Is that true though?

Not based on recent research conducted by Readex Research. In a Media Usage Studies survey of 2,095 professionals between September 2010 and May 2011, when asked which media is used regularly in their work, respondents shared that:

• 77%  regularly use of search engines,
• 74% regularly use print publications,
• 74% regularly use e-newsletters,
• 55% trade/industry publications websites.

Furthermore, the survey revealed that “Of the nine forms of media listed, 55% indicated they used five or more, and only 5% indicated they used only one.” What we learn here is that instead of one media form (digital) replacing another (print), individuals are increasing the number of media types they are using in their work.

Translation: To increase the strength of your marketing, your message needs to permeate all the media channels being used by your customers. And according to this survey, PRINT must be one of them.

One of the core tenets of B2Bbloggers is to assist B2B marketers with finding the best B2B marketing content available to help them become more successful. In a world of ever increasing content living up to that tenet is becoming more and more of a challenge each day.

When we find others who are also committed to this tenet, and they produce content that delivers on that promise, we love to share it with you. Today, it is in the form of an infographic from marketing automation vendor, Eloqua and JESS3, called “The Blog Tree: New Growth,” and it’s a follow up to last year’s original Blog Tree from the same duo.

“With this version of the Blog Tree, we attempted to not only list our favorite marketing-relevant blogs, but also visualize their relative size and interrelatedness” said Joe Chernov, Eloqua’s VP of Content Marketing.  He went on, “The “New Growth” edition now curates 64 new blogs — sites launched after 1/1/09 — that have captured our attention.”

One other interesting change Chernov made with this version is the metrics used to “rank” the blogs. The first version relied on web traffic alone, this time “we’ve used Edelman’s BlogLevel tool as our grader. BlogLevel takes into account attributes like frequency and engagement, which aren’t inherently biased toward longevity,” said Chernov. For more on this, read David Armano’s in depth interview with Joe Chernov about the relevancy of blogs, influence, and today’s most significant business challenges for marketers.

The Blog Tree – New Growth

Below is a categorized list of the blogs depicted in the infographic. Enjoy!

Design/Data Visualization:

Established Company:

News/Commentary:

Personal (Marketer):

Personal (Author):

Personal (Journalist):

Start-up:

Root System:

As for methodoloy, Netprospex used the NetProspex Social Index (NPSI) to score and rank social network activity across the top social networks, including Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. The data was mined from NetProspex’s expansive database of crowdsourced business contacts, which include phone, email, job function, industry, location, social media profile information, and other fields used to generate this report.

The NPSI (NetProspex Social Index) score is determined by the following:

1. Social presence: The number of employees with social media profiles across Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook using a company email address.
2. Social connectedness: The number of connections across social networks, including Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections.

The Most Social Industries

Not surprisingly, computer technology tops the list. And examining the Top 20, 13 others represented could fit into a broader “technology” category. That’s 65% of the list. So what about everybody else? Why aren’t they becoming more social? (I ponder rhetorically.)

Even with the challenges with HIPAA and the FDA, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals are tied for 29th in the listed Top 50 in the report.  Expectations led me to think Newspapers & News Services and Publishing would have been higher on the list  looking to actively engage their existing reader communities. Yet coming in at 32 and 36 respectively leads me to think their past 10 years has been focused on integrating print and Web 1.0, and maybe social and Web 2.0 hasn’t yet been a top priority.

And Let’s Not Forget The Least Social Industries

Organizations working for Cities, Towns, & Municipalities have the least socially connected employees. Rounding out the 10 least social industries are Motor Vehicle Dealers, Automotive Service & Collision Repair, Hospitals & Clinics, Lumber & Wood Production, Veterinary Care, Automobile Parts Stores, Mining, Emergency Medical Transporation Services, and Libraries.

Your Thoughts?

Will technology based industries become the only industries that experience the benefits of the social web? Or over time will we see all industries finding ways to use the social web to grow? What do you think?

In your role as a content marketer and becoming a publisher, one of the most significant functions you and your organization needs to develop is the ability to effectively plan and schedule your blog’s content. In publishing, this is simply known as editorial planning. As a marketer new to publishing, this can be difficult without the proper guidance and in my experience, it is one of the most common areas that causes the best of intentions with a corporate blog to go awry.

You see, a corporate blog is very much like a trade publication. “How so?,” you ask. Consider these characteristics of a trade publication:

• Targeted to a specific audience
• Published with a consistent frequency
• Has a variety of article styles and departments
• Covers a range of topics
• Has some combination of writers, contributors, and guest columnists.

