Koroberi Blog

We’ve all seen it. The dead Facebook page. An inactive Twitter account. An attempt at B2B social media marketing gone wrong.

With 81 percent of B2B companies maintaining company-related profiles on social networks (source: Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study), it’s clear that social media is no longer uncharted territory for B2B marketers. So why is it that so many make the leap into new media without the strategy to back it up?

It’s critical to have a larger strategy to guide social media tactics or you may quickly find that you never see a return on the time you invest (unless you just need an excuse to learn how to tweet).

For a company with a miniscule marketing budget and not enough staff to carry out a full-fledged new media campaign, developing a strategy before creating your Twitter or Facebook may seem daunting. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing developed a social media hierarchy for businesses to follow as they deploy social media tactics. Here are some of the highlights:

• Blogs: Blogging should be the foundation of your social media strategy. Keep up with relevant blogs, stay in-the-know about hot issues and develop content that inspires real engagement.
• Social Search: A social search provides a more personal experience for consumers than traditional advertising. Make use of social search engines such as Yelp to increase and manage your reputation online.
• Facebook: Once you have the content and digital reputation nailed down, take advantage of the potential business prospects on Facebook. Create a dialogue with the surrounding community and keep them coming back to your page with fresh content and ideas. After all, nothing is more disappointing to consumers than a dead Facebook page.
• Twitter: The ultimate tool in the social media marketing mix, Twitter allows for quick tracking and engagement. However, Twitter is at the top of the hierarchy because without the groundwork laid by blogging, social search techniques and Facebook, you may quickly run out of new and appealing tweets.

If social media strategic plans are thoughtfully developed, B2B companies have the potential to build the kind of lasting relationships they want with their clients, jump-starting word-of-mouth and increasing brand loyalty. If you jump on the social media bandwagon without a sound strategy to back it up, you’ll end up with a Twitter account but nothing to tweet, or a Facebook page that no one “likes.” Nobody likes that.

While the virtual ink is drying on some tough media negotiations at Koroberi we are looking for metrics to help measure the effectiveness of both our 2011 B2B advertising and public relations campaigns. Soft and hard metrics have never been clear-cut in PR, so we at Koroberi appreciate the effort that has been taken in the past year by the international PR community to develop quantifiable industry standards against which to measure our work.

More than 200 professionals from all over the world met in Barcelona, Spain, in 2010 to address the need for consistent standards to measure public relations campaign results.  Representatives at the Second European Summit on Measurement agreed on a set of seven measurement principles, called “The Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles”.

Point five of the declaration states that advertising value equivalents (AVEs), which measure the dimensions of occupied coverage space to calculate the cost of purchasing equivalent space, do not represent the value of PR.  The declaration recommends that metrics replace AVEs that reflect the quality of coverage, physical space of coverage and negotiated advertising rates relevant to a client.   Rather than relying on AVEs to evaluate public relations results, a portfolio of metrics would better measure the success of meeting specific program objectives.

In an agency like Koroberi, where we integrate advertising, design, public relations and interactive marketing strategies in our campaigns, we are increasingly experiencing a push by B2B publishers to bill for media coverage in line with advertising book rates.  This is particularly evident in our programs that target Latin and South America, China, and Europe, unlike in the US and Canada where titles still run promotional PR at no charge.  Right now this trend relates to positive PR and product and service promotions rather than breaking news items.  Therefore, we find value in using AVEs to measure our PR campaign results because we see a greater and more direct commercial connection between advertising and public relations in B2B marketing.

Even if we still value AVEs in measuring our public relations work, we are pleased that the public relations community is striving to improve the credibility and quality of work in the profession.

To learn more about the “The Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles” and how the principles will potentially change the public relations industry, visit http://ketchumperspectives.com/.

Thanks to Ketchum and Jack Mello for the lead-in on the blog post.

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We recently interviewed George Wright, VP of Marketing, and Kels Goodman, Video Producer, of Blendtec. They are the creators of the popular YouTube videos series, Will It Blend?, which has generated over 200 million views. They spoke to us about the inspiration for the series, the goals behind the campaign, the keys to social media, and how it relates to B2B marketing and corporate culture. They even gave a shout out to Koroberi. It is our video after all.

Watch the video here and share with your friends and colleagues. We have also posted this on YouTube so you can embed the video in your own blog if you want.

I sat down this morning to write about ideas for B2B marketing during the holidays. It was already a little late, but the freshness of great marketing ideas should hold up through the holidays. As the day was passing by, I realized that this would be a great chance to find other Business to Business marketing blogs and do a wrap up of what they were saying. After several searches I discovered that there is not a lot out there about marketing during the holidays, but I did find some good suggestions.

The Integrated Marcom blog suggested offering holiday gifts through emails and newsletters. These include free downloads, animated greeeting cards, or even a Starbucks gift card.

The Email Marketing Reports site ran a four-part series on holiday email marketing that dealt with planning, frequency, and tips for the days around shipping deadlines, but it is the final post that is relevant to B2B marketers whose business is not seasonal. It suggests continuing to publish newsletters on a regular schedule, even if it is just to send a holiday greeting, or a customer reward.

The Funnelholic blog takes a different approach and provides a list of gifts marketers could hope to receive in their stockings, including a lead-nurturing system, a marketing plan, and even a marketing budget. None of these are a given in our current business environment.

The Woman Partner blog offers 10 ways to cross market your products or services with an appropriate partner to expand your audience in the coming year.

And finally, Brand Flakes for Breakfast showcases a unique holiday video produced for RMI Direct Marketing. This video helps customers relate to their reps at the company by showing them at work, and has a lot of fun doing it. You may recognize the style and the tone from a hit TV show.  The company has a small promo button on their site, which links to a custom landing page (rmiextremecaroling.com) to host the video.

