November 18, 2010 By 2 Comments

Born to B2B Social

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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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August 6, 2010 By 14 Comments

Google Wave & B2B Marketing

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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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July 26, 2010 By 22 Comments

Is Your Social Media Strategy Unique?

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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: , , , , , , ,
June 15, 2010 By 4 Comments

What Do People Want Online?

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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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June 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Mobile Net IS the Net

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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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Filed Under: communication strategy, content marketing, mobile Tagged With: , , , ,
May 8, 2010 By 1 Comment

Fremtidstrender, Oslo, 03. juni

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I‘ll be speaking in Oslo on June 3 at a conference about future trends and challenges for Nordic businesses.

If you’re in Oslo and are interested in coming along, you can register with Positiv.no.

The program is available (pdf) here.

The conference is in Norwegian.

Jeg kommer til å snakke om: Nye medier- Fremtidens krav til bruk av nye medier

  • Hvordan pÃ¥virker sosiale medier vÃ¥r kommunikasjon?
  • Hvordan skape bedre kunderelasjoner ved hjelp av Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook og andre sosiale medier?
  • Hvordan kommunisere bedre online med dine kunder og ansatte?
  • Hvilke faktorer vil bli viktige ved bruk av nettkommunikasjon i tiden fremover?
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March 30, 2010 By 28 Comments

10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Corporate Blog

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Like you, I want to drive traffic to my website. Not just trickles: I want stacks and stacks of visitors! And then some.

Here are ten of the things that I do to generate traffic; maybe they can help you as you seek to drive oodles of traffic to your own site:

1. Blog with WordPress

Ever since I made the switch from ExpressionEngine to WordPress and Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme (no affiliate link) I’ve seen my traffic rise and rise. Sure, it was a bit messy shifting blogging tool, and I lost a year’s worth of posts, but I learned my lesson and now make weekly backups. And I definitely don’t regret changing.

traffic

Still after more traffic?

WordPress is an easy blog system to use. There are stacks of plugins to help you do whatever you want with your installation and since the Scribe WP plugin (no affiliate) for optimised copywriting appeared on the scene I’m even happier. I’ve seen my site perform better in Google and that’s brought in traffic. A massive 600 percent more traffic than when I used ExpressionEngine.

If you don’t take my word for it, the Top 100 bloggers can’t be wrong.

2. Blog Often

Google seems to like it if you blog regularly. Of course, people come only back regularly if they like what you’re doing, but I’ve also started seeing my posts turn up higher than they “should” in Google since I increased from 2-3 posts a week compared with 4-5 times.

Although it can be tough to write four or five posts a week I find that a bit of forward thinking, a bit of planning, a bit of inspiration from other people and some occasional hasty scribbling seems to keep things ticking over.
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March 2, 2010 By 7 Comments

Business Blogs RIP?

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Mark W. Schaefer's Grow is a MUST for marcom bloggers

Mark W. Schaefer’s post yesterday – New report suggests corporate blogging may be at saturation point– really bugged me. In a good way! Actually, the apparent demise of business blogging has been on my mind ever since, during dog walks and working out at the gym, and I’ve been struggling to find the best way to respond.

In the end I decided to abandon a hefty second comment on Mark’s blog and continue the conversation here.

The Back Story

If you haven’t got time to go back and read Mark’s post (and you should really go back and read it!), he notes that Fortune 500 companies seem to have got their head around Twitter, but really aren’t pushing business blogs to the next level.

Mark wonders if corporate blogs are falling by the wayside because companies struggle “to be responsive and authentic” when they have to get everything reviewed by the legal department.

He then posts some great questions – that I’m now going to answer:

A Blog-to-Blog Interview

Mark Schaefer: What is the role of a blog in the corporate communications structure?

Jon Buscall: I think business blogs are incredibly important to corporate communications. First and foremost, businesses should be listening to blogs! There’s been so much talk of brand monitoring with Twitter that the conversation about blogs has dropped away.

Blogs are still incredibly important to corporations because bloggers still write about what’s going on. 140 words on Twitter doesn’t give you the whole story.

Chris Brogan’s got a great post on Growing Bigger Ears. Corporates need to do that and remember that the blogosphere is still where conversations are taking place.

Blogs are also significant because they offer corporations a great way of showing who they really are, instead of just telling us.

Here in Sweden SaltÃ¥ Kvarn’s business blog shows that they really are passionate people that care about ecological food rather than just trying to brand this with advertising. I love that about them.

But business blogs aren’t just about showing who we are or what we can do; they’re incredibly important for crisis management. Sure, you can achieve similar results with Twitter and Facebook Pages, but the structure of a blog allows you more space to respond effectively.

After Southwest Airline’s handling of the “Kevin Smith debacle“, I would have got them to make much more use of their blog than they did. They could have used it to apologise, laugh at themselves for being such idiots with some cool content, and worked hard to make up some of the ground they lost. Still, the fact they had a blog allowed them to tell their side of the story. Every business needs that kind of channel.

Mark Schaefer: What are the benefits versus the cost of approvals and the time needed from executives to sponsor the work?
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Filed Under: blogging, communication strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
February 28, 2010 By 4 Comments

Online Communications Consulting

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If you’re not getting the right message across to the people that matter – whether it’s customers, potential clients or colleagues – you might want to take a look at the way you’re communicating.

Communication is a massive part of daily business, but what with the rapid pace at which things are changing online, you might be missing the opportunity to communicate effectively with the people that matter if you aren’t making the most out of the tools that are available online.

Blogs

I’m a massive believer in the value business blogs can bring to your strategic communications.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed firsthand how they can:

  • generate regular traffic to your website
  • improve how you perform in Google search results because they’re pretty much SEO-friendly – straight out of the box
  • help show customers who you and what you do
  • give you a channel that’s easily helps you publish and promote text, video and pictures
  • enable you to communicate directly with customers through comments
  • make crisis management easier

If you’re looking to find out more about business blogging as a communications strategy, please download my free ebook.

Also, check out my 10 Essential Posts for Business Bloggers or Six Must Haves for Business Bloggers
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February 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Is Your Business Social?

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smug fellow

Are you smug about your social media efforts?

With all the talk of social media in recent months a lot of companies have jumped on the social media bandwagon in an attempt to kick their online marketing and communications into the twenty-first century.

Maybe your business is like this?

You know: you’ve got a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account; you’re maybe posting pictures to Flickr, and monitoring realtime streams for mentions of your brand.

Trouble is: Just having the gear, doesn’t make you the belle of the ball. The tools per se don’t make you social: it’s what you do with them.

Successful online marketing with social media is about your mindset, and the communications strategy you use!

10 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Business

Do you:

  • never answer questions on Twitter just to be helpful?
  • forget to respond to comments on your Facebook Fan Page the same day they’re posted?
  • find yourself erasing the comments that don’t make you look good?
  • conveniently forget to be honest when you mess up in public?
  • police every move your people make on social media?
  • always – bottom line – focus on selling more stuff
  • jump in with social media tools before thinking about your communication goals and desired outcomes?
  • forget to measure success and failure and fail to learn from it?
  • feel insecure when promoting other people’s services and products online?
  • never bother to look for new and emerging channels ?

Bonus Question?

  • Do you think you’ve got social media totally nailed?

So what about you?

If you’re answering YES to lots of these, you might want to think again about your online marketing and communications strategy.

Maybe you’re missing the point. Or maybe you’re not quite seeing the return on investment (ROI) you thought you’d be getting once your business went social.

Go on: take another look at your online marketing and how you’re using tools like Facebook, corporate blogs, Twitter and so on. Is your business really social ?

Image:FlickrCC

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