Top B2B marketers know that there are a couple primary objectives:  Building new business and becoming a thought leader. According a recent Economics Intelligence Unit study, 56% of B2B marketing execs state that “positioning our company as a thought leader is a top objective”.  1/3 of those who responded also stated that they felt thought leadership was the key to marketing their services over the next 5 years. So why is...

A lot of companies that get involved in social media marketing become obsessed with having a plan and doing it right.  That plan is supposed to contain all the strategies and actions that will bring about the desired results.  A good portion of the plan is tied in with a financial forecast that a business owner or company uses to communicate their planned results. The entire planning process is setup to encompass every little step along...

You have to wonder how the slimming and trimming of marketing messages over the years, and the medium in which we operate, is having an affect on the way people think and perceive data.  Is the Twitter/IM/Microblog/Minivideo age pushing us to a place where our customers (and even us) are becoming less capable of committing to deeper thought and marketing content. Nicholas Carr spoke on this in an interview last month – check out this...

What your audience can’t see can hurt you. Here’s some proof – I had a recent conversation with a long time client who had been discussing social media marketing with me, and was curious how he could invest more into Twitter to gain a larger following.  We discussed a few tidbits of information and common tactics before I looked through their current marketing strategy, including the website – I was a little amazed that nothing...

There is a vast difference between simply deciding to do something and knowing what to do.  That difference separates the winning team from the losing team.  There are simply too many people and organizations that jump on the social media wagon simply because everyone else is doing it. If you simply do what others are doing then you move from being a strategic thought leader to a lemming.  By coping and following the herd, you have the...