My business is helping smaller B2B companies accelerate their growth by learning to sell bigger deals to bigger customers. Most of our clients have some kind of a complex sale, such as a software solution, a technology, a marketing plan or a training program, for a few examples. When they are selling into a large company, they find that many people are involved in the decision of what to buy and from whom or whether to buy or do it themselves in house.

One or two people will make the final decision but many more will influence that decision. Whoever ultimately decides will not choose a solution or a service provider that is not widely accepted among other internal influencers. The price of change is too high; the price of internal conflict is too painful.

The other influencers will make their recommendation based on their confidence in the capability and likeability of the people from your company with whom they would be interacting. So, they want to get to know these people. They want to check out the credentials of members of your project management team or your trainers or your customer service staff or your IT department or your graphic designers or whomever. They want to know their peers in your company.

Now here’s where social media comes in: they will look for your employees on LinkedIn and on Facebook and possibly on Twitter or JigSaw and they will check to see which employees contribute to your company’s blog or Facebook page or LinkedIn discussions. They will want to see a profile, work history, where people went to school, what kind of credentials they have. Especially on LinkedIn, they will explore whether your employees have received recommendations from past or current customers, supervisors, or co-workers. They will be interested to learn whether your employees are thought leaders; for example, do they comment on relevant industry blog posts, do they ask and/or answer questions on LinkedIn, and do they participate in special interest groups online. They’ll look to see how your employees are connected, to them and to others. They may ask to connect with members of your team.

If your employees are invisible online, or if their only presence is a personal presence, you will be at a distinct disadvantage in comparison to other competitors whose employees are visible and active online.

Of course you need policies and procedures, mostly guided by common sense. If you have a marketing team, someone there can draft policies and provide some training. If you’re smaller than that, find a blogger or a savvy GenY employee to take a lead. To start in a small, safe way, encourage your employees to create a LinkedIn profile. Teach them what a good one looks like, and help them get a professional headshot photo. Ask them to request recommendations. Show them how LinkedIn works, how to find groups, and how to participate appropriately. Make your expectations clear, and be explicit about how much time during business hours would be acceptable for professional social media activity. Even a limit of 10 minutes a day on LinkedIn will enable them to become well-connected (and LinkedIn won’t require a daily check-in).

The more your team “connects” with others, the more powerful your company will become in business development opportunities-more sales, bigger deals.

Image Source: SXC

Here are five serious ways that you will be left behind:

1. Thought Leadership. You are not actively engaged in developing a point of view about your industry on behalf of your company. You and/or your employees are not publishing articles and white papers, or participating in online discussions, or asking and answering questions in the leading social media sites for your industry and/or your state and locale. Therefore you will not become known as an industry leader and will increasingly be perceived as irrelevant.
2. Website. It’s a marketing piece all about you. It is not interactive, inviting visitors to participate in any way. It doesn’t offer any links to unbiased information or free white papers or eBooks or any little way to promote extra value. It just sits there, doing nothing for you. Therefore, you are by definition losing ground to competitors who are upgrading their interactivity.
3. LinkedIn. You have a minimal presence or none at all. Only one or two of your employees are engaged here. There is a lack of personal photos, complete profiles, and connections to other professionals. You are not members of relevant industry groups. If groups don’t exist, you haven’t taken leadership to create them and invite others. Therefore, interested prospects will not find you, nor will you find them.
4. Google Alerts. You have not set “Google alerts” (they are free) to help you monitor what is being said about you personally, your company, your industry, and your key executives on the Internet. You do not have any system to monitor the flow of industry information and where you may, or may not, fit into it. Therefore you have no basis for an improved marketing strategy.
5. Opt-In e-mail List. You are not actively building your list of friends, current customers, and prospects, so you have no reliable and inexpensive way to reach them with news, special offers, or simply thanks for their business. Therefore you run the risk that your competitors have a much better list and the capacity to reach your customers and prospects regularly.

You may not need a Facebook page. You may not need a Twitter account. Those channels depend highly on the nature of your business and where your audience is engaging online. But even if you think today that your market is offline, I challenge you to think again and to investigate or ask your youngest, newest employee to investigate on your behalf.

Today’s communication channels will change, as did the mail, telegraph, telephone, cell phone, etc. They will continue to evolve. But the basic premise that you need to be connected will not change. If you’re not sufficiently connected, the steps you take today will pay you back many times over!

Do you have a connectivity story or comment to share? We would love to hear from you.