I could go on, but the point is that these common characteristics are what makes a corporate blog, a publication. And it’s this mindset and approach to a corporate blog, (it’s your publication) that will lay the foundation for success. I hate to say folks, but writing the actual articles is really only a small piece of the work.

Here are some tips and definitions to help you effectively plan your blog’s content.

Editorial Planning

• The act of selecting and coordinating topics, dates, and resources for the articles to be published in a given period of time. It’s recommended to complete this activity every six months, with check-ins each quarter.

Editorial Planning Tips

• When planning your blog’s topics and articles, first fill in your calendar with significant dates that affect and impact your company. Examples of the types of dates to consider: new product releases, trade shows you will be attending (and those that you won’t but are important to your company/industry), webinars that are scheduled, milestone and historic dates for your company and industry, dates of economic reports that will be released, dates of earnings calls if public company, key legislation etc.
• With these dates on the calendar, you can now visualize what is happening and when, and begin the process of “penciling in” articles ideas and topics.
• In our corporate blogging consulting, we recommend that your blog topics be categorized as: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
  • Primary: As indicated by the name, these are the most important topics for your blog and should be covered the most frequently. These articles should address your buyer persona’s most vital pain points, provide relevant, valuable information to assist them, and support your brand promise.
  • Secondary: These topics have less of a direct relationship with the use of your products and services, but still have a place in your industry and interest to your buyer personas. As an example, you may write an article on “Five Must Have Skills For Tomorrow’s Leaders,” to help your customers improve professionally, all the while this is not directly related to your content marketing consulting services ; ).
  • Tertiary: These topics are covered with least amount of frequency and can delve into reflective topics, personal stories, and even comics. The key though is that they do add the opportunity for levity, providing insights into the people behind the blog, and what makes you and your company tick.
• It is better to underestimate the amount of articles your organization is capable of publishing when you are first getting started. There is nothing worse than adding pressure that is unnecessary. If it’s a new activity for you, so start slowly and build frequency as you gain competence.

Editorial Calendar

• The end product of your editorial planning containing the dates, topics, and penciled in titles/subjects for the articles. It should be a formal (or at least semi-formal) document that once complete is shared throughout the company. By doing so, you are providing an opportunity for everyone to participate in the blog and add .

Publication Schedule

• A publication schedule plays a vital role in helping to operationalize your corporate blog as it identifies all the deadlines that must be met to ensure that the final publication date is not missed.
• For all the benefits an editorial calendar offers, it only provides one date: the publication date. It does nothing for all the activities that must take place prior to publication. Enter the publication schedule. It is used to plan the pre-publication development process and milestone dates of articles, including writing, copy editing, proofing, approvals, posting the article to the blog platform, optimizing, etc.

By using these tools and following these tips you’ll be on your way to developing a corporate blog that STANDS OUT and gets the ATTENTION of the people you care about. If you don’t, you are in for a long struggle and blog that will probably in it’s lifetime have less than 10 articles.

As the saying goes these days, everyone is a publisher, but the truth is not everyone should be. If you are gonna do it, why not do it right? Here are some tips to help you effectively plan your blog’s editorial content.

Photo Credit:  Some rights reserved by Rob Enslin

Let’s face it, no matter how many articles, books, or tweets you read about content marketing, no one is going to be able to walk into the office one day and say, “we are now content marketers.” It just won’t happen. Organizations don’t operate that way, and certainly people don’t operate that way.

As I wrote yesterday, in Content Marketing: Four Essential Elements To Focus On, content marketing is a mindset change, not only for you the marketer, but the entire organization. The best examples of content marketing organizations have a myriad of people involved. You’ll see commentary from the c-suite, trend analysis from the engineering department, and of course sales, marketing and support all play a vital role in running the content marketing engine.

So how do you get there? How do you go from idea to organizational adoption and execution? It’s starts with the realization that you need a change agent. A change agent is the catalyst responsible for leading the organization in its new direction. If that’s you, here are the traits all successful change agents have:

1. Change agents have a clear picture of the outcome they are working to achieve and an insatiable desire to accomplish it. While they can’t actually “see” into the future they have a keen sense of what the future holds and how best to succeed there.
2. Change agents believe in their cause so deeply its motivates them to overcome obstacles, breakdown silos, and persevere through tough times. They understand that failure could reflect poorly on them, but that does not stop them.
3. Change agents are natural leaders with a unique ability to build relationships. They can easily establish rapport and show a genuine concern for those they interact with. It’s this kind nature about them that garners respect and leads to the support they need to affect change.
4. Change agents know how to communicate up and down the organization. Their communication skills are honed so well they know what information each personality type prefers and use that knowledge to get and capture people’s attention and buy in.

