In short… NO! A blog is still an integral part of the B2B marcom mix.  In fact, for many companies, the blog IS the company’s face of social media, especially when used to convey thought leadership beyond 140 characters.  Even more, the B2B corporate blog is helping generate leads and revenue  as well as boosting other online marketing metrics such as search ranking.

Corporate blogs lead to “leads.”

Mike Volpe of HubSpot says in his blog post, How to Turn a Blog into a B2B Lead Generation Machine, that the HubSpot blog generates more traffic than the main company website and is an excellent source of leads. A HubSpot study shows that 65% of businesses blog. For Joe Chernov, vice president of Content Marketing for Eloqua the investment in the corporate blog was worth it for Eloqua. “We launched our corporate blog, It’s All About Revenue about 18 months ago. The blog today is the fastest growing referrers of traffic to our corporate website. Visitors from our blog to our website are among the ‘best’ traffic we drive. They tend to view more pages, bounce less frequently, and ‘convert’ (fill out a form) at a higher rate than other traffic sources,” says Joe.

For B2B, Are Corporate Blogs and Social Media Mutually Exclusive?

Joe explains that the corporate blog is the hub and social media the spokes—mutually reliant, but different.  He sees the corporate blog as the starting point for the content that tends to spread best on social channels—everything from videos to infographics to provocative articles. It [content] starts on the blog and then is distributed over social channels that point back to the blog.

How Can B2B Marketers Leverage Blogs within an Integrated Marketing Communications Program?

Joe says that when the blog is the hub of the marcom wheel, it overlaps all outbound communications including ads. For example, he explains that the blog gives marketers an excellent opportunity to provide context for an online ad campaign. “The marketer can share the back story on the creative, or dive into what sites the ad will run on and why. It gives readers an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the people behind the logo. And I believe that people trust other people more than they trust logos. So the more a brand can be humanized, the better,” says Joe.

No… the B2B corporate blog is NOT dead.  And yes, when used in conjunction with other social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn, the blog can be a lucrative source of qualified leads.  However, other forms of social media, though often guideposts pointing back to your latest blog post, offer much more than a promotional pointer.  Vehicles such as Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn and others can be used in conjunction with the blog to further engage prospects and build relationships in the social sphere which is what social media is all about, and such relationships can lead to real business opportunities.

Is Your Business Blogging?

Billy Mitchell, partner/senior creative director of B2B agency, MLT Creative, is getting to the bottom of why businesses don’t blog.  He’s running a LinkedIn poll. (You’ll probably need to be logged into your LinkedIn account to see it.) As of 9/29, results indicate that businesses aren’t blogging because they don’t have the resources to do it, followed by lack of top management support. Why are you or are you not blogging?

Additional B2B Corporate Blog Resources:

Jeff Bullas has all the infographics you’ll ever need on blogging including corporate blogging. http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/16/past-present-and-future-of-blogging-3-infographics/

Corporate blogging:  value versus risk by Ross Dawson share valuable, practical blogging advice that every B2B marcom profession should read.

Get a F#ck!ng Blog Already by Brian Solis says not to underestimate the corporate blog.

Mashable’s 15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to Learn From by Erica Swallow includes 15 good practice blogs in both B2B and B2C.

Deb Weil’s book The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get it Right is a must-read for every B2B corporate and marketing communications professional.

If you’re a B2B marcom pro considering extending your social presence to the Twittersphere, you need to think about how to set up your Twitter handles—the @name—to avoid future issues. I advise clients against using colleague names for two reasons. One, you need to consider what happens to that person’s handle when they leave the company and use their personal name to continue tweeting; and two, the handle offers a branding opportunity for the company.