I have argued that your customers and prospective customers are hungry for relevant, easily located information. Therefore every company should have a content strategy-a method for providing extra value to customers, especially when customers are shopping online. That doesn’t mean they are buying online, but they would much rather get information about your products (and those of your competitors) online than from your salespeople. Your customer is not “the company,” but rather the engineer or the factory manager or the purchasing agent or the tool-and-die maker who uses your products.

But if you don’t have a big marketing staff and if you don’t want to create new content, how could you provide them with relevant information to make their lives easier? How could your website become known as a “place to go to” when they are investigating?

One way is to offer a industry-relevant links and embedded content. Here’s what I found on my tour of social media sites looking for content about “machine tools.”

• First, I Googled machine tools blog and found CR4, “the engineer’s place for news and discussion.” The blog is up-to-date and the associated forums are very active. At the moment I landed there, 243 visitors were online! Link to this space and introduce your customers to some useful conversations.

• I went to Alltop and searched for “manufacturing.” Alltop is a site that aggregates the most popular blogs on a wide range of subjects. Link to that site and show your customers where to find relevant blogs.
• How about YouTube, the online site for sharing videos? What does that have to do with your company? Well, I found a series of five videos about machine tools and their history, Modern Marvels. YouTube videos can be embedded into your own website or blog (as illustrated below!)
• I tried SlideShare, the online site for sharing slide presentations, and found an analysis of the global machine tools market. Like YouTube, SlideShare permits you to embed content into your own blog or website.
• Searching Twitter @MachineTools, a stream of tweets about buying and selling used machine tools.
• On LinkedIn, I found a Machine Tools Group featuring discussions with 348 members.
• Turning to Facebook, I located Machine Tools Mart, whose CEO lives in India and offers global information about buying and selling machine tools.
• At amazon.com I searched for books on the machine tools topic. On the amazon.com site you can create your own list of favorites that you recommend (search for Listmania) and feature it in your profile. You can also create a bookstore on your website or feature books in your blog with direct links to amazon.com where your customers can buy them. Incidentally, you can earn a commission on those sales.

Please note, this post is not about machine tools. no matter what your B2B business, you can improve your sales position through social media, even by using social media very passively. Make your website, your blog, or your Facebook page a source of timely, relevant information. It will be relevant because YOU selected it, because YOU know what your customers are looking for.

Remember Danny DeVito in OPM (Other People’s Money)? Well, you can boost your sales strategy with OPC (Other People’s Content)!

(Still confused? Read more about #blogchat here.)

This Week’s Theme: What company blogs can learn from personal bloggers with @1680PR

This week, #blogchat was held LIVE at SXSW. Sad face that I couldn’t go, but happy face that there was still normal #blogchat at night for those of us stuck at home! Actually, I was so busy apartment-hunting that I didn’t get to the online version either, but moderator and host Mack Collier is nice enough to link to the transcript every week, so I was still able to pick out some awesome points to share with you all!

One that stood out to me just a few minutes into the chat:

@ScLoHo: Every business has people. Share people stories on your business blog

Business blogs are too often outlets for company press releases and nothing else. Think about your favorite brands in the world. I like Hershey’s chocolate. I like Gain laundry detergent. I like Dell computers (don’t judge me, that’s a debate for another day, haha). But really, I don’t like any of those companies enough to read announcements about their products every day – or worse, multiple times per day. It’s sometimes nice to know big changes that are coming, but I don’t need constant content that is little more than ads for your brand.

Corporate bloggers, write this down and post it by your computer: A blog is not a commercial.

Adding personality to your corporate blog is, in my opinion, the only way to go. But if you’re a major brand (like Hershey or Gain or Dell), doing that can be tricky, since you have a corporation to represent (not just yourself) and since you’re probably one of several people working on posts. Even as a small business owner, it can be tough to know how to go about adding personality to your blog.

That’s what I love so much about @ScLoHo’s tweet. Telling stories is something I do regularly on my own blog, After Graduation, and companies can definitely learn to do that as well.

• Share the story of how the company was founded and how the business owners helped it evolve into what it is today.
• Share awesome stories from people who work at your company. Feature everyone from board members to factory workers. Feel-good stories that fit your brand well are interesting and help promote your products.
• Share stories from your customers. Not only are you promoting your brand, but you’re starting to build a community by getting your readers involved.

I think that personal bloggers can take some value away from this idea as well. Don’t be afraid to share your story and the stories of readers if they are relevant to your topic. It’s one of the most basic ways we can connect as human beings. Between the press releases, some human interest stories go a long way for corporate blogs, and for personal bloggers, this is a way to spice up your content, doing something different and interesting for your readers.