If you are leading the content marketing change in your organization, this is what it is going to take. No one is just gonna jump on board. Everyone is too busy for that. Leading change is one of the most difficult things do, but also one of the most rewarding.

Are you up for the challenge?

Image credit: Flickr Creative Commons: Some rights reserved by rittyrats

Mindset

First things first, when it comes to content marketing, the proper frame of mind is of utmost importance, the predominant theme: becoming a publisher. The challenge extends beyond adopting this mindset yourself to also understanding how to lead the change within your organization.

The notions that take the most time for everyone to adjust to are:

• Like a publisher, the core outcome you seek is to build a community by consistently delivering relevant, useful, high quality information. Your content’s purpose is to attract, retain, educate, and engage the people in your area of focus as they enter and move through your buying process.
• A publisher’s standard of quality is beyond reproach. Publishers strive for perfection in everything they do and obsess about meeting the needs of their audience. Publishers are constantly asking, “How can we create a better, more meaningful experience for our stakeholders?”
• Content marketing is a journey without an end (as a publisher’s job is never done). This is not a set it and forget it proposition. There is always something to do and 9 times out of 10, it is on a deadline.

Our eBook, How To Think And Act Like A Publisher, offers additional guidance on the publisher’s mindset.

Customer Focus

Never before in B2B marketing has it been more important to have a customer centered approach to everything you do, content marketing is no exception. It’s time to take the guess work out of the equation and make the commitment to customer focus. If it’s an intimate, lasting relationship that you seek with your customers, the knowledge required for getting their attention and starting one involves a level of understanding that goes beyond anything that you now know.

The creation of buyer personas is just one of the ways customer focus makes its way into content marketing. I’ve shared with you before how to create them and the vital role they play in content marketing. With a customer focus, your content suddenly becomes for *someone* versus *everyone*. And that makes all the difference when using content to build and sustain relationships with your customers.

Story / Experience

What’s the point of all this content? Why write or publish even a single word? We all the know the answer to those questions, right? To get, keep, and grow customers.

If that’s the answer, then you need to create a story and customer experience that is going to consistently do that for you. With each piece of content, no matter the size, no matter its form, no matter the place it is found – it must have some connection to the overall journey/experience you are creating for your customers.

Consider the basic elements of any story to help you get started:

• theme – What’s the overall message?
• plot – What does each persona go through? when does it thicken?
• structure – What happens at the beginning (of the buying process)? the end?
• characters – Who are each of your personas and why are they involved?
• style and tone – What is right for your brand?

If you don’t have a path (solidified with your story) for your customer take, succeeding in content marketing is not going to be possible.

Keywords

If there is one area of content marketing that may not receive the attention it deserves, it has to be keywords. They play such an important role in the effectiveness of your content attracting the correct buyers that you must make defining your keywords and keyword phrases a top priority. In a recent article, Effective Use Of Keywords In Content Marketing, Lee Odden wrote,

Effective content marketing informs prospective buyers of what they need to know in order to help them arrive at a logical conclusion to buy and recommend. Relevant and engaging content facilitates that outcome.

Understanding the information needs of the customers you’re trying to reach is the first step in creating a great editorial plan. The role of keywords in a content marketing program come into play as a manifestation of knowing what customers are interested in and what their pain points are. What are they searching for? What are they talking about on the social web?

As Lee so clearly points out,  keywords are born out of understanding your customers. We know B2B buyers turn to search engines to find the information they need to solve their problems and support their decisions. In order for you to get your content in front of them, you need to understand the terms and phrases to optimize your content for.

Is that it?

Of course not. There’s editorial, social, resources, measurement, integration and many other important aspects as well, but without these four basics, or essentials, started and understood first, you are getting ahead of yourself. Learn and master these first.

With each and every passing day, the role content is playing in the lives of B2B marketers and publishers is growing and evolving. The way I see it, if you are not working on building content initiatives into your B2B marketing, you are making a critical strategic mistake. In the complex world of B2B purchasing and discovery, content is now your means of attraction, influence, and connection.

