When I was in college (far too many years ago) we learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing. Of course, in just the last few years, we’ve seen a major shift in thinking about the 3rd P – promotion. We no longer accept the notion that 2% returns on direct mail or 0% responses from print advertising are smart Marketing. Instead, we are laser targeting our messages to audiences and using social marketing to build a following of like minded customers.

With increasing interest in the power of communities, we now have the 6 C’s of Social Influence Marketing thanks to Dave Friedman, president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish. In today’s post, I’ve shared some of Friedman’s very timely advice on making social marketing and communities work.

You see, I’ve had some very interesting discussions of late on how to design and “position” a community. It boils down to “can you really design and position a community or will the community itself determine what it becomes?” We’ve decided to let the BreakingPoint community define itself. Stay tuned for the big launch announcement and see how this works for us.

In the mean time, here is what Friedman has to say courtesy of Chief Marketer Report.

1.Content: Access to valuable tools and content is a key factor in a consumer’s decision to interact with a brand. Regardless of their goals, brands need to think about customizing bite-sized, portable content or experiences for their most prominent target segments—content that their “friends” would be proud to display, share, or support.

Sound familiar? This was the focus of The B2B Lead – snack size educational nuggets.

2.Customization: Users crave the ability to customize, post and share content. On social networks like MySpace or Facebook, users define themselves through their personalized profile pages and the elements that they choose to display. Marketers need to empower consumers to express themselves.

3.Community: The adage “build it and they will come” is not applicable here. To build community within social media campaigns, brands need to achieve several things: Give users a reason to interact with your brand frequently by providing unique content, value or engagement. Let your content travel by distributing it across widgets and other mechanisms beyond your Web site.

Get the rest of the 6 Cs Or, check out Joseph Jaffe’s version at www.jaffejuice.com.

Share on Facebook

While I’ve been deep in debate about Twitter as an effective B2B marketing or community building tool, one Twitter user just used it to save his life. According to CNN:

“Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held. “

Amazing.

Share on Facebook

Anyone who thinks Twitter is a waste of time, just doesn’t know how to use it properly. Take a look at how Mahalo is using the product to build a following of tens of thousands.

According to Mahalo CEO, Jason Calcanis

“People have told me I’m crazy for wanting to give one of my friends on Twitter a Macbook Air if I become the #1 user (i’m essentially tied for #2 behind Obama). Well, based on the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to Mahalo.com I don’t think so. It’s not huge traffic, but as you can see in March Twitter sent over 10,000 people to Mahalo and this month we’re on track to have–wait for it–20,000 folks visit Mahalo from Twitter. In the past six months ~45,000 people have visited Mahalo from Twitter. If the 20,000 number is sustainable 250,000 folks will visit Mahalo from Twitter over the next year. Most of these folks are coming from my personal account (I’m think half). 250,000 visitors at .01 each is $2,500 in value. At .05 each (what StumbleUpon charges) it would cost $12,500. MacBook Air = $1,700.”

Wow, and I’m really a huge StumbleUpon fan. Call me crazy but I agree with Calcanis, “Twitter is going to be huge. Folks have no idea how huge right now.”

Share on Facebook

There’s a lot buzz around social media moving into our world of B2B Marketing and how are we going to leverage it for our own agendas. Almost every day now I hear of a new social media platform or tool, a viral success story, or a frustrated Marketer trying to figure out how to make it ‘work’ for their business. Just today my friend, Jennifer Horton, a fellow B2B Marketer and a Best Practice consultant at Eloqua, also intrigued and inspired by this new social media world, forwarded me a GREAT blog post from Brian Solis I wanted to share with all of you.

Check it out, there are lots of good thoughts here. http://www.briansolis.com/2007/06/future-of-communications-manifesto-for.html

Share on Facebook

Twitter is such an awesome app for driving readers to your blog and keeping friends posted about your activities. But, sometimes the posts simply blow my mind. This is one for the TMI files http://twitter.com/chrisheuer. Now, on the Gallup Strengths Finder scale (http://www.bemyastrologer.com/strengthsfinder.html), I’m a Relator, so I totally get sharing lots of details about your life with others. Maybe that’s why I blog. But, man oh man, nothing like sharing these intimate details with 1500 of your closest friends.

Seriously, we’re all glad the tests came back negative, Chris.

Share on Facebook

In case you haven’t already figured it out, we played a little April Fools joke today. Google is not partnering with Second Life (unless we had some sort of unknown psychic premonition, or maybe we just gave them a great idea).  We hope you enjoyed us having a little fun.  We are always up for trying something new to drive more blog traffic.

