B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity

The B2B Marketing Blog

12 Lessons I’ve Learned from Writing 1,000 Blog Posts

by

Revised February 17, 2017

After writing 60+ additional blog posts since October, I find these lessons even more important today than back then. 

In Taekwondo, students are taught they must perform each kick at least 1,000 times before they can safely say they have learned the kick perfectly.

I’m not sure I craft “perfect” blog posts even after writing 1,000 of them—but I’ve certainly learned a few things.

lessons learned from writing 1000 blog posts(For the record: I wrote 440 posts on the Blogger-based WebMarketCentral blog between 2005 and 2010, and have now published 560 posts here on Webbiquity. Hence, 440+560=1,000. It’s true there have been guest posts published here, but those have been balanced out by posts I’ve written for other blogs.)

Here are a dozen things I’ve learned and observations I’ve drawn from writing 1,000 blog posts.
[Read more…]

B2B Marketing Trends 2016-2020: Social Media Breakfast Wrap

by

What trends will drive B2B marketing over the next three to four years? Where should savvy B2B marketers invest their resources to optimize results over the next few years?

Those were among the key questions I had the opportunity to address in a recent presentation at the Social Media Breakfast – Minneapolis St. Paul (#SMBMSP90 on Twitter).

B2B Marketing Trends 2016 to 2020The genesis for the presentation was the research done a few months ago in conjunction with Tony Karrer, asking the expert B2B blogging contributors to the B2B Marketing Zone one simple question as shown to the right.

The initial product of that research was the eBook, B2B Marketing Trends for 2016: 25 Thought Leaders Weigh In, previously summarized here.

The presentation detailed trends within marketing analytics, influencer and advocacy outreach, and marketing technology. But the biggest trend (both in terms of input from influential B2B bloggers and recent research) is [Read more…]

10 Top Marketing Thought Leaders in Social Media

by

If you were asked to name the top thought leaders in marketing today–the 10 marketers you’d definitely advise others to follow on social media–how would you proceed?

You’d probably start by looking at those you’re connected with on the major social networks, then do some additional research. Perhaps you’d look at existing “top” lists from other sites. You’d develop a “long list” of worthy experts, then gradually narrow it down based on followers, level of engagement, quality of posts, and other factors. You’d carefully develop your final list, possibly using a method like pairwise ranking.

Top 10 Social Marketing ProsBut—what if you had to answer on the spot? What if you had to respond immediately, or within just a few minutes? You’d forget some important names, of course, but your answers would reveal those you keep top of mind.

If you’re up for it, try this now; spend no more than five minutes listing your top 10—then come back to this post.

This recently happened to me. Below is my list in response to the question:

“Tell me the top ten marketing people you would follow on social media, those people that you think are the top ‘thought leaders’ in the marketing space today?”

Cheryl Burgess would unquestionably be on the list. In addition to being an expert on enterprise b2b marketing, she’s the co-author (with Mark Burgess) of The Social Employee, and the authority on how to inspire employee social media advocacy inside large organizations.

Ann Smarty knows SEO inside and out, and is the guru-ess of online tools. She also hosts the highly popular weekly Viral Content Buzz Twitter chat.

Meghan M. Biro is an acknowledged thought leader at the intersection of HR, social media and marketing.

Carla Johnson is one of the top experts on enterprise content marketing. Plus, she went to grade school in a one-room schoolhouse, making her ascent all the more impressive (or perhaps that just explains it?).

Robert Rose is another top resource on enterprise content marketing, co-author with Carla Johnson of Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, and an original member of the Lebron team.

Jeff Bullas — does anyone know more about blogging than Jeff? He’s one of those guys who seems to defy the laws of time and space by being able to consistently churn out bookmark-worthy blog posts, speak at events all over the planet, write ebooks, and still engage actively and prolifically on social media.

Glen Gilmore has long been known as an author and expert on the intersection of social media and the law. But not content with that, he’s more recently emerged as a top authority on the Internet of Things (IoT) as well.

J-P De Clerck is a “digital business and marketing strategist” whose expertise stands in the crossroads of content, search, and social media. Plus he’s from Belgium, so along with Jeff Bullas (Australia) he keeps this list from being too U.S.-centric.

Gini Dietrich is a top PR pro, author of Spin Sucks and co-author of Marketing in the Round (incidentally a great primer on building a team to execute a web presence optimization strategy), and tweeter of consistently good stuff.

Wendy Marx is a brilliant b2b PR strategist whose B2B PR Sense blog is a must-read for any marketing or PR pro seeking wisdom and insights into b2b content marketing and social media.

