Hey, MarCom!

Give Them the Option, and They Will Click

Most of us in the B2B industry like to think that we’re savvy marketers. (Social media? Pshaw! Of course we’re going after those channels.) But before you go thinking you’ve got all your bases covered, it’s important to take a look not at where you’re posting content (whether that’s Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc), but how you’re leveraging these web sites as well.

Marketo’s Maria Pergolino recently wrote about this topic, in a blog post titled, “7 Ways All B2B Marketers Should be Using Social Media (But Probably Aren’t).” At the top of her list was social sharing links—those little tweet or Facebook buttons that allow you to share an interesting link with a simple click—which she recommends placing in emails and landing pages to boost the chance of content pass-around.

We couldn’t agree more with this tactic, and MarketingSherpa even has some metrics to back it up, highlighted in a case briefing from its 2011B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. According to this study, when a B2B newsletter publishing company incorporated social sharing buttons into its email newsletters, they saw:

The Pros and Cons of Blogging

Nowadays, almost everyone has a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account. And we’re not just talking about individuals; businesses (like us!) as well. Social media is one of the fastest and probably most cost-effective ways to get your message out to the masses, which explains why today it’s considered a must-have piece in any corporate marketing strategy. But in order to develop a successful social media plan, it’s important to understand which tactics are most effective so that you invest the appropriate amount of time on each activity.

So where exactly should you be focusing the most effort, you ask? According to MarketingSherpa’s latest 2011B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, it should be on your corporate blog. Blogging was found to be the most effective social media tactic, beating out activities like using social media to improve search engine optimization (SEO) or sharing content on multimedia sites like YouTube. On the flip side, however, is the fact that respondents also rated blogging as the most effort-consuming.

New Year, New Content: How to Keep Your Collateral Fresh and Relevant

 “Content is key . . . you can never have enough of it and you have to keep cycling it and keep it relevant for the audience you serve.” – Laura Ramos, VP, Forrester Research* 

Hope everyone’s New Year is off to a good start! If you’re reading this blog, you already know that creating content is the name of the game here at Eccolo—which is why we felt that revisiting the Laura Ramos quote above was the perfect way to highlight our goals and continued strategies for 2011. (If you thought it looked familiar, it’s probably because you checked out our Strategy Guide for Creating Quality Lead Generation Content from last year.)

As outlined in our strategy guide, the first step toward crafting compelling, relevant content is to identify your target audience’s pain. They’re only interested in solving their own problems, and unless you directly address these challenges, they won’t bother to listen.

Putting things in perspective

Here at Eccolo Media we are an agency or writers, but we are also and agency of readers.

Recently we read Eric Larson’s book,  “Isaac’s Storm,” about a hurricane that famously hit the gulf coast town of Galveston in 1900.  There was popular belief in the day that Galveston could never be seriously affected by a Gulf hurricane, an idea fostered by the head of the local weather bureau, the eponymous Isaac Cline. You can see that this statement has disaster written all over it.

In September of 1900, a monster storm virtually bulls-eyed Galveston with devastating results—6,000 inhabitants dead in eight hours. Rising waters forced people to the highest floors of their homes, then onto the roofs, then into the water as a massive storm surge pushed a wall of wreckage before it that acted like a giant scouring pad across the town.  Wind-driven debris further maimed and killed those townspeople that managed to scramble onto anything that still floated.

The aftermath was equally frightening and gruesome. Disposal of the literally mountains of bodies eventually required nightmarish mass cremations on the beaches in an effort to manage sanitation and disease in the end-of-the-summer heat. The body of Isaac Cline’s wife was finally identified four weeks later, by the wedding ring on her hand.

A gruesome story, to be sure, but the part of the book that actually made me exclaim out loud, “oh my god!” was this part: several inhabitants, washed from their homes and struggling for any purchase, caught the topmost branches of trees and clung against the raging wind and water for their lives. They managed to avoid drowning and decapitation by flying debris, only to be found dead after the storm from snake bite.

That’s right: venomous snakes, also escaping from the storm, slithered up into the topmost branches of the trees.

Somethings are just meant to happen.

Mind-boggling numbers for online video

We're about to head out to enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend, but before we go, we wanted to share some news that caught our eye.

As if you needed any more proof that online video is the wave of the future, a new forecast predicts that Internet traffic will increase fourfold, to 767 exabytes, by 2014. (What's an exabyte? We didn't know either until we looked it up, but one exabyte equals one billion gigabytes.)

Online video will make up more than 90 percent of that traffic. As the survey put it, that means it would take 72 million years to watch all of the video crisscrossing the global network.

We're going to chew on those numbers (along with those veggie burgers we'll be grilling up) this weekend, and we hope you have a fun, relaxing holiday.

Online video views: Up, up, and away

We're busy putting the finishing touches on the new supplement to our 2009 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report (check for it here next Wednesday), but we wanted to point out an interesting article we found this week. comScore has released its latest online video tracking report, and the stats they've discovered are pretty amazing: From 2009 to 2010, video views in the United States were up almost 120 percent, from 14.8 billion to 32.4 billion.

Numbers like those just confirm what we've been saying all along--video is a rising star, and making it a top priority for 2010 presents one of the best opportunities for you to reach a rapidly growing audience of customers who expect to see more video content.

The long and short of online video

A client recently sent us a link to an interesting article about online video, specifically about how videos should become a core part of any marketing strategies (if they aren't already).

The article, 5 Tips for Using Video to Grow Your Business in 2010, describes some best practices for creating successful videos, and one in particular caught our eye. The article says that videos should be under two minutes in length, but if you can get it down to 30 seconds, that it's even better.

We're curious to know if this two-minute rule only applies to demos and other how-to videos. In our experience, getting a customer to tell their story in their own words in less than two minutes can be a big challenge.

We're not saying online videos should clock in at 90 minutes, but we certainly think different video types call for different best practices when it comes to length. Something that's worked well for us is providing several versions of a video. We'll put together a five minute cut that tells the full customer story, and then cutting it down to a few shorter clips that highlight some great customer quotes.

The ideal length of an online video may still be up in the air, but knowing your audience and what they want to see and hear will definitely help you hit the mark.

The new B2B report from MarketingSherpa

So we've been perusing the new 2009-10 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report from the sages over at MarketingSherpa, and we've found some data points that dovetail nicely with our upcoming B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report.

For instance, we noted in our 2008 survey report that podcasts play an increasingly significant role in the purchasing cycle. The new MarketingSherpa report confirms that trend, noting that 40% of respondents in large organizations (i.e., orgs with more than 1,000 employees) rated podcasts as "effective."

Our upcoming survey report will also expand on our past findings, paying particular attention to the channels (especially the social media channels) through which respondents find influential information. So we find it especially interesting that, according to MarketingSherpa, B2B marketing seems to be ahead of B2C marketing in adopting social media strategies. As far as we're concerned, that's all the more reason for marketers to pursue Web 2.0 strategies for influencing prospective purchasers.

We've got a lot of big plans for our upcoming report...keep your eye on this space to see what we discover. 

"Social media doesn't drive purchases"? We're not buying it.

We're a little late to the party on this one, but we just wanted to comment on a recent study by Knowledge Networks claiming that "social media doesn't drive purchases." At first glance, the data might seem compelling: fewer than 5% of respondents "regularly turn to these sites for guidance on purchase decisions."

That might be enough to turn off marketers already skeptical about social media. But as Marketing Pilgrim points out, anyone who actually uses social media sites will immediately recognize that these findings just don't hold up.

When we're considering a purchase, do we turn to our friends on Facebook and ask for their input? No, not really (though we have some friends who do). However, if a Facebook friend posts a status update about a local sandwich shop or a new smartphone (positive or negative), we've been known to take mental note. In other words, we wouldn't say that Facebook has a direct and concrete influence on purchasing decisions, but friends' recommendations can have a much subtler and more powerful pull than other, more direct forms of marketing. 

That's because social media sites tend to work just like any other word-of-mouth. When we're out drinking with friends, it's perfectly natural for us to talk about products that we like or don't like, and those conversations can have a huge influence on purchasing decisions. But we're not in the habit of scheduling lunch with friends just to talk about products. So if asked whether we turn to friends in order to make purchasing decisions, most of us would probably say no...even if, upon closer inspection, that's not entirely true.

Another problem is how the Knowledge Networks study defines social media, asking respondents to limit themselves to "27 pre-specified social media sites." Among these sites are dubious contenders like Classmates.com and no mention of opinion sites like Yelp. Yelp might not be strictly defined as a social networking site, but if you, too, have Facebook friends who frequently update their profiles with Yelp recommendations, then it's safe to say that popular opinion sites are intimately connected to the social media phenomenon.

Anyway, all of this loops back to the problem of metrics: it's outrageously difficult to pinpoint the purchasing influence of something as amorphous as a social network. And we're sad to say that, as arresting as the Knowledge Networks study might seem, this new study just doesn't make a strong enough case against the power and potential of social media.

What We're Reading This Week

• What are the business applications of Twitter? Or let’s take that one step back: why does Twitter remain such a mystery to so many adults? Mike Moran wants to know; Caroline Middlebrook has some answers.
• What about LinkedIn? The most boring social network ever, or a powerful business tool? Chip Griffin is on it.
• Say what you will about the writers’ strike, but the WGA is doing a great job of communicating its message to an increasingly receptive audience on YouTube. Compelling messages, great copy, and a dash of humor—that’s just smart marketing! Susan Getgood has the skinny; YouTube has the videos.