Koroberi Blog

As the New Year rolls around, everyone inevitably compiles the usual list of resolutions: lose weight, eat better, Tweet more often, watch TV less, etc. Here at Koroberi, we’ve compiled a short list of resolutions that we feel will bring more value to our clients in 2010. Below are my media and marketing resolutions for the New Year.

1. Don’t let clients engage in social media without them knowing why.

Too often, B2B companies see social media as simply creating a Facebook page, adding a Twitter account or uploading videos to YouTube. It’s our job to help them see the big picture. Identifying key objectives, understanding customer behavior and devising a detailed strategy are paramount to any successful marketing initiative, so why shouldn’t that apply to a social media campaign?

2. Create measurable metrics for all social media activities.

Once upon a time, social media was seen as the “immeasurable medium” that offered no identifiable metrics, therefore making it impossible to calculate ROI. Those days are history. With tightened budgets and uneasy executives making marketing decisions, creating quantifiable metrics and demonstrating ROI can make the difference between a successful social media campaign and one that never gets off the ground.

3. Move beyond email marketing.

I won’t go as far as saying that email is dead, but there is an oversaturation of email marketing in the B2B space. What was once an affordable, fairly simple form of advertising has deteriorated into a spam-ridden vehicle utilized by many and read by few. So what’s next? SMS advertising? Social search marketing? Online video sponsorship? How about a return to direct mail now that the receipt of a letter has become a rarity?

According to a recent online survey of 400 senior marketing and media executives, two-thirds of them expect 2009 to be the year they embrace online video as an important part of their marketing strategies. Nearly three-quarters of those plan to use video to expand their brand awareness. And this trend will certainly be part of B2B marketing in the upcoming year.

Video is a more engaging medium than text on a screen, and as people become more comfortable with web video in their daily lives, this will flow through to the business arena. While there are several different approaches to generating video content for the web, companies will succeed when videos are created as part of a campaign with a clear goal in mind, and are developed within the context of the brand.

1. Develop your own videos
Cisco is a well known brand and a leader in the technology industry. As part of a product launch for the ASR 9000 router, they created a campaign around a bumbling tech reporter who is assigned to break the story of the new product. Even CEO John Chambers shows he can play along. The initial video was combined with a blog, facebook group, twitter account, youtube and a preview launch site to build awareness of the product launch. Read more about the success of the campaign and the importance of cross-promoting video content on Dianna Huff’s B2B Marcom blog.

Marketing software and service provider Hubspot created this video to explain what they can do for their clients. Again they cross-promote this, and other video content, through their blog, facebook, twitter and youtube.

2. Call for user-generated content
Software company iRise has a slew of informational corporate videos, product demos and customer testimonial videos on their website, but according to this blog post by Tom Humbarger, the company CMO wanted to host a user-generated video contest to build awareness for the company’s products and give its customers the opportunity to share their passion.

By offering a $15,000 first prize, the company generated 44 entries to the contest. This was the result of posting in over 100 online forums and groups for film and video makers. While he calls the campaign a success with over 16,000 visitors to the contest website, 57,000 page views, and more than 30,000 video views on YouTube, I would point back to the goals of the campaign. No videos were created by iRise customers, including the 3000 members of their user community, but only by creative types competing for a cash prize. And the winning entry is not even included in the video section of their web site. The announcement of the winner was on the company blog, and the contest site is still live for your perusal.

Since the creator of the contest no longer works at the company, we may never know how this user-generated contest affected the brand, but this is a good example of a B2B video contest.

3. Embrace existing user-generated content
And the final example of video marketing is to seek out and embrace video content that is being created. This example may be less relevant to B2B marketers, but people are passionate about their favorite brands and talk about them online. As video continues to be more widely used for online conversations, marketers and pr professionals need to be comfortable reaching out to video bloggers and be receptive when they reach out to them. Below is a video interview I did with Lynn Williams, Community Relations Representative of Mt Olive Pickle Company. I contacted her as a blogger interested in their New Year’s Eve event (a pickle drop) for my site NewYearsDrop.com
http://www.vimeo.com/2691396

So, in summary, video will be an important part of marketing in 2009, but like all components of a marketing campaign, it must be developed with a clear goal for success, be consistent with your brand, and be part of a larger promotional strategy. If you have other examples of B2B video, or any comments to add, please leave them below.

