Online Marketing Blog

What happens on the internet in 60 seconds? 1,500 Blog Posts, 60 New Blogs, 98,000 Tweets, 20,000 Posts on Tumblr, 600+ New Videos Uploaded to YouTube, 6,600 Images Uploaded to Flickr, 79,000+ Facebook Wall Posts and over 695,000 Facebook Status Updates. What does all that activity have in common? It’s content, it’s social and presents a ripe opportunity for optimization.

Content Marketing is a hot topic and deservedly so.  According to an AOL Nielsen study in May 2011, 53% of all time on the internet is content consumption. In the U.S. alone, 27 million pieces of content are shared per day.  In the Junta42 and MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing study, it was reported that 90% of marketers use content marketing and 51% plan to budget more than the previous year.

As companies seek to understand where and how social media fits, one of the key questions asked is: How can you move beyond branding with social media and directly affect business outcomes?

At Dreamforce this week, Robert Wollan – Global Managing Partner for Accenture CRM, attempted to answer that question with his presentation: “Making $ocial Media Pay – With (Really) Fast Followers.

Most C-level execs are finding that traditional channels are not delivering the results that they had in the past. At the same time, they’re trying to capture new growth potential through disruptive forces and emerging channels like social. Conversations need to happen about social in the boardroom and at C-levels in order to affect real change in the organization.

One of the big questions in the social media marketing space is whether social media is the place for B2B marketing. As companies begin to understand for every B2B company, there’s also a “C” aka people behind the business (@garyvee).

Once B2B companies realize that buyers discover, consume and share information on social channels just like any other “human” they seek to understand how social participation and marketing fits.

The session, “B2B Social Media: Not As Different As You Think” at Dreamforce in San Francisco aimed to help answer that question with presentations from three B2B Social Media Marketing practitioners. The speakers included: Gordon Evans from salesforce.com, Brian Stokoe from Caterpillar, and Maura Ginty from Autodesk.