business model is to sell advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that and, in fact, their strategy is a brilliant one. Google wants to provide more and more relevant search results to users, so users will do more searching on Google. This means advertisers get better value from Google, which means Google sells more advertising.
Google has created Google+ to be the killer platform for B2B social media marketing. What is your B2B company doing to take advantage of it?
According to a recent study, customers who interact with a brand via social media spend 20-40% more with that company than other customers. With the right marketing strategies in place, you can actually drive direct sales from social media.
Remember, both social broadcasting and social listening are key components of any solid social media campaign. This recent article from Marketing Profs expands on this and offers an overview of how to deploy a social media sales mechanism in your company.
What are you doing to drive direct sales via social media?
HP’s recent earnings announcement, it’s $8 Billion write-down of Autonomy and it’s $13.2 Billion write-down of EDS, and it’s 
shrinking sales in several core areas don’t bode well. They seem ripe for acquisition. Will Oracle swoop in now that the stock has taken another significant hit?
Yes, HP needs to address Wall Street, but it also needs to put forth a strategy, products and messaging that customers resonate with and want to hear.
In the meantime, what do customers think? If I’m a competitor of HP, I’d be talking to every HP customer about why they should go with the alternative. HP needs to direct their efforts at customers or this slippery slope will take them down, and that would be a shame.
Check out the Bloomberg Businessweek article on these findings here
Check out this good visual illustrating content marketing and the 
connection between content type, distribution channel and the multi-stage purchase funnel…
For a full view of the infographic and to read the article, click here.
It’s no secret, social media networking is changing the way people make purchasing 
decisions. With this comes new opportunity, new challenges and new leaders. We recently came across an article that outlines 5 marketing rules in this new Age of Discovery. How do your marketing strategies align with these key principals?
Is your custom content selling products and services or selling solutions to your customer’s pain points?
“People don’t want quarter-inch drills… they want quarter-inch holes.”
Read the full article, What Problems is Your Content Solving? here
IDG predicts that business tablet buyers are going to gravitate towards Android 
more over the next year, going sharply against current trends favoring the iPad.
According to this article, the opportunity just might be in emerging markets. What do you think of the Android competitive strategy?
Check out the full article here
We recently read an interesting article, How To Make Your Content Marketing Spread Like Wildfire, which contains 20 actionable marketing tips to distribute custom content. While most marketers are familiar with these tips, not many use them thoroughly. Use this as a checklist to help with your content marketing strategy…
By Judy Hopelain and Jim Lightsey
Jim and Judy recently led a panel discussion at the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Marketing Association on Mobile Marketing. Panelists included Beth Murphy, CMO of mobile-first site HotelTonight, Robyn Yoslow, Digital Strategist at Seagate Technologies, and Stephen Andrews, Director of Sales and Marketing at The Creative App Company. This article is based on preparation for and takeaways from that discussion.
Brand Managers have historically aimed for consistency in the online experience and have strived to deliver a largely uniform presentation of their brands. Their websites house most, if not all, of their content and serve as the one-stop-shop for accessing it. This approach to online brand management has been possible as long as users could access a brand’s online assets through just one platform, the laptop/desktop, and only a handful of operating systems.
Brands are in for a thrill — and brand management will be redefined — as Gartner forecasts that mobile will overtake the PC by 2013 as the main way users access the Internet. At the SVAMA panel discussion on mobile marketing, panelist Beth Murphy of HotelTonight shared with the audience that “Mobile users have different expectations of their experience than their computer-based counterparts: they want it to be tactile and much more engaging.” Meeting these expectations will require redesigning the brand’s mobile experience, not just porting the computer-based web experience over to mobile platforms.
Today, less than 30% of company websites are optimized for mobile access. Optimizing for mobile requires understanding each mobile platform’s unique advantages and constraints — from text messaging on mobile phones to wireless roaming and apps on smartphones and tablets. Google’s brand new gomo initiative is a reflection of the importance of optimizing for mobile, and the size of the opportunity. HTML 5 is also something to watch closely as an option to optimize the user experience across multiple devices and platforms.
Brand management will continue to evolve as brand teams are called on to define the brand experience for specific mobile platforms, and to develop mobile style guides that define the user interaction, depth of experience and local cultural requirements on each one. They will also need to specify how the brand’s messaging hierarchy and overall brand positioning are expressed through mobile. In the process, mobile affords opportunities for brand meaning that are different than that affording via traditional web channels. Thereby, mobile informs brand strategy and is also informed by it.
To make the initial mobile “case” to management, Brand Managers may want to run a few mobile promotions first so they have the numbers to justify the request.
Mobile is expanding what is possible within the user experiences and at the same time making brand management a lot more interesting and fun!
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