Online Marketing Blog

Kipp Bodnar of HubSpot

This post is one of a series of liveblogs from the 2010 MIMA Summit.

B2B social media can be surprisingly successful with a specific focus on lead generation.  If social media is to be taken seriously for B2B by marketing decision makers, it needs to maintain a focus on business objectives and driving sales vs. “fluff”.

B2B companies are actually in a much better position to use social media as a marketing channel than B2C companies.  They often have a much clearer expectation for what a customer does and what they want.

B2B companies also have deep internal expertise.  It’s not uncommon for top B2B companies to employ thought leaders in their specific industry.  However, there’s a solid argument that for many B2B companies, online marketing and social media might not be a fit.

This post is one of a series of liveblogs from the 2010 MIMA Summit.

Web Analytics is an excellent way to ensure your marketing efforts are not in vain. However, looking at Analytics without understanding user behavior may leave you treading water instead of creating a wake your competitors will fear.

One way to take your methods of measurement to the next level is to combine Analytics with User Experience (UX) information. What you stand to gain can be great whether you dip a toe or cannon ball into blended analytic waters.

To make sure you don’t sink, first understand that Analytics will tell you what’s happening on the site. User Experience Research then helps you understand why it’s happening by gaining insight into the behaviors and motivation of visitors.

Marketers like formulas and what better metaphor for successful online marketing with blogs than a recipe?

At the upcoming BlogWorldExpo conference in Las Vegas, I’ll be giving my recipe for success using Social Media and SEO in two ways:

First, I’ll be doing a solo presentation on Social Media SEO, giving bloggers a tested methodology for making the most of their content and social networks.

This presentation will focus on the value of combining SEO best practices with social media marketing to amplify the reach and traffic for blogs. I’ll outline and share examples of how to  build a Cycle of Social Media Interaction.  Specifics will include:

• How bloggers can leverage keyword research to develop a blog editorial calendar
• Best practices on creating and promote optimized content

With every online marketing channel and discipline, there must be tools to make the task of marketing more efficient and effective. Social Media Marketing is no different. Over the past 6-9 months, I’ve been researching and reviewing a variety of social media management tools that help with everything from source network connections to campaign & social content management to monitoring & measurement. While there numerous tools that manage single platforms (like Twitter) this list includes services that manage multiple social network accounts, content and measurement.

At some point we’ll do more with individual reviews, but in the meantime, here is a list of 22 different social media marketing management tools, platforms and services to help manage and scale your online marketing efforts on the social web:

The Winning Tweets from TopRank  Online Marketing Ticket Giveaway for the 2010 MIMA Summit:

@danmonfre: Justin Bieber is NOT performing at this year’s #mimasummit He is being replaced by @garyvee and @baratunde http://tprk.us/mima-2010 @TopRank

@panelectric: RT! Help a geek win a seat with the cool kids @TopRank @garyvee@baratunde #mimasummit http://tprk.us/mima-2010 #SinceWereBeingHonest

Congratulations! See the Tweets that received the most votes at:  Winner: 2010 MIMA Summit Free Ticket from @TopRank

The 2010 MIMA Summit being held next week 9/27-28 will feature keynote speaker Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and author of Crush It! (review). Once I heard @Garyvee was speaking in Minnesota I hoped to do a pre-event interview, but it didn’t work out.  Two years ago, Geoff Livingston introduced me to Gary at Blog World Expo and while I wasn’t familiar with who he was yet, my first impression was that he had a lot of energy and could pass for Joe Pesci’s nephew.

Social sharing buttons have evolved a lot over the past few years. We went from basic text links to images, and now we have interactive buttons. That’s all great except it can be a pain to add them all to your blog and get them to display nicely.

That’s where ShareDaddy comes in. Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, has created a single plugin that integrates all the major sharing buttons. There is no need to install multiple plugins, mess with template code, or worry about the buttons not lining up right in your theme.

ShareDaddy Supports:

• Faecbook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Email
• Print

It’s configurable to so you can:

• Show only the buttons you want.
• Drag and drop the order of the buttons.

B2B Marketing offers a variety of choices for reaching customers wherever they are in the buying cycle.  Make no mistake, buyer behaviors towards information discovery, consumption and sharing online have been significantly affected by changes in social technology.

At a conference I recently spoke at, an attendee made a statement that social media only works for consumer marketing. The reality many marketers forget, is that B2B buyers are people too.  They have the same social needs and influences as anyone else. Social media, in my opinion and experience, is a great fit for business to business marketing.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and on the social web, that flattery goes one step further, often in the form of a mash-up. Google has launched a variety of services to much fanfare by the media and yawns from the masses (Google Wave, Buzz).

However, the recent implementation of Google Instant has resulted in a number of “instant” implementations on other types of search. Twitter has tempted us with the promise of real-time, all the time and Google’s effort at real-time results has resonated with a number of developers. How much it has resonated with the searching public at large, is not yet being disclosed.

Check out the following Instant Search applications and see which you like best:

Even though a company sees the value of social media, it doesn’t mean the organization or its members are ready for it. Have you started something you really weren’t ready for? Sometimes it works out and other times it doesn’t.

In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit from social media marketing, there must be a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications. One of the most effective ways TopRank Online Marketing has found to assess a company’s awareness, capabilities and resources for social media marketing is to conduct an external audit and an internal survey.

With the growing momentum of content marketing, a lot of companies get hung up on making investments in quality articles, white papers, videos and other media only to find they’re not getting much traction. I’ve heard it time and time again at conferences in discussions with brand marketers where they’ve invested in creating great content and digital assets but are frustrated at the lack of reach.

Over the past 6 1/2 years of blogging, followed by contributing articles, posting videos, photos, PowerPoint slides, reports in PDF format and other types of content publishing for our own agency and for clients, here are a few guidelines that stand out for helping content get better reach.

While in Hong Kong I thought it might be interesting to start doing videos that offer tips against an interesting backdrop. There are so many amazing conversations and topics discussed at the events I travel to, why not combine that somehow?

Watch this Content Marketing Optimization video to learn the simple, yet highly effective, method of incorporating search and social media keywords to guide content marketing optimization efforts. Combine optimized social media content with promotions to increase the traffic and sharing that will provide subsequent data to mine even more effective content ideas.

Please let me know if you like this format of content. I’ve been doing more video interviews of other people in the search and social media marketing industry lately but I haven’t used video to share my own ideas. In the interest of making this blog even more interesting and useful, your feedback is greatly appreciated!

I’ve been connected via the social web with Brent Payne for several years and we finally met in person at SES Hong Kong. Working for the Tribune companies as Director of Search Engine Optimization, Brent has been able to make a significant impact on news web sites like the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times.

In this interview, Brent shares his experiences with how optimizing news content for search engines works as well as the challenges and results from training journalists on how to use keywords to improve traffic to news content.

If you work with a media company or online publisher, do you train writers, reporters, editors and journalists on how to optimize content with keywords? Have you tried and had great results? Have you tried and met strong resistance?