Happy holidays from all of us at Koroberi, and if you have any last minute shopping to do, you better get going.

As Thanksgiving is upon us, lots of people are thinking about their Thanksgiving dinner menus. Without seeming too much like a TV soap opera that plods along according to its own timeline, but magically celebrates every holiday on the correct day, I did want to write about the similarities of planning a Thanksgiving dinner to planning a business to business marketing campaign.

The main functions of preparing dinner involve planning, shopping, cooking, serving, eating and cleaning up. Each one of these relates to the steps of a B2B marketing campaign. The most important part of both a meal and a campaign is the planning. You need a goal and a strategy to reach that goal. For a meal, the goal is usually to serve your guests a tasty, well-balanced meal that they enjoy. Developing your strategy to reach that goal is what you do when you create your plan. A B2B marketing goal might be to get sales leads, increase newsletter subscriptions, or to get people to request information. The strategy you develop needs to drive those results.

Who is coming to dinner? That’s your target audience. You would never make a turkey for a table full of vegetarians, so you need to make sure you know who you are serving. You also need to decide what dishes to serve. These are the tools that you will use in your campaign. You would never serve just one dish to your guests, and you need to approach a marketing campaign the same way. A mix of tools and techniques that reaches your audience at different touch points will be more successful that one that only reaches them one way.

A traditional dinner may include family favorites that have been served for generations. The same is true for a traditional marketing campaign. It may be appropriate to use the same methods that have worked for years, but maybe this is the year to turn dinner, or your campaign, on its head and try something different. But don’t change things just for the sake of change. Make sure the changes are part of a goal-based strategy.

Shopping for your meal is just like checking your resources for your campaign, and making sure you have all the things you need to reach your audience and achieve your goals. Cooking your meal is just like putting all the pieces together to build your campaign. Writing copy, chopping onions, developing creative, basting the turkey, finalizing layouts, sprinkling the canned onions on the green bean casserole. They are all steps to the goal.

Serving the meal is like delivering your message in all its forms. Eating the food is when your audience interacts with your message. They read, click, open and digest. With a clear call to action, your target audience knows how to respond. Your dinner guests usually respond with yummy sounds.

And the final step of any plan is to clean up. With dinner, it means clearing the plates, but with a marketing campaign, it means determining what parts of the campaign worked and generated the best response. If you provide distinct calls to action for each element of your campaign, you can determine the success of each one, just like clearing plates that are left with various amounts of food. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows are never left, but nobody eats the random green vegetable. Incorporating this feedback and measurement against your goals will make your next Thanksgiving dinner and your next B2B marketing campaign a success.

And just to have a little fun, here’s an example showing that it is possible to go way overboard in both your Thanksgiving dinner, and your marketing campaign by having too many dishes, or parts. This is a song from the family friendly podcast (and my kids’ favorite), the Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, called Mom’s Thanksgiving Dinner.

And if you read this before the end of Thursday, and you haven’t heard about this charitable campaign, Epic Change is using social media to raise money to build a classroom in Tanzania. Go to Tweetsgiving.org for the details of how to tweet what you are thankful for this year and how to make a donation.

Bruce B. Olive, CEO of Koroberi, was named a 2008 Marketing Impact Leader by Business Leader Magazine.

A North Carolina native and CEO of Chapel Hill-based integrated marketing communications firm Koroberi Inc., Bruce B. Olive has spent a lifetime helping clients communicate complex subject matter clearly and concisely. With nearly 30 years in the advertising industry, Olive began his career as a copywriter, working overseas at some of the world’s largest international advertising agencies. He started Koroberi 10 years ago, with a determination to build a leading technology-focused, business-to-business marketing firm. Koroberi has since become one of America’s leading business-to-business agencies, leaving Olive justifiably proud of his business, his employees and the industry leaders who make up his clients. Outside of the company, he is active in Durham’s Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, where he serves both as verger and on the vestry, and enjoys organic gardening and flying his aerobatic airplane.

Last week I attended the ConvergeSouth Blogger Conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. This gathering of technology professionals, personal bloggers and business marketers had a decidedly political tone to it. Many bloggers are charged up over the upcoming election and are using Social Media to get their message out and connect with like-minded people. This is the core of Social Media, but the same principles apply to business marketing.

You start with a goal that you would like to reach, whether it is more sales, more customers, greater brand awareness, and you develop a strategy to reach it. Blogging is a tool that can help you reach your goal. It is just another form of communicating, according to keynote speaker Chris Rabb. The first blogger was Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense advocated independence from England. Another form of proto-blogging was the use of quilt patterns to guide people through the Underground Railroad.

As the day progressed, there was lot of talk about the coming revolutions in Social Media. The biggest Social Media sites, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, were compared by speaker Anil Dash, to the days of the big three networks (ABC, NBC and CBS for you kids). These companies have too much control over our web experience and how people interact with their own data and information. Revolutions will occur from both the inside and the outside. Technology changes and improvements will allow people to control their information across the web. At the same time, people will demand more control, and get that control by going to other sites.

The lesson for business marketers is to understand your target audience. If you don’t give your customers what they want, they will not be your customers for long. In the early stages of a customer relationship, many things are overlooked, but as time passes, it is critical to provide exactly what customers need. If you can’t do it, your competitor is waiting in the wings.

And finally, internet superstar Robert Scoble spoke about how video can enhance the content of any web site. It is easy to get started with simple tools, but make sure you can record good audio. People will suffer through bad video if they can hear what is being said. And like with any business marketing campaign, the key is to have a plan. If you start a project without knowing where you are going, it is difficult to get there.

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.