Consider the following when setting up your Twitter handle:

• Remember that social media is about people and not brands or companies, try to work the person’s name into the Twitter handle when it’s not awkward to do so, i.e., @companymike or @mikeatcompany
• Some associates may prefer to keep their personal names for their personal Twitter use. It’s better to allow them to separate their personal Twitter profiles from your company profile. If you allow associates to post on the company’s behalf using their personal Twitter profiles, then your social media policy should instruct associates to include a disclaimer in their Twitter profiles.  i.e., “I am [an employee of] [a Contingent Worker for] Company Name. The statements or opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Company Name.” I like@anetah‘s disclaimer:  “(btw: thoughts expressed here are solely mine)” @anetah is the social media strategist for Pitney Bowes (see below).
• If you plan to extend Twitter activity beyond marketing and PR, then you may wish to have a handle that describes the functional area represented, such as @companytechsupport or @techsupportcompany. This method allows you the most flexibility should someone leave the company. However, you may also add a person’s name. Such as @companytechsupportmike or @mikeatcompanytechsupport. The downside is that at 25 characters, nearly 20% of your 140 characters is taken up by your handle. This is o.k. if you can offer simple answers or if you can redirect customers to a help file or other resource that will solve their problem in 140 characters or less.
• Channel partners’ Twitter handles can also provide B2B companies with extended branding opportunities. If your channel partners represent multiple lines and prefer to use their own brand, then at least have them add your company name in their Twitter profiles.

When it comes to images, my personal preference is to see a person; after all, social media is about people. However, when people are tweeting on behalf of a company or brand, it can be effective to use the company logo to help customers better identify with the brand. A good experience in the Twittersphere, can support and even elevate brand image.

Finally, if you have a number of people tweeting on behalf of your company, leverage the Twitter profile to describe the role of each Twitter account. Use keywords too. It’s another opportunity to brand your company and associate it with keywords on which your company wants to rank.

Here are examples of how several B2B companies handle Twitter handles:

• Dell uses its logo, but it also leverages the profile to promote other handles. i.e., the @Dell handle represents the official Dell communications team; however, their profile lets you know the handles for Dell support and Direct2Dell.
• Indium Corporation @IndiumCorp is operated by Rick Short, who also has his own personal handle, @rickshort21, that he uses for his music business.
• B2B agency, MLT Creative, @MLTCreative, uses its company logo; and the company’s associates tweet using their first and last names as a Twitter handle. In the Twitter profile, each associate includes the company name and his or her role in the company. Such as @gtaylor57, @billymitchell1 and @martinehunter Note that each handle includes unique content… social media good practice. MLT Creative also tweets “all things B2B” under a unique handle @B2BLaunchPad using targeted keywords and hashtags. The avatar has the MLT Creative branded look, but attracts a generalist audience.
• Pitney Bowes took an interesting approach by linking their@PitneyBowes account to a Twitter list of “Pitney Bowes Tweeps” who use their own names but reference Pitney Bowes in their Twitter profiles with a disclaimer, of course.

Additional Advice on Twitter Handles:

Twitter Handles Do’s and Don’ts – This is a good primer from @HubSpot.

Twitter help explains how user names are used in conjunction with your handle. This explains what people will see in your Twitter profile. Good advice when you set up or change your Twitter account.

Tell us, “How Should B2B Companies Handle Twitter “Handles”?

Thanks!
Joan
@copywriter4u

New social media marketers are jumping into the field every day. This is reasonable – with hundreds of millions of people active on each network, from all backgrounds and different interests, it’s important to create interesting content and to get in front of them. Having worked with many people new to online marketing or social media, you can see many of them making the same mistakes over again, despite other people already having struggled with the same issue.

I’d like to share three crucial best practices that I’ve developed from working with dozens of businesses to develop their social media presence and generate leads. If you have your own ideas as well or things you’ve seen businesses stumble on when getting started, I’d love to hear them as well!

Tip One: Show Visitors Specific Offers

A very common mistake that marketers make when promoting their offers on their social media profile is not making it clear what will happen next when someone converts. Visitors always like to know very clearly what they are getting in return for their contact information, or if it’s really going to be helpful for them.

For example, take a look at SteelMaster’s Facebook page below. They have several guides available for download right from the Facebook page. Clicking on one of these images takes you to a short form to get your contact information, and then the whitepaper is directly mailed to them. Before a visitor is asked to leave Facebook however, Steelmaster is showing them the types of content that they have available and the cover of each one so that users can easily determine which offer is right for them, right away.

This kind of path also helps it be very clear to Steelmaster which leads they are generating from Facebook – A quick look at referral traffic from Facebook will tell them what leads are coming in because of their excellent presence on Facebook.

Tip Two: Try Different Content And Formats

Inbound marketing always follows the ABCs: Always Be Creating. Or, maybe that’s “Always Beating Competition”. Either way, one of the biggest errors you can make when working in B2B social media is to not be constantly experimenting with different offers or formats of content. People will always respond to various types of content differently. Not everyone enjoys on-demand webinars, and would prefer to read an eBook or start a free trial instead.

