Using Social Media for Networking…

Last week, a former client and I spoke at the Professional Skills Workshop for members of the Society for Neuroscience @ Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management on using social media for networking and personal branding.

Our audience included neuroscience students and faculty from across the U.S., and we learned as much as we taught. It was a great experience, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

My co-presenter, Richard Sharp, came up with the idea of incorporating the game “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” as a way to communicate the power of social networking today, which was brilliant.

If you are interested in seeing the slides, here is a link to the presentation:

Social media: Bacon and you

View more presentations from Pete Wiltjer Marketing Group.

All Eyes on You…Recent Results for Our Clients

Whether it’s helping a company by developing and distributing their company newsletters, revamping a website to include more strategic messages, or conducting a focused public relations campaign, we always strive to get solid results for our clients. Here are just a few of our most recent media placements for our PR clients:

Bylined article for Insurance Industry Service Provider:

The Business Ledger

PR for Group Purchasing Organization:

Investor’s Business Daily

Purchasing Magazine

BtoB Magazine

PR for Career Coaching Business (a location-specific campaign):

Highland Park News

Chicago Tribune

Integrate Your Marketing Efforts with Your Lead Generation

Pete Wiltjer was the guest speaker at the Chicago chapter of the American Marketing Association’s Business-to-Business monthly meeting in September. He talked about the importance of effectively integrating a brand message within a company’s outbound lead generation efforts. Here are a few key points from this presentation that we’d like to share with you:

1. Your brand is the whole experience of doing business with your company, including a prospect’s or client’s time on the phone with anyone representing your organization. So, even your outbound email and telemarketing should be aligned with a positive brand experience.

2. This often means fine tuning your email messages and outbound calling scripts to reinforce value, rather than only pushing for an appointment.

o For instance, try offering a free case study, a white paper or something that can assist the prospect in taking action on an acknowledged problem he plans to spend $$ to resolve.

o WHEN YOU GET VOICEMAIL: Leave an intelligent message. Avoiding leaving a message that reminds prospects of auto-dialers.

With regard to email marketing, in particular, I agree with Craig Kerr of iPost, who was quoted in this insightful article from BtoB. Kerr said that by focusing on your e-mail strategy instead of devising the next cool campaign, marketing managers should be able to demonstrate to upper management that they are focusing on return on investment. And that importance cannot be understated in a recession.

3. After all, outbound call and email campaigns should generate interest in your company.

o But it only happens when you tell a story that connects with the prospect’s acknowledged need.

o The challenge is to keep tailoring the storytelling to the interests of the prospect, not just preaching principles and products.

*Contact us if you’d like to discuss ways we can support your lead generation efforts!

All Eyes on You…

Things often slow down in summer, but not for us, or our clients. We’ve been piling up the good news and results, from securing a slot as a featured columnist with Examiner.com to exclusive planned features in targeted media outlets like TechDecisions for Insurance and The Business Ledger to meetings with industry analysts and consultants that are anxious to open doors for our clients.

But as our website says, we like to keep ‘all eyes on you’. Take a look at some of the things we’ve been up to recently:

Examiner.com—July 26, 2009

Supply & Demand Chain Executive – June 29, 2009

Industry Week – June 17, 1009

Wall Street Journal (front page) – June 4, 2009

Market Watch – May 1, 2009

Stragglers Take Note: Facebook’s Massive Growth in 55+ Age Group

The growth of Facebook over the past year has been remarkable. iStrategyLabs’ recent report on growth over the past six months, between January and July, is even more amazing for the trends that have been revealed. Take a look at the table below, featuring the iStrategylabs data.

Baby boomers have joined FaceBook at an astounding rate over the past 6 months

What this means for many BtoB companies is that they need to think about Facebook as a marketing and communications medium. And while many consumer businesses have embraced Facebook, I have unscientifically polled peers regularly over the past few months to get their impression of Facebook as a platform for marketing. My finger-in-the-air test of which way the wind is blowing on this matter has shown me that many in the BtoB world are reluctant to consider Facebook as a legitimate platform for communicating with prospects or customers. The main exception has been the human resources department.

Since Facebook was born in 2004, HR managers have enjoyed being able to get a true look at hungry job candidates, to see what they are really like when they leave the office. Incriminating photos, videos and comments posted in Facebook have prevented many “promising” candidates from landing the jobs they wanted.

Yet many business owners I talk with have quickly called it a giant waste of time and tell me that LinkedIn is the only social media platform they will consider using for business. But with nearly six million new Facebook users since January that are 55 and over, and more than 20 million new users since January that are between ages 35-54, Facebook can only be ignored at your own peril.

As I mentioned in the Entrepreneur.com series about PWMG that followed us as we rebranded the company, I have had meaningful discussions with prospects through the Facebook ‘Chat’ function. In addition, we have a fan page for our company on Facebook, and we see a lot of traffic coming to our blog and website from employees’ various Facebook pages.

Obviously this means I can’t take part in all the fun-and-games that many enjoy on Facebook (endless boring polls, poke poke, virtual food fights, mafia wars, etc.). Too bad for me. But not really.

The 35 and up crowd may have been late to the Facebook party, but these older users are also changing the way this social media platform is and will be used going forward. How has your social media strategy changed in 2009? Drop us a line and let us know. We would be glad to share some ideas.

