I often think about how to get messages to the B2B market on behalf of our clients.  Typical ‘networking’ and ‘lead-generation’ groups I’ve been involved with rarely had B2B participants.  I don’t know if you’d ever see a C-Level executive delivering their “elevator pitch” at your typical BNI meeting. I think B2B decision makers are so entrenched in their day-to-day jobs that they have no time or patience for networking, much less social media outlets.

Then, I stumbled upon “New research: B2B buyers have a very high social participation” on the Groundswell blog site. Groundswell is a book written by two Forrester Research analysts.  Their research shows that 91% of technology decision makers are watching videos and participating in (if only just reading) blogs and other social media outlets.  So, we’ll keep recommending social media strategies to our B2B clients.  I, for one, will feel just a little bit more comfortable doing so with some research statistics under my belt that validate the necessity.

What do you other B2B marketers think?  Are you encouraging your B2B clients to have a blog? post videos? Tweet away the hours?

Got to go to Nashville last week to meet with some clients, and with time to kill before my flight, had a chance to drop by Print Design Mecca, aka the Hatch Show Print office. This is a famous letterpress shop, specializing in concert posters. However, they had this great new post card on the rack, which I thought I’d share:

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz had a tweet recently where he was wondering how the heck do you follow hundreds of people on Twitter? He had decided to quit following his brother because he posted too frequently…kept Rand from seeing too many people. I had the same problem with Guy Kawasaki, finally deciding that he has 10 people posting to his Twitter account. BTW, in 1993, when Rand started playing with the internet, he was in high school. I had already helped build my first commercial B2B site, for Schlumberger. Glad that we can share the pain of too much too fast too soon.

How about you? How are you managing to follow all the interesting people on Twitter?

Some people make resolutions around this time of the year. If you like them, great. I have no use for them. I prefer challenges and goals, things with restrictions and deadlines, things that demand work every day. The problem with resolutions is that they’re so nebulous, so open-ended. For me to be successful, I need a community, too. Back in college, a bunch of friends and I did the Danskin Women’s Triathlon. I never would have signed up on my own. Never ever. The community of friends was only way I wound up standing in front of a lake, watching the sun come over the horizon with a few hundred women.

The secret wasn’t support, though that was great. It was having to be accountable on a daily basis for working toward a goal. We hired a coach. We learned to run and to swim together. We were stunned at our successes and marveled at the unexpected roadblocks. Almost every single big, personal accomplishment in my life has a similar structure. NaBloPoMo was easy compared to NaNoWriMo (next year, so help me God, I will get to 50,000 words).

I’m a writer, and I mostly live in the land of words. That’s not all I do. Right now, I take pictures every day. Every single day. If there weren’t flickr and the various groups and challenges and projects and photo friends, I think it would be really hard to do. It’s the same with anything. When people ask me about adding various social media aspects of marketing to what they’re already doing in marketing, the main point I try to make is that it doesn’t create itself. Yes, it’s free and available to everyone, it’s not hard to do, but you actually have to DO it.

We all have computers, pen and paper—how many of us write books or poems or stories? The idea of sitting down to write a book is incredibly daunting. Writing for an hour or so a day for a month? Not so bad. You can do all 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo in 60-90 minutes of writing a day. You can do social media in far less time. A huge part of successful social media is being involved with the community. You don’t have to blog every day. Blog on Monday mornings. On the other mornings, you come in to work, grab your cup of coffee, and spend 20 minutes reading what other people write. Make pertinent comments. Internalize what they say. Not only does it foster relationships and bring you readers, it makes you informed and creates something for you to write about when it’s time for you to sit down and say something.

My challenge to you isn’t to make resolutions or identify places that could use some work, but to actually find something small to add to your daily routine that will make a big difference in aggregate. You don’t have to be a writer or a social media expert or incredibly clever in snippets of 140 characters or fewer. You just have to do the work.

Here is a question I get fairly often:

I notice in your Twitter posts/tweets that you have a “tiny url” for the website postings you want the reader to see. What is TinyURL? How is this different from a regular URL?

GOOD question, Bob. Here is the answer: Twitter allows only 140 characters and that include any URL you may insert into the text. The problem with URLs is many of them are very long and hairy, as you’ve probably noticed. So … thanks to TinyURL freeware, here’s what you do to solve that problem:

1. Go to http://www.tinyurl.com
2. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a box titled: Enter a long URL to make tiny:
3. Do what it says and click on the Make TinyURL button.

OR, if you want to add TinyURL to your toolbar:
1. Click and drag the following link to your links toolbar: TinyURL!
2. Once this is on your toolbar, you’ll be able to make a TinyURL at the click of a button. By clicking on the toolbar button, a TinyURL will be created for the page you are currently on. 
3. Next time you’re composing a note in Twitter and want to include a page’s URL, open another window (or tab up) so you can see the content there. Grab the URL and click on the TinyURL thing on your Toolbar, and it will give you the short version you can copy and paste into your tweet.

Try it out. You can always delete your test twitter.

BONUS:
This question also comes up about Twitter: Why should a business bother with Twitter? Well, what you have to keep in mind is there are two parts to the Twitter opportunity, and you don’t see the second one unless you know about it. I’ve had all sorts of businesses contact me when I twitter about something because these businesses are constant running SEARCHES against all Twitters for keywords. When they find something, they send that person an email (or Twitter). It’s the ultimate one-on-one marketing.