At HubSpot, that is a big part of why our best offers are our “kits”, like our Lead Generation kit. They come with several different types of content that are all available behind just one form, so that there’s something for everyone. If someone doesn’t like one type of content or isn’t as interested, there is still a good chance of offering content to them that they’ll like, without needing to make multiple landing pages or excessive amounts of A/B testing.

If you can’t assemble a “Kit” like this easily, another great way to make sure that you’re maximizing leads from social media is to rotate offers, try out new types of content, and see what visitors could be interested in your content but haven’t converted yet.

Tip Three: Place Your Offers Everywhere

Don’t be shy to place relevant offers across all of the social media profiles that you own. When someone arrives at your Facebook page and they don’t Like you yet, invite them to Like you via an image. Afterwards, show them an offer or form to convert on. It’s the perfect time – You’ve already established that they are interested in you and want to learn more and engage. Start collecting more great leads from those visitors.

Optio Solutions (above) does a great job of this by offering people a cup of coffee in return for a conversion on their form and learning about how they want to be your business’s new collections agency. They’ve positioned this offer in a few places, but one of the spots where it is very effective is the homepage of Facebook if you don’t Like them yet.

By making it easy for people to become a lead and a solid offer, they’ve started to generate real leads from Facebook. Something like this is definitely inventive and a big change from most B2B messaging in social media. It’s easier to walk the line of self-promotion and community building if your offers and content are natural. Always be constructive, not obstructive.

Have you seen other great tactics be effective on social media? Let us know!

In this follow up to 5 Steps to Building a Solid Content Marketing Foundation, I interview Kimberlee Wilkes from Wilkes Business Solutions to find out how to take the next step with your content marketing strategy and begin to use social media to interact with and engage your audience.

This interview picks up where Step 5: Add More Channels left off: You’ve set up your foundation of blog content and follow-up offers and expanded your reach by linking posts and offers to your company’s LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter pages. Now it’s time to turn that one way dialogue into a 2 way conversation and make it easier for your readers to share your content with their networks.

One of the most common questions about B2B social media is whether or not (and how) Facebook fits into the mix. There really isn’t a simple answer and it’s best to think of it in macro vs. micro terms. There are hundreds of variables to consider, but starting with these three important b2b social media questions should help.

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.

This post is part of the B2B Expert roundtable series: B2B Marketing – In 140 Words Or Less.

• January: The Single Most Important Focus For Today’s CMO Is …
• February: Social and PR. Friends or Enemies?

This month we asked our B2B marketing experts:

What’s the cost of moving too slow in adopting social technologies to market your company?

Read what the roundtable participants have to say. Then get involved and share your expert opinion.

Joe Pulizzi – Content Marketing Evangelist, Junta 42

I think the bigger problem is B2B brands moving too fast into social media without having a plan or anything interesting to say.

Getting someone to accept your messages in social media is purely opt-in. They can easily shut you off or pay attention to something else. Without a consistent plan for compelling storytelling/content marketing, social media is pretty much useless. Focus on the pain points of your customers and answer those questions with compelling content through the channels where your customers are hanging out (print, online, in-person, mobile, social).

So brands should be thinking first “What’s my content strategy that will help me attract and retain customers?” Then they can figure out what social media channels to leverage to create that engagement and capture that attention.

Move fast, but don’t move at all without a content marketing strategy.

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Trey Pennington – Marketing Pro, Business Connector, and Storyteller

Short answer: irrelevancy.

Longer answer: it depends. Business-to-business firms have a reputation for conservative adoption of emerging technology (okay, some say B2B firms only cross the chasm once it’s been completely filled in and paved). Because B2B companies typically have long-standing, person-to-person relationships with real people, they probably have more time to adopt new technology than B2C firms (Imagine if Coca-Cola were to adopt and implement at the pace of Dow Chemical or Boeing, for instance). Expectations for B2B consumers are comfortably lower.

On the other hand, B2B firms who move too slowly may stumble away a “competitive advantage” to a faster moving competitor, especially if that competitor uses technology to help it’s customers nurture closer relationships with their customers (remember Tom Peters’s wonderful story of Milliken and the shop towels). There is something to be said for helping customers leverage technology throughout each level of each channel. Just a thought.