Shorten a Web Link and See if People Care

Coke or Pepsi?

Honda or Toyota?

Tiny URL or TR.IM?

Like many people, I have cut-and-pasted countless incredibly long Internet links into emails over the years and sent them to colleagues or friends or family when I wanted them to see an article I found. However, like many people, I would often have recipients of these emails reply to let me know they couldn’t reach the website I wanted them to see because the link I sent wouldn’t work anymore thanks to a line break in the email.

And like many, I was happy when URL shrinkers started becoming available. I started using TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com/) whenever I needed to shorten a URL for a twitter post or a facebook post. But I have since learned of other similar services that are actually an improvement on TinyURL.

No offense against it either, since TinyURL is a reliable free service. But there are other free URL shrinkers, like BudURL (http://budurl.com/) and TR.IM (http://tr.im/), that offer an extra benefit: built-in analytics so you can track how many people click on your shortened Internet link.

If you are interested in traffic data and finding out whether the links you pass on are valuable to your audience, consider using one of these URL shrinkers.

Traditional Media Still Thrills the Customer (and Us)

I walked into the office today thinking about how good content can impact the lead generation process. And not just by generating more and better leads, but also by helping to manage demand through skillful nurturing and closing the loop with sales.

We here at PWMG often attack the initial lead generation process with PR (with great success), yet many clients and prospects still struggle with the idea of embracing the multitude of new media channels, from custom publishing to blogs, discussion groups, social networks and even Twitter.

Putting hard-earned resources into some of these newer media channels is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of companies today, despite the obvious writing on the wall: traditional media has fallen on hard times.

However, most traditional media outlets have embraced key components of social media, that is the peer-to-peer connection, by allowing their readers, listeners and viewers to immediately comment on nearly all published articles and broadcast segments.

We happened to secure an article for our client, Prime Advantage, in today’s Wall Street Journal, accomplished through our own skillful process of ‘nurturing and closing’ one of our targets – an editor at the WSJ. This article about United Airlines requesting bids on 150 new airplanes addressed the fact that today’s economy makes it a good time for United and other manufacturers to get their suppliers to commit to new orders at low prices. Here is a link to the piece: “United Plans Huge Jet Order“.

And in addition to thrilling our customer, we are also able to see how readers react to the story in real-time.

Is this real-time feedback providing our client with qualified leads? That is unlikely. But it does validate that people who participate in peer-to-peer communities most likely prefer educational content and unvarnished opinions over a straight sales pitch. And it puts the pressure on marketers like us to figure out how to best use social media for sales conversion.

In the meantime, we will bask in the glow of this success for our client and for our firm. After all, it’s not every day that a boutique agency can get its client on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Marketing ROI: How do you compare?

When is the last time you properly measured the effectiveness of a marketing campaign? Do you know what information to collect and how to identify and analyze the data that matters?

Review these five critical questions, and you will be able to start forming the foundation for a successful marketing campaign or even a strong marketing strategy.

1] What are the primary benefits to the customer when they buy from you?
Once you know the answer to this, you can begin to focus on how to best convey those benefits, so your customers can look at your sales and marketing collateral and immediately know what your products offer them, and what may set you apart from the herd.

2] What are your key strengths in the market?
In comparing your company to your competitors, do you find that they can claim any of the same benefits you offer? What are the areas where you are stronger than your competition? How can you leverage those strengths in your marketing materials?

3] What weaknesses do you have?
Where is your competition stronger than you? How can you minimize the weakness? Put yourself in your competitors’ shoes and you’ll be more effective in gaining a competitive advantage over them.

4] What makes you unique?
What is the one product, service or benefit you offer that your competitors can’t?

5] If you were to buy from your company, would you be thrilled?
Are you delivering an excellent customer experience? Where can improvements be made?

After reviewing these questions, we have a simple offer. Join us for the opportunity to more effectively measure your marketing’s return on investment.

Our Marketing ROI Performance Study will ensure that you are collecting the right information about your marketing and sales programs, and that you are able to identify and analyze the metrics that matter.

Contributing participants will receive the following:
• Monthly participant webinar to review best practices
• Quarterly executive summary
• Invitation to annual Marketing Best Practices Conference

We are accepting applications now. For more information or to register for this study, please contact me (petew at pwmginc dot com).

A Salute to the Entrepreneur

This is a great video I found from Grasshopper that supports the Entrepreneur movement.

We usually reserve our efforts to promote other companies in this space to paying customers. But this video was just too good to not share. Enjoy!

Do you have a Google Profile yet?

Google has unveiled its newest feature, Google Profiles.  If you thought Twitter was hot, make sure you don’t miss the latest “hottest thing” to hit social media.

Google Profiles allow you to present yourself on Google products to other Google users. Even better, it allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are and what you do. With a Google profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You can include links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

Currently, Google Profiles are set up to be “people”, but you can easily make an individual profile serve as a company profile.  To clarify, Google Profiles can’t be set up for companies yet but there will most likely be that option very soon. 

To set up a Google Profile, you must have a Google email account, so if you are trying to set up a profile and don’t have a Google account, be prepared to register one.

Click HERE to learn more about Google profiles.

And, please visit pwmg INC’s Google page: http://www.google.com/profiles/PWMGinc