In the moments after rattling off this list, my first thought was: not bad, for a group quickly compiled off the top of my head.

But my second thought was: wow, I missed a lot of important and worthy names!

How could I have left off some of the most engaging social media marketing and PR pros like Harry Hoover, Judy Bellem and Jayme Soulati?

Or within just the PR realm, thought leaders and key influencers like Deb Weinstein, Lisa Buyer, Jeff Domansky and Arik Hanson?

In the realm of content marketing, Michael Brenner, Neal Schaffer, Rebecca Lieb, Heidi Cohen and Ann Handley are certainly worthy additions. As are, getting more granular, experts in developing b2b buyer personas, like Ardath Albee and Tony Zambito.

Closer to home, I could have highlighted the fact that some of the smartest people in social media marketing are fellow Minnesotans, including Lee Odden, Marty Weintraub and Angie Schottmuller.

How about CMOs and others focused on leadership, like Patrick Strother, Tony Karrer, Chris Schenk, Kent Huffman, Eric Fletcher, and Margaret Molloy?

Or leaders in academics on social media, such as Gary Schirr, Mike Johansson and Dorie Clark?

Even at that, there are deserving names left off the list.

If I’m ever again asked to name a list of the top 10 social media marketers, I think I’ll answer—I can’t name 10. But I can give you 75 or so.

Who’s on your “top of mind” top 10 list?

5 Reasons I’m Thankful for Social Media

by

With the annual celebration of Thanksgiving upon us here in the U.S., many people pause to think about what they’re thankful for: family, friends, Netflix, Tom Brady leaving the New England Patriots…

I’m thankful for all of those things too of course, but also for the development and growth of social media. Here are a few reasons why:

Social media makes it easy to reconnect with old friends and co-workers. How did we do this before? There were ways: reunions, phone calls…but most often, we just didn’t. Now, social media tools like Facebook and LinkedIn make it easy and (usually) non-awkward. I was recently friended on Facebook by a guy I went to high school with. Back then, I thought he was kind of a jerk quite frankly. I discovered he’s now a cancer survivor and a completely different person. It happens.

I’ve written recommendations for folks I worked with in the past and had some nice ones provided for me as well. Old connections also often lead to new ones: I’ve introduced people who should know each other and been introduced to others who have become mentors, clients, or friends.

Social media makes it easy to connect with new people who share your interests…anywhere on earth. Before social networks (and even more so before email became widespread), it was difficult to make and maintain acquaintances with professional peers or people with similar interests in other parts of the country, much less the world.

And second-level connections (getting to know the people whom the people you know know) were even more difficult to make. Now I routinely trade updates and information with smart marketers and other interesting people across North America as well as in the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, South Africa, India, Thailand, Malaysia, The Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and elsewhere.

Just a few of the cool people I likely never would have gotten to know without social media include Shelly Kramer, Judy Bellem, Jennifer Kane, Marissa Pick, Ardath Albee, Frank Strong, Neal Schaffer, Tony Karrer (my cofounder of the B2B Marketing Zone and Social Media Informer), or Casey Allen.

Nor would I ever have been recognized on various top lists from organizations like BuzzSumo, Marketing Insider Group, or Onalytica.

Social media is a meritocracy (mostly). Early in my career I worked for a company that produced digital prepress equipment for printing companies, and we had a huge poster in the office that read:

“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.”

If you were wealthy, fortunate, obnoxious (or in a few cases, talented) enough to be involved in publishing, you had a voice. Others, for the most part, didn’t. The Internet opened things up a bit, but creating websites (a dozen years ago) was hard unless you were a programmer. Blogging opened things up considerably more. Social media has blown the gates wide open. Anyone with an interesting point of view and knowledge to share gets to be an influential star, at least in his or her corner of the social mediasphere. Blowhards (usually) tend to get called out and ignored.

Social media is fantastic for research and learning. Want to know what your customers and prospects are thinking? Sure, surveys and focus groups still have their place, but you can learn a lot from what they’re saying in social media circles. At the very least, you’ll be able to craft more intelligent, informed questions for your survey.

Your competitor recently released a new product? Cool. Their press release, and perhaps a puff piece in an industry trade pub where they advertise, are no longer the only sources of information about it. You can now, easily, find out what other people are saying. Real people. Customers, prospects, thought leaders, people who have some expertise on the product but aren’t part of, or paid by, the company.

Want to know how to perform a certain task or process? Social media can not only lead you to the answer, but let you know which alternative answer is probably best based on the level of social influence of the writer.