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Jody S. Canavan – President, Launch International, Inc.

Whenever I think about social media and the challenges associated with integrating it into everything we do, I’m reminded of the YouTube video clip with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble trying to figure out the Internet. Today, we can’t imagine a world with no Internet.

Five years from now, we’ll laugh again. We’ll figure it out because we have to in order to successfully compete. That’s because social media is changing how we interact with customers, prospects and other key targets. Done well, its impact on a company’s sales process is significant because it means that, for the first time, there is a technology-based (marketing-based) equivalent to a trusted advisor conversation traditionally reserved for salespeople.

The result is a more efficient and more tightly integrated marketing and sales effort — a major goal for every company. Bottom line? The cost of moving too slow is competitive disadvantage, which is something most companies can’t afford.

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Joe Chernov – VP of Content Marketing, Eloqua

There is a compounding cost to being slow. Status is transferrable from one social platform to the next, so waiting to “jump on the next one” early is a fail-certain approach. (After all, did you notice who had the most Quora followers when the Q&A community launched? The same people with the largest Twitter following.)

Aside from the obvious drawbacks to today’s marketing efforts, the later a company begins experimenting with new social technologies, the less influential they will be when the next one takes off.

Speed is a marketer’s most valuable weapon.

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Billy Mitchell – President and Creative Director, MLT Creative

If your company has a pulse, it’s not too late to start using social media for marketing as long as you’re willing to commit the time and resources required to stay the course.

Start as an aggressive listener. Seek out others in your industry using social media including customers, prospects and your competition. Search for blogs and reports being shared by trade journalists, consultants and industry influencers.

If you’re reading this, you must be interested in social media, and hopefully well on your way. But If you’re still standing still, you’re conceding valuable ground to your competition.
The B2B Bloggers site you’re on now is a great starting place. Subscribe today. I enjoy it with my coffee and learn something new everyday.

Get started and never quit. You’ll learn fast and you can pick up your pace as you go.

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Erin Eschen – Social Media Marketing Manager at Perficient, Inc

Organizations have a choice–act now or fall behind the competition. To a marketer, delaying can be both an opportunity cost to the organization and a career set-back. Rarely are we presented such a clear opportunity to get ahead. Social media is an opportunity that is unparalleled as an open and two-way dialogue.

I’ve noticed three common pitfalls that can set you back even if intentions are strong:

1) Setting sights too high, such as building a hosted community site before leveraging thriving and popular networks. 2) Investing resources in the wrong places. Research from Forrester and Gartner can tell you where your target audience is. 3) Simply pushing marketing messages and press releases to social networks. “Engagement” is key. Be sure your social media strategy addresses how you will engage in a way that drives desired results.

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Mark Schaefer – Author of {grow} at www.businessesGROW.com

This is dependent on your company’s competitive position. If you are a market leader, you can probably afford to be a “fast follower” and let others make mistakes on technology. If you are a newcomer, it probably makes sense to take more risk with technology.

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Doug Kessler – Co-founder Velocity Partners, Author B2B Marketing Manifesto

The cost of delay in social media is invisible.

You’ll never know what opportunities you missed by not engaging in the right social media circles.

An invitation to guest blog? Contacts with potential new business or partner opportunities? A great idea you didn’t have because you missed the tweet that would have inspired it?

These things aren’t measurable, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
Social media engages you with a community of like-minded peers. Foregoing it won’t make the roof fall down but it won’t blow it off either.

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Joan Damico – J.Damico Marketing Communications

The opportunity cost from a B2B marketing perspective is not in moving too slow, but in moving too fast. Companies that jump in without a clear understanding of the time/resource commitment and a clear policy and strategy in place risk a failed social media program. Listen first. Find out what, if any conversations are going on around your brand, product or service categories.

Then take an internal assessment to understand what time and resources are available and if not available, determine the extent of your social media program and how you will support it. Know your limits, assess what’s available, start small, plan, set metrics, measure, re-assess. You may find that the extent of your social media effort is a good blog with relevant content and regular updates.