Share on Facebook

In a bold move designed to fortify itself as THE King of All Advertising in both the real world and the virtual world, rumor has it Google will be announcing an exclusive agreement with Linden Research, Inc. (aka Linden Lab), the creators of the wildly popular online world Second Life, to become the premiere advertising medium within the virtual world. Code-named “Narnia”, the agreement details a two-pronged advertising strategy that will enable Google’s PPC-based AdWords technology to be ascribed to any assets within Second Life, including the Avatars themselves. The second and most interesting component of the agreement provides for the ability to “bridge” PPC advertisements and landing page interactivity between the “real world” and Second Life. Imagine an Adwords-enabled billboard in Second Life promoting a new sports car that, when clicked on, draws the user back onto the advertiser’s web site on the Internet, and vice versa.

What’s next? Is salesforce.com going to start tracking virtual leads? Are marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo, Vtrenz, and LoopFuse going to start allowing you to track virtual marketing campaigns to Second Life Avatars? If so, how will all of this integrate with our tracking and social media tools?

This is perfect timing for ReachForce, as we just announced our Convert software-as-a-service enabling businesses to turn web visitors into active leads, whether traditional or virtual.

Share on Facebook

Last week, we hosted a B2B Marketing Roundtable in Austin on Social Media. It was great to see what other marketers are doing with social media. Some were very advanced with huge customer communities while other were still trying to figure out how best to integrate social media into their overall marketing strategy. It seems, overall, executives are aware of social media but do not completely understand it. If you are feeling pressure from your bosses to start a blog or user community because it is the hot thing right now, you should really sit back and analyze what tactic would be best.

One attendee said she was supposed to be starting a user community but they only have 70 customers. For most companies a user community is a lot of time, effort and money for only 70 customers especially when you consider that only a fraction of customers will actually be active in the community. Knowing your customer is also something to consider when deciding to start a blog. Some companies believe that blogs today are what websites were 5 years ago, you just have to have one. The truth is they are a lot of effort. If your customers and prospects are not active online, starting a blog is probably not a good idea. The point?  Research and know your customers’ behavior before launching any social media program.

Share on Facebook

It seems everyone nowadays has a profile on Facebook and LinkedIn plus more and more are becoming Twitter users. But are people there to really network and create relationships or is it something you have to do to stay in the game? With so many blogs and other publications giving strategies on how to leverage twitter or how to get the most out of Facebook, is everyone really just there to promote themselves? Now I will say that there are users out there that are very committed to their social networks and often interact with people more online than they do face to face, but is that the majority? Are most people out there just commenting on your blog post or writing on your Facebook wall so that you will listen to them? And does that mean that they don’t really care about your message at all?

When I comment on a blog I am genuinely asking a question or giving my opinion but do I hope that it will help traffic and linking to my blog? absolutely (isn’t that part of the strategy those articles tell us?) When I follow you on Twitter do I expect you to follow me back, of course. My point really is that all forms of social media are not completely transparent and everyone who participates does so with some degree of selfishness. As brilliant as Seth Godin is, do you really think he writes his blog just to share ideas and isn’t hoping that it will help sell more copies of his next book?

Share on Facebook

In my last post, I shared a few of the metrics I track each week to assess the performance of my social media programs. In this week’s post, I focus on the tools I use to track results. Because I’m a metrics-aholic, I have racked up a rather expensive habit over the years. But, I have found the insight these products provide is well worth the investment.

Here are a just a few of the products I use to track social media and traditional marketing program results:

Website Traffic: Google Analytics helps me track web analytics basics. And, it costs nothing!

Top Referrers: Once again, Google Analytics has my vote for the best info at the best price.

Unsolicited Inbound Leads: I use a combination of salesforce.com and Eloqua to track inbound leads. Eloqua, while one of the most expensive tools in my tool chest, actually gives me details on a one-off basis so can monitor the click stream of a user from our blog to our web to a lead form. And, it helps me automate lead processing which can come in handy when you have a viral marketing success. I have been able to identify enough leads that came from our blog and converted to closed deals to more than justify it’s expense (including the salary of my full-time blogger).

Blog Rankings: Technorati posts blog rankings and authority ratings. Once again, the price is right: Free.

Conversions from Blog to Website: Google Analytics shows me the conversion rate from our blog to our website.

RSS Subscriptions: If you use Feedburner for RSS you can easily get this data for free.

Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: I use a wonderful SAAS service from Hub Spot to provide this data and more. And, it’s not really that expensive.

Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: This is a tricky area because web traffic data can often lie. But