I’ve been an advertising and marketing professional for over 30 years, well and truly before Al Gore invented the Internet. Like everybody else, we kept up with technology, and jumped on the Google bandwagon when it was little and red.

So yesterday, when yet another client brought up the idea of spending good money on increasing their adword buy, I had to say it. For a lot of businesses, buying adwords and investing lots of money in their SEO strategy makes about as much business sense as a stripper who would pay an audience to watch her show.

Well, maybe I can parse this using a more PC description.

Imagine yourself in a rock band, performing in front of 10,000 people all of whom have paid good money to see you perform. You bare your soul, do a great show, and take the money. Nice work if you can get it….

Now, imagine yourself in a business. Your business. You’ve just paid for a bunch of adwords, and a brand new SEO-friendly website. In fact, you’ve just paid so much that 10,000 total strangers come and see you open your company kimona. Reveal all about your products and services. But the truth is, unlike the rock band with a fan base of thousands, only about 10 members of the audience you are paying for actually want to see you. Nice work for somebody. The somebodys you just spent a whole bunch of money with to help you pull in an empty net. And the people who really want to see you? Well, they need to sit down and have a conversation with some engineers. And anyway, they were going to call you about setting up an appointment even before you spent all of this money on SEO.

In case after case when we actually get down in the weeds and follow the sales cycle, adwords and SEO very quickly become a non-issue. It simply doesn’t matter. In fact, for most products and services that are: a) specialized; b) expensive; and C) complex , SEO and adwords are totally irrelevant. What matters is that the finite audience that is your target is kept abreast of your enterprise, has easy access to the information they need for buying decisions, and knows where to find you.

This is not to say that parts of a business could not benefit from micro-marketing strategies using SEO and adwords. For example, a manufacturer of industrial machinery may offer an online parts store with spare parts at competitive pricing not only for their own products, but for competitor products as well. In this case, a judicious adword buy to increase spare parts traffic might make sense. But only after looking at all of the options.

All I’m saying is this. Think about your market targets and your sales cycle BEFORE you invest in either your SEO or your adword strategies. SEO and adword buys are not a mandatory component of every marketing initiative. You could save money, and sleep a whole lot easier.

As we are updating our agency web site, we wanted to incorporate more social media tools into the mix. The topic of discussion today was Twitter. I gave an overview of this microblogging tool to some of my colleagues.

We discussed some basic aspects of Twitter, including how to build a network, the importance of being a person rather than a company, and how to engage with others and become part of the Twitter conversation. In showing off some of Twitter’s shininess , especially the very timely election.twitter.com, we discussed the value of scraping the Twitter stream for business marketing related tweets (a 140-character long post on Twitter) and re-posting them on our site.

This is an easy way to provide additional content and knowledge about business marketing, especially in the B2B space, to our site visitors. This blog is one way to present content from industry professionals, but an automatically updated snapshot of thoughts and links from marketers on Twitter is another. The programming of this Twitter stream on our site is easy, since it would just be displaying an RSS feed of a specialized Twitter search.

Since we are all concerned with SEO, especially with our new site, I wondered aloud how tinyurls are handled when the search spiders crawl a site. A tinyurl is compact and permanent reference link to a site address, or URL, to reduce the number of characters needed to provide a link. According to this post about tinyURL SEO, since a tinyurl is a permanent redirect, these posts would gain the benefit of authoritative outgoing links. This would provide additional positive SEO benefits to our site.

Watch this space for more details as we work out the final details of displaying a relevant Twitter search on this site. In the meantime, check out this great post about 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business for more ideas of using Twitter in your business.

Follow me on Twitter @dgtlpapercuts to see what else I am talking about, and let’s start a conversation.

UPDATE: The stream at the right called B2B on Twitter displays all Twitter posts with the term B2B in them.