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Steven H. Parker – CEO Parker Communications

This begs the question: how do you know if you’re too slow in adopting new social technologies? It probably varies depending on the specific market and customer preferences. I would suggest one year as a rule of thumb. If your company’s competitors have been using new social tools for a year that you view as applicable to your business, and you’re not using them yet, that’s too slow.

This is lost opportunity cost. Chances are you’ll miss opportunities with prospective customers who would have preferred this new tool. With B2B customers controlling their buying cycles, you might find you’re off the short list simply by lagging behind. Why give your competition a head start with new social technology? Whether the sales hit is 5% or 50% it can and should be avoided, by staying current and understanding customer preferences.

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Now it’s your turn, tell us what’s the cost of moving too slow?

This post is part of the B2B Expert roundtable series: B2B Marketing – In 140 Words Or Less.

• January: The Single Most Important Focus For Today’s CMO Is …
• February:Social and PR. Friends or Enemies?

Stop pushing press releases into your social streams! Don’t keep pushing the same old messages out! You need to engage!

How many times you read or heard those statements over the last year? After that, how many times have you thought to yourself, “Then what the heck am I supposed to do? It’s the only content I have.”

If you’ve found yourself in this position, rest assured you are not alone. It’s one of the most common challenges facing B2B marketers today.

That said, as complex as the social web can be, your approach to it doesn’t have to be. All you need to get started is the answer to three simple questions about your customer. These questions are at the center of every B2B social media strategy and the answers are your guide.

Where are they?

Understanding where your prospects and customers hang out online may be the single most important question to answer. But the fact of the matter is it takes real effort to discover. So before you rush out and begin building any presence on the social web, your first step is to start exploring and understanding where on the web (social and otherwise) the people that matter to you spend their time.

What do they like?

This question not only helps direct the search for your customers on the web but also feeds directly into your content and editorial strategy. Your target is to learn as much about them as possible from their professional interests to their evolving media consumption habits.

The key point to consider is that as a group, your customers have a set of shared common interests, problems, and values. It’s this information that is vital to the creation of content that is going to influence and attract new and existing customers to your business and brand.

What do they know?

First similar to the “what do they like?” question, it will guide your content and editorial strategy. But more importantly, this question is one that helps guide your efforts once you begin the process of participating and interacting on the social web with your prospects and customers.

As you begin meeting new people and building a community, the real work is in understanding what each of them knows about you and where they are in their buying process. That is the “what do they know” that you care about. Armed with that information, you and your team can have the appropriate dialogue to support their specific needs. After all that’s the whole point right:

• to start and nurture relationships,
• accelerate the speed at which new opportunities become customers, and
• build brand awareness.

So that its, a simple three question approach to building an effective B2B social media strategy. It’s at the intersection of these three questions that the most successful B2B social media efforts are born.

I’ve been catching up this weekend on some of the SXSW coverage. In this interview of Valeria Maltoni by Simon Mainwaring, he captures what I think is a gem of insight from Valeria.

After watching the video ask yourself, “Do you have buyers or customers?”

Don’t have five minutes to invest in the video, here is the gem from Valeria:

Let me take a step back and define what I mean by transforming buyers into customers. Most organizations think of customers as all the people who buy from them. I would like you to think about the transactions, the number of transactions. If you have have a lot of people who buy just once, what you have really is “buyers” you don’t have “customers”.

To me commerce begins, when you have those buyers who come back and buy a second time, and a third time. And then with social, you have those customers who not only come back and buy something, but also bring back their friends. You know, it’s kinda the word of mouth on steriods in social media. And now they are helping other people come to your business and make transactions.

So you see the multiplying effect of designing a conversation that allows people who are attracted to your business and solution to come back with other people like them and generate more business.

Pretty smart thinking, no?

We’ve covered mobile marketing for B2B a bit over the past year with the following stories:

This infographic might suggest we haven’t given it a high enough priority on our editorial calendar. What do you think?

Learn More about Mobile Tagging at Microsoft Tag.

Have you been ignoring LinkedIn? Hope not.

Today, LinkedIn announced a rather significant milestone: 100 million members. To quote the blog post announcing it, “We’re now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second.”

At 100 million members, as a social network, LinkedIn is simply too big not include in your B2B social media marketing strategy.

Whether it be growing your connections, participating in groups, starting a group, responding to Questions, or going a step further and extending your website to use their API, LinkedIn should have a place in your B2B social media strategy.