Born to B2B Social

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November 18, 2010 By 2 Comments

Welcome to social media marketing

It doesn’t matter if you’re churning out great content for your B2B blog. If no one is reading you, you’re going nowhere. No prospects. No leads. No nothing at all.

Lead Generation

Pay-per-click has traditionally been one way of getting visitors to your website and still has a role to play. If not, Google wouldn’t still be pushing so-called “sponsored links”.

It maybe beneficial though, that as the owner of a small-medium business, to also consider using social media channels to win some traffic and generate really meaningful leads. That’s not because pay-per-click doesn’t work. It’s just that with all those chunky costs you’ve got, pay-per-click isn’t always cheap. And anyway, given the lengthy B2B purchase cycle, social media lead generation might actually be a more effective path to go down.

Word of (Digital) Mouth

Just as we listen to our friends when they recommend or refer us to a business, the same goes for social media connections on sites like Twitter or Facebook.

Even the big guns are witnessing the power of social. For example, this week, Martin Clarke, who runs Mail Online (British newspaper The Daily Mail’s website), revealed that 10 percent of the site’s UK traffic is generated by referrals from Facebook.

According to Clarke, who was speaking at the Society of Editors annual conference, only Google delivers more traffic to their site!

A number of our clients are also witnessing similar figures. At a meeting today, I was going over some stats with a client that revealed Facebook sends them over one third of their traffic – second only to Google.

Make Social Work for You in Your Area

Forget dreaming of business from Chicago, Oslo or Cannes, as a small business with local knowledge and local contacts, you should also be using social media to target local people – especially if you own a bricks and mortar store. But even in the B2B space there’s plenty of room to connect on social channels with other local businesses.

In a country like Sweden, were we don’t really have many people (approx 9 million), B2Bs have taken advantage of the Twitter hashtag #svpt to connect with other B2Bs, generating a local dialogue of sorts.
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Google Wave & B2B Marketing

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August 6, 2010 By 14 Comments

google_wave_logoWe were really excited at Jontus Media when we first heard about Google Wave. That video on YouTube blew us away and we imagined Google would be taking online communications to the next level, making it easier to collaborate over the web.

We got our invites really early on and gave it a whirl, trying it first out as a collaborative note-taking space at a Stockholm conference.

But as we tried to get our heads around it, it quickly became apparent that the product itself just wasn’t what we were looking for. After looking at other options we settled on Basecamp, which makes working as a virtual agency a blast, and haven’t looked back.

Google Wave – A Marketing Lesson

As you might have heard, Google put the final nail in the Wave coffin announcing that it was killing it earlier this week. I must admit it came as a bit of a surprise given the resources that had been put into building the Wave brand.

It was supposed to radically change the way we communicate online: Email 2.0 for millennials and other interested parties.

But after all the publicity, the hype and the interest generated around the product – people were paying for beta invites on Ebay, for goodness sake!– Google didn’t follow through.

Development seemed to stall despite the release of a few Wave templates; and it didn’t play nicely with Google Docs.

And then Google really shot themselves in the foot by releasing another highly promoted online communications tool: Google Buz.
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Is Your Social Media Strategy Unique?

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July 26, 2010 By 22 Comments

So you read up on social media strategy until you’re blue in the face. Then off you sail and create a Twitter profile, a Facebook Page, a blog, a YouTube channel, a flavour-of-the-month profile. Then provide “unique content”, “meaningful resources”, ebooks, webinars and whitepapers.

You then promote the hell out whatever meaningful content you’ve put (hatched?) together across all your networks with countless tweets, comments and “helpful” retweets by the tribe you’ve been working hard to amass over the last three months.

You then sit back, breathe momentarily, and then hope like hell it yields results.

Haven’t we seen it all before?

Trouble is I’m personally getting a bit jaded by the same old social media strategy that seems to be populating the communication channels right now. Everywhere I look businesses – guided by social media gurus or not – are walking down the same path. Everyone seems to be using the same kind of approach and the only difference seems to be the shade of wallpaper on their Twitter background or the design of their blog. Sure, a few people try the odd trick of bombarding you with DMs or continually retweeting old stuff, but on any given day I see about 90 percent of businesses using the same social media strategy. And as a potential customer I’m bored.

That’s why the Old Spice campaign, which is practically now a social media marketing legend, was so refreshing. [Read more...]

Filed Under: communication strategy, content marketing, social media Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What Do People Want Online?

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June 15, 2010 By 4 Comments

If you’re setting out to develop your online marketing and communications strategy you should ask yourself an important question: What do people want online?

what do people want onlineThere’s no point filling a website, blog or twitter account with endless sparkly online content unless you actually know what your audience is looking for.

Understanding Consumer’s Motives for Being Online

One of the most significant reasons for web-usage is that people get online because they want to accomplish something. They are goal-orientated in the sense that they want:

  • information
  • help
  • ideas
  • inspiration
  • examples
  • entertainment

and so on.
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The Mobile Net IS the Net

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June 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We’re used to thinking of the emergence of online communication in stages:

  • the birth of the Net
  • the shift to Web 2.0
  • the emergence of the mobile net.

But it’s time to kick the distinction between the Net and mobile into touch and truly accept that the Net is mobile.

Quite frankly, there is no distinction between the Net and Mobile anymore. At least not here in Sweden. The Net is mobile. It’s readily available all over the city on 3G and 4G as well as wifi. And we’re consuming the Net like never before.

mobile online content marketing Take a ride on the T-bana in Stockholm and you won’t see us Stockholmers surfing on netbooks and laptops. That’s what’s going on in cafés across the city. On the metro, however, everyone seems to have an iPhone or Android and is browsing online, checking their mail, tweeting, or checking into Foursquare between stations. It does’t matter who you look at: teens and business people have smart phones everywhere you look. They’re on Foursquare, Formspring.me, Facebook, and various Swedish social media sites. 24/7.

Online is Mobile Now

When it comes to online content marketing we’re now talking about online content in a web browser but also on a smart phone.

So stop sticking your heard in the sand. You’re gong to have to embrace mobile if you’re going to reach your audience as just another part of your online campaign.

Social media sites like Twitter are great for short conversations on the go, but it’s getting to the stage where you’re at a restaurant and someone says something or has a question and someone else is checking it online. On their phone. Even the choice of your restaurant may be decided by mobile access to the Net.

“Hey, lets eat Italian! Anyone know of a good restaurant round here,” you might say.
“Foursquare says Big Italian Restaurant on Stockholms vägen is great! Six people recommend it,” says someone else.
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