Go to Google and type Twitter Search and you’ll see all kinds of search engines. In fact, Twitter actually purchased a specialized Twitter Search software company that has been integrated into Twitter – see http://search.twitter.com/. 

The business leverage here is getting more intimate with people who are exposing so much about their daily lives (business and personal) that you can hook into this and engage with them. Answer questions, help them out, solve a problem for them, sell them a product they are looking for, fix something broken they are complaining about.

I tell you, when someone pops up in your email box telling you they saw a Twitter you posted and they are offering some help, it just about blows you away. This is true for B-to-B and B-to-C.

Another feature is the list of hot topics that are shown at http://search.twitter.com/, so go exploring and see what’s possible for you and your business on Twitter.

Tom

Here are some numbers from page 42 of Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff:

From a sample of 10,000 online US consumers, the percent who say they do the following things monthly:

Use Twitter – 5%

Write articles, stories, poems, etc, and post them online – 7%

Use RSS – 8%

Listen to podcasts – 11%

Publish / update their own Web pages – 11%

Publish / maintain / or update a blog – 11%

Post ratings / reviews of products or services – 11%

Listen to or download audio/music from other users – 14%

Contribute to online forums or discussion groups – 18%

Add comments to someone’s page on a social networking site – 18%

Update / maintain a profile on a social networking site – 20%

Read blogs – 25%

Read reviews / ratings – 25%

Visit social networking sites – 25%

Read online forums or discussion groups – 28%

Watch video from other users – 29%

Those of us in b2b marketing must keep in mind that business-to-business happens person-to-person. And more and more, folks are getting together online to swap stories in one way or another…are your prospects there?

…says the Wall Street Journal. I agree. The book is “Citizen Marketers – When People Are the Message” by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (favorite bloggers of ours at Church of the Customer).

This insightful book is a quick read and helps explain how social media has come about and how one person can truly make a difference. The book is a social media primer. It’s an historical reference more than a how-to-do-social-media guide, but some of the history happened without my noticing and it’s nice to have a short and sweet explanation of things that now “defineâ€Â� social media.

If you’re not clear what all the hype is about, it’s worth a few hours to read this book. The authors deliver their message via informative, real-life stories. You’ll read about the effect an individual can have on a brand, and how that single person can influence what LOTS of people buy. Get ideas on how companies can benefit — and profit — from engaging Citizen Marketers. Social media is a “trendâ€Â� that’s real and is becoming a new standard for good marketing and communications.

Now I *almost* understand why people spend so much time blogging, posting videos, creating podcasts and composing advertisements. It’s powerful stuff.

Recently, I received an invitation to join John’s network on TimeBridge, a social media site allowing groups of people to share schedules and availability. TimeBridge may be a good solution, but my relatively short experience was pretty bad.
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I happened across an interesting article from Sean Carton with the Clickz Network. It’s titled, “Why Social Marketing Nirvana Escapes our Reach.� Sean talks about the not-so-distant past where businesses were hot to set up “portals.� Portals were sure to keep people coming back … keep them staying on YOUR site … keep them from looking elsewhere for things like news, sports, stock prices, etc. Fortunately, the corporate portal goals have died (and Sean explains why). Unfortunately, the push for the must-have portal sites has become a push for must-have social networking sites. Or, so it seems.

It’s not prudent to create a social networking site just because some businesses are doing it, or because some experts say you have to have one. Your site might do just dandy by only providing customers the information they need to make a purchase decision and the ability to find/buy your products. Of course, you must optimize your site so those customers can find you, but you don’t necessarily have to create a new social “neighborhoodâ€Â� to get – or keep – their attention.

RefreshWeb staffers know an awful lot about social media and we do believe there are benefits to social networks – where appropriate. We’re also good business people and would advise against putting the time, effort and money into something that isn’t strategically important for your business. Are you feeling pressure (from your company or the media) to jump on the newest Internet bandwagon?

Somebody told me they couldn’t see their colleague’s contacts on LinkedIn and she wanted me (a LinkedInner from waay back) to help her fix her settings. I agreed, since I was so sure she must be doing something wrong. After all, I can see the contacts of all my friends. Or, so I thought. After accepting an invite to LinkedIn, I almost always scan the person’s contacts and see if there might be a long lost buddy of mine with whom I could re-connect. That’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

I’ve since learned that LinkedIn allows you to block others from viewing your network. I’ve even found a couple of friends’ listings that “do not allow� browsing of their contacts. Why would you do that? Isn’t the point of social media for us to interact, connect, re-connect and network with each other? It seems that blocking others from seeing your contacts is kind of “Anti-Social Media.� What do you think? Do you dis-connect with people that block you from seeing their network??

Marketing people are very good at communicating. That’s what we call it, and that’s how we make our money, but really, what we like to do is talk, have other people listen, and then see them take action. That’s exciting. On the web, we search marketers pay a lot of attention to what people are looking for, and try to help them find it, but I’m not sure if we marketers are really communicating with the market. That’s where social media comes in…where we get to listen.

Dave Evans pointed out the difference last Thursday at the InteractiveAustin2008 conference, and I wanted to bring it up in the panel I was on, because it needs discussion. That didn’t happen–we did have a lot to cover, between niche marketing on the web and bridging the generations–but it is something to keep in mind as you think about using social media in your marketing mix. Social media is about listening.

Where are people talking about you? What are they saying? Can you help solve their problem with your company or your product? These seem like great opportunities for marketers to get closer to your customers…and learn what they really want, not what we think they want.