Social media makes marketing more fun. A dialog is more enjoyable and interesting than a monologue. Sure, social media makes marketing a bit messier (because marketing and PR people no longer control the messaging) and more challenging (thought leadership content is more difficult to write than sales copy), but engaging in conversations gives marketers a direct line to prospects—enabling them to craft messaging that really resonates with their audience. Social media also provides a variety of near real-time methods for measuring audience response, so marketers know more quickly what works and what doesn’t. You can’t get that from a print ad.

Got your own reasons to be thankful? Leave a comment to share.

Content Aggregation: The Future of (B2B and Consumer) Media?

by

“Traditional” media is struggling. Weekly news magazines are declining, newspapers are shriveling, and industry trade magazines are downsizing. Meanwhile, the blogosphere continues to expand and pundits like Joe Pulizzi have declared that we are all publishers now. What do these trends mean for the future of news gathering and information delivery?

David Koretz offered one vision recently on MediaPost, writing:

The news organizations of tomorrow will no longer be loud-mouthed pundits espousing a barely informed worldview. Nor will they still be large monoliths attempting to maintain news bureaus worldwide. There is simply no cost-effective way for them to be on scene in every city, town, or village where the next big news story may break. Instead, successful media will become aggregators and editors of content, rather than creators. The smart money will build a technology to gather, sort, and filter stories from every corner of the world, and couple it with smart and thoughtful humans to do the editing.

Online content aggregation is as old as the Internet itself, beginning with AOL. Examples range from Google News and Yahoo! to topic-focused niche sites such as (using social media as an example) Social Media Today and Social Media Informer. Technology to “scrape” websites and republish content (legally or not) has also been around for some time, but until recently, doing content aggregation well required either a massive investment in infrastructure (like Moreover) or a unworkable level of manual effort.

Social Media Aggregation OptionsNew tools, however, are bringing sophisticated content aggregation and curation within reach of midsized enterprises. These technologies include Browse My Stuff (which powers both the B2B Marketing Zone and Social Media Informer) and Paper.li, which enables users to create custom online “newspapers” based on a Twitterer and his/her followers, a hashtag subject or a Twitter list. For example, it took me just minutes to create my own newspaper organizing tweets and links from the smart group of local Minneapolis Twitters I follow. The site also makes it easy to promote your newspaper through Twitter and Facebook. Set up properly, this could be an easy yet powerful way for an organization to create and distribute a social newsletter on the fly.

Paper.li is free but doesn’t offer any filtering options for results. Browse My Stuff is fee-based for sponsors, free for bloggers and offers more professional publishing power.

While the use of such technologies is limited only by the imagination, there are three types of entities that could clearly benefit from content aggregation tools: large brands/companies, online publishers and PR firms.

Enterprises: organizations large, midsized or small can aggregate blog posts about their company or industry in one spot as a service to their customers, prospects and other interested stakeholders. For example, the iPhone got huge social media exposure when first released. Apple could create an aggregation site to pull in blog posts and reviews about the product. It’s a win-win-win: the company gets increased exposure; potential buyers get a one-stop site where they can read all independent views of the product; and the bloggers writing about it get traffic. A smaller vendor with fewer social media mentions could nonetheless position themselves as a thought leader in their field by aggregating industry-related posts. It’s particularly important for smaller companies to recognize that they don’t need to produce all of their own material; content written by others can be very helpful to their prospects’ decision making. Direct Message Lab has increased its exposure by sponsoring Social Media Informer.

Publishers: traditional news organizations are losing clout and their audiences to citizen journalists and bloggers with deep expertise, and industry trade magazines face declining influence due to the explosion in content marketing. The cost of maintaining large news and content producing/gathering  staffs is becoming more difficult to justify and monetize. Content aggregation offers publishers a way to maintain their position as destination sites, serve readers a larger selection of news at a lower cost, and incentivize bloggers to contribute.

PR firms: as the influence of bloggers increases at the expense of traditional news outlets, PR firms are increasingly pitching bloggers with their “story ideas” about clients, in some cases cleverly, in others more ham-handed. Even many writers of relatively small blogs are now overwhelmed with such pitches. Content aggregation offers PR firms a way to build relationships with bloggers, increase exposure for their clients through more social media coverage, increase billings by providing clients with a differentiated offering, and serve the market by collecting relevant, independent third-party content on one site.

News and content “consumers” no longer want to rely on one or just a few sources for information; they want to hear a variety of voices. Yet they are time-strapped and still value convenience. Bloggers and content marketers want traffic. Publishers want eyeballs. Content aggregation and curation will become increasingly popular as a way to give everyone what they want.

For more on this topic, check out Automated Filtering vs Human-Powered Curation from Tony Karrer.

Recent Posts

Categories