Sony:
Sony uses their blog to engage with enthusiasts and customers. They use several multimedia elements including photos, video blogging. Sukhjit says that it’s really important to have a visual side to a blog update – and even on Facebook. She also revealed it’s important to put yourself out there – as long as you have solidified and support your message.

Sony also put together some case studies, and saw some amazing results by showcasing exclusive content for their readers and sneak peeks to new products. A key aspect to their blog strategy is responding to their comments. “It’s not about being the expert in everything, its about knowing what experts use to connect with the community.”

Cisco:
Cisco uses their blog as the social media hub – which reaches out to their Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr accounts. But their goal with those external products is to always push back to the Cisco home and brand. The main blog is also a hub for their 28 separate blogs with teams focused on different products! Their goal is to showcase thought leadership, engage a community and gather valuable feedback from customers, partners and stakeholders.

Cisco believes that “participation is the currency of the new economy” by engaging with the audience, listening to the conversation, and changing business practices if necessary.

Ford:
Ford evolved their blogging platform into The Ford Story. It didn’t really start out as a blog – but was launched in 2008 as a political action site to provide readers with a humanized way of telling their story and provide documentation of the execution of the Ford plan. They saw great results but realized they needed to turn it into a blog for further updates and to interact with their readers to make their content “embeddable, spreadable, and shareable.”

The blog is designed around the community of Ford fans – showcase their comments via blog posts and Facebook – and allowing them to share their stories via text, images, and videos.

Want to hear more of these business strategies? sign up and check out the archives!

Perspectives on Social Media Marketing

Audience: Large Businesses, Small Businesses, Individuals – There’s something for everyone, including start-ups and successful businesses.
Tone: Conversational with some personal views, humor, and case studies sprinkled throughout.

Here are just some of the 89 specific topics included:

• What is Personal Branding and How Important Is It?
• How Has Social Media Changed Customer Service?
• Do Consumers Really Want to Communicate with Brands? Why?
• What Tools Are “Must Haves” for Every Social Media-Marketing Effort?
• Should Strategy Come from PR or Marketing?
• How Can Companies Use Social Media Internally to Improve Employee Morale?
• Should Your Company Follow People on Twitter, or Just Be Followed?
• Is There a Direct Relationship Between Social Media and Sales?
• Is It Ever Too Late to Start Social Media?
• What Would You Consider to be the Worst Social Media Campaign Ever Run?

An excerpt from the book (reprinted with permission):

Topic #27 What Advice Would You Give a Manager For a Company That Has So Far Ignored Social Media But Now Wants to Get Up to Speed?

B. Bonin Bough: The Brand Perspective
The first step is to make sure you yourself participate in the platform. Don’t kill yourself, though, trying to participate in every platform. Figure out which platforms you care about and focus on those. Also, understand that as an individual, you can be a part of social media without necessarily putting a lot of content into the space. I think one of the best rules of thumb is the 1–9–90 rule. It says that 1 percent of the people create the social media content, 9 percent of people participate in that content, and the other 90 percent are passive. It’s okay to be passive—although as a marketer, you want to be sure you understand the nuances of what it means to participate. I’m not the most prolific Twitter contributor, but I’m a freak about following it, so much so that that I have data visualization in my office that I can follow like a news ticker.

Next, you want to identify people in your business or industry who are influencers and power-users. If you can find folks who represent your passions, that’s even better. Start to fan, follow, subscribe. Search online to find recent articles that talk about the players in your area who are doing social media well and identify experts who discuss social media marketing in general. If you are a brand manager, bring in as many agencies as you can find time for.

I know that becomes very difficult after a while, but bring them in to talk to you so you have a sense of your options. Nobody has the one answer in this space, and you want to understand what all the different players bring to the table. Look for an agency that sounds different and that provides ideas that are not just based around their traditional business structure. And if they are a social media agency, look to see if they understand the scale necessary to drive your business objectives. Do not be afraid to be very clear about the resources that you require to actually make your program successful.

Another important piece that gets overlooked a lot is going to conferences. I spend my life going to conferences—talking to people, mingling with people, meeting new technologies. It’s a great way to be exposed to the culture of the space. For example, if you go to a social media conference, there will almost certainly be a Twitter screen behind the panelists. They are talking and tweeting at the same time. Everybody at the conference has a laptop, and they’re talking and tweeting and reading different things. That level of multitasking is completely lost inside the walls of a lot of marketing agencies right now; that’s a proof point that as a group we aren’t spending enough time at the conferences where new ideas are being formulated and thought about and behaviors are being transformed.

Finally, you want to follow and analyze your competition. You want to identify the best-in-class examples, and you want to find where the gaps and opportunities are. Also, look beyond your direct competitive circles and look at comparative circles. For example, with Gatorade, we are not just thinking about Gatorade and what might be perceived as other beverage competitors; we try to figure out who shares the mindspace of our core targets. In the case of Gatorade, that is elite athletes, athletic directors and coaches, and sideline moms. Who else are they listening to? Are there programs they are part of we can align ourselves with? That’s some of the best advice I can give for getting started.

Stephanie Agresta: The Agency Perspective
If you want to get up to speed with social media, the first thing you need to do is to get started with your own social media efforts. By that, I mean create personal accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These three platforms are the most widely used. For media consumption, check out YouTube and Hulu and photo-sharing sites like Flickr. If you’re feeling ambitious, try starting a blog and posting a few thoughts. Sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com offer free blogging solutions. Create media and upload it. Share it with your friends. Also, read, read, read! There are so many great blogs out there, and the best part is, the content is free! Check out AdAge’s Power 150 list (http://www.adage.com/power150) for a complete list of top-notch marketing and PR blogs. Also, take note of what people are tweeting and re-tweeting on Twitter. Often, the best content is curated by people who are in your trusted network. Tools like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn basically create a river of news from your friends, colleagues, and family members. More and more, people are using this as a main source of information. Posts on these networks may just clue you into what is going on at a very high level, thereby allowing you to do further research on search engines and professional news sites.

Giveaway!
Here are the rules to win a copy of Perspectives on Social Media Marketing:

• Leave a comment below, saying what you’d hope to learn from the book, to receive one entry.
• Tweet about the contest for a second entry.
• Entries must be received by midnight PST January 18th to be considered.

To generate online leads, you need a steady stream of new, qualified prospects to your web site.

And there’s no better tool to help you in both categories than your business blog. But like any tool, it doesn’t work by itself, it just amplifies your own efforts. Here’s how to maximize your efforts to increase your online visibility, drive more qualified traffic to your site, and convert that traffic into leads for your sales team.

1. Spend time crafting a keyword-rich title for each blog post. Every blog post creates a new web page; each web page is another opportunity to rank well for one of your targeted keyword phrases in Google and other search engines. Your blog post title becomes your web page title, and titles are the biggest variable in the search engine algorithm, so don’t short-change yourself here. Make sure your best keyword phrases appear in the first few words in the title for maximum exposure.
2. Keep those titles compelling. Leverage the “sharing power” of social media by creating compelling titles. People will often “Like” or retweet a blog post based solely on the title, even without reading it first! Although the tool may be tongue-in-cheek, check out the Link Bait Generator for ideas on how to create a compelling title.
3. Blog for your audience: your prospects and customers. Too many business blogs appear to be where press releases go to die. Although there’s a place in an active blog for company news, for most businesses that’s not what will attract customers. Instead, keep the focus of your blog on your customers’ pain points. Every time you get an email or phone inquiry asking you for your expert advice, turn it into a blog post. If one person had that question, probably a dozen, a hundred or a thousand other people had the same question. Answer it before your competition does. Eighty to ninety percent of your blog posts should be addressing problems that your prospects face on a daily basis.
4. Blog regularly. Don’t fall into the “I don’t have time to blog” trap. Blogging is marketing, and every business needs to make time to market their services. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, don’t watch “Project Runway” one week (unless of course you have a fashion blog. Then watch it twice.) You should really be blogging at least twice a week, three times when you’re just getting started.
5. Reach new audiences through guest blogging. If you have the opportunity to blog at someone else’s blog, you are immediately introduced to a new audience. If you get another blogger to contribute to your blog, very often they will promote the post to their faithful readers, who will check out your blog. In either case, the cross-promotion is valuable to help you reach an audience who may never have heard of you otherwise.
6. Actively market your blog. If a blog is such a great marketing tool, then it should market itself, right? Well, it needs a little help from you, especially at the beginning. Leverage your social media presence by promoting your new blog posts through tweets and status updates. Use tools like Pingoat to push your post to news aggregators. Use social bookmarking & news tools like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon as appropriate. Leave (intelligent) comments at related blogs and make sure your name links back to your blog post.
7. Funnel blog traffic to your web site. Once you start attracting new traffic to your blog, it’s time to convert those visitors into prospects. You can do this through keyword-rich links to areas of your web site where you offer more information, or directly to a lead generation form. Consider offering a free download from your blog (at flyte’s blog we offer “The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make”) that requires an email registration for collecting leads.

Now it’s your turn: what techniques do you use on your blog that generate leads and get people to start doing business with you? Share your ideas in the comment field below…and who knows, maybe some later readers will follow your link back to your blog!

Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a web design and internet marketing company. He writes flyte’s company blog, is an Expert Blogger at FastCompany.com, and contributes to the Social Media Examiner. He teaches courses on web marketing and social media at the University of Southern Maine, and is the “Tech Guru” on 207, an evening news magazine on the NBC affiliate in Maine. You can stalk him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/therichbrooks.

Justin McHood

As adoption velocity of social applications appears to be increasing at an increasing rate, chances are that you will be hearing more about companies using applications like Foursquare in innovative ways to answer the basic marketing questions:

• What makes people come to my store and buy something?
• What makes them buy more when they are in my store?
• What makes them come back and buy again once they have left?

And when developing a strategy around these basic marketing questions, it may make a lot of sense to start utilizing location based marketing services to your advantage.

What Makes People Come To Your Store And Buy?

Unless your store is in the middle-of-nowhere, your physical storefront has other (usually related) businesses in the immediate vicinity. If you have your location based marketing strategy set up, when someone “checks in” at a nearby store, you will be able to announce your special to them.  Even though they are not checking in at your store. As long as they are in the immediate vicinity, you are allowed to announce your special. Heck, you may even end up stealing customers from your competitor across the street!

What Makes People Buy More Once  They Are In Your Store?

Once a customer is in your store, how do you increase the average order size? By using an attractive offer for customers who are in your store, you can increase your average order size. Buy one, get one half off? Buy two, get one free? These simple offers are age-old marketing offers that have been proven to increase the average order size.

What Makes People Come Back To Your Store?

Game theory is alive and well in location based marketing. You may be surprised what people are willing to do just to become the mayor of somewhere they like – even without a “mayor special”. Add a “mayor special” and watch what happens… your most loyal patrons will end up showing up more frequently just so they can reclaim bragging rights – oh, and maybe as a result of your mayor special.

Is it time for business to pay attention to location based marketing? Probably. Currently it doesn’t cost anything to set up a special on Foursquare – so what do you have to lose?  And if you are still skeptical about setting up a special for your store and not ready to make the leap by yourself – at least one company is willing to help you (for free)… They are searching for businesses who are interested in working with them for a case study and called it “The Foursquare ROI Challenge“.

Justin is a nationally published mortgage expert and is constantly looking for someone to listen to him talk about mortgages. If you are addicted to your Real Estate blog and can’t find a loan officer who can put together mortgage information that is intelligent, informative and engaging you are not alone. He claims many other Real Estate sites are reporting the same problem. The solution? Talk with Justin. It’s free.
Twitter: @jmchood
Website: justinmchood.com

The inspiration behind the panel was why it is a bad idea to inflate or increase your follower numbers just for the sake of a big number.  I was reading Seth Godin’s blog about bullhorns.  Yeah I know he has a way of speaking in metaphors better than anyone.  You have to read the post yourself to get the idea. In the post Seth talk’s about Anil Dash’s recent and often discussed series about being on the suggested user list and why having a million followers on Twitter is actually not really as it seems.  It seems among my brethren in social media and marketing circles that they are shouting from the mountain tops that size doesn’t matter and note that many of which don’t actually have the size spoken of and are not benefiting from Twitter with the same dollars that Kim Kardashian is seeing with her $10,000 per tweet budget.  Are any other people out there with 100 followers making that kind of coin? Not hardly.  Why? Because the size of your bullhorn matters.  If Kardashian get’s 10K how much would Oprah get?  I shudder to think of that amount.

I can remember when people like Jason Calacanis and others were begging to be on the list and others were upset they were not included.  It’s about the numbers.  We all know that size doesn’t matter (it doesn’t right?).  If size doesn’t matter why do companies only want bloggers that have huge traffic numbers, and only pay attention to Twitter people that have large followings?  It is because they can put a metric on it and sell it.

Apparently, it is all about the Twilebrity?

Until we come up with a better metric or until we can stop “measuring”, size will always seem to matter.  To the people that are writing the checks and paying for Tweets or making lists of the tops in Twitter that has the most traffic it does matter.  Now, where did I put that stupid bullhorn?  Sorry Seth, apparently that is the game we are playing and until the rules change, those like you that have the largest will be the winners.

We are implementing some early stages here of a new look and feel and we will be unfolding those shortly.  I am not sure of the application or whether there will be any significant changes other than certainly our UI and the simplicity of the blog to gear up for our new push for content.  Good job on the changes over at Mashable guys, I am jealous of the coolness factor!

UPDATE:  I knew I was going to forget something important, like the name of the company that did their redesign.  Here is their announcement.  Great job by the people over at nclud.