There is so much to consider, but at the very least to create and lead a successful content marketing initiative requires:

• The ability to develop and craft content that meets a specific need (of a buyer persona) at a specific time (stage of the sale process)

• Understanding how and where to make the content available and what to ask for in return from the individual interested in it

• A publisher’s mindset and the ability to nurture relationships with content and conversation

• A belief, that as marketers, it is now a shared responsibility with sales to grow the business.

With these points in mind, one of the first questions that comes to mind is, “How do I create content that people want to engage in?” Or as I like to phrase it, “How do I make good media?” So in the run up to Content Marketing World, I’ve issued a challenge to myself: write an article every business day that helps answer this key question in content marketing.

To get us started I’ll share the feature article I recently contributed to the innovation issue of Chief Content Officer magazine titled, CONTENT INNOVATION 15 Content Marketing Projects To Inspire. It starts,

Winning the battle for attention takes innovation—whether through an unexpected presentation, a new tech application, or a provocative message.  These fifteen projects demonstrate that creativity and daring is possible within a wide range of budgets, industries and formats. Click to see the15 most innovative ideas in content.

Hi everyone,

I’m off to the beach for a week with the family, but before going I wanted to share a quick update with you. You’ve likely noticed that I’ve personally been on a bit of a blogging hiatus over the past couple of months. Thankfully, we have several great B2B marketing bloggers contributing, so that has helped me from going completely dark here at B2Bbloggers.com.

There are several exciting things transpiring involving Make Good Media and its future. At the top of the list is that I’m in the midst of merging it with a publishing company. I’m super excited how it is going to enhance our ability to serve the emerging content marketing industry. Primarily we’ll be expanding to serve both B2B publishers AND B2B marketers. While we are still ironing out all the details, the great news is that our range of services will extend the full life cycle of content marketing and production – from consulting and strategy to back of house print and web production to distribution. Fun times are ahead indeed.

That said, things have leveled off a bit, so after my week at the beach, my plan is to pick up the pen again and get back to blogging. So I’ll see you then.

Enjoy your week.

Jeremy

• A quality infographic deepens a viewer’s understanding of a complex topic by clearly and concisely presenting data in an appealing visual design. At the heart of its success is the communication of a story, a point of view, or a fresh perspective.

For the article Joe also turned to some other members of the marketing community for their definition of a great infographic, a sampling:

• A great infographic tells a meaningful story that can be consumed in an instantly digestible seating.
  - Jeremiah Owyang
• A good infographic offers clarity: Simple, clean design. But also, it allows a reader to scan and quickly grok the data being communicated, almost immediately.
  - Ann Handley
• A good infographic is fun to look at, relevant and rich with an arrangement of information that has context based on the viewer’s interests.
  - Ardath Albee

With these definitions in mind, take a look at the latest infographic from Eloqua and JESS3, The Content Grid v2. It’s simply brilliant. I’ll call it the single best piece of content I’ve seen to explain the process of content marketing. It plots content type across two dimensions – the objectives of the business as well as the goals of the customer, making it incredibly simple to see how and where different content types fit into the process.

If you or a colleague have struggled grasping the concept of content marketing, I urge you to use this infographic to help bring clarity to a complex topic.

That said, some of the best expertise on the subject of Facebook for B2B comes from SocialMediaB2B.com’s co-founders Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen. At MarketingProfs B2B Forum , Jeffrey, along with Deirdre Walsh, and Susan Solomon, presented on the topic: Facebook for Effective B2B Marketing.

Below is the presentation used for the session. I encourage you to check it out. While it is my bet that the overwhelming value of the session was delivered in that room, the presentation is one of the most succinct I’ve seen on the topic. It’s definitely one I would use with anyone to answer the question, is Facebook marketing for B2B?

Below are two more of my favorite Facebook for B2B posts from Jeffrey and Kipp. If you are not following them and SocialMediaB2B.com, what are you waiting for!

75 of the Best B2B Facebook Marketing Tips

Many B2B marketers approach Facebook with the knowledge of how to maintain a personal profile, but still shake their heads at how to get results from a business Page for their B2B company. There are two basic things you need to know about managing a Facebook Page for a B2B company.

8 B2B Facebook Landing Pages

B2B marketers see the growing numbers of Facebook users and join the ranks of businesses who set up outposts on the world’s largest social network. As Facebook is a tightly controlled environment, there are few opportunities for branding and creating a branded experience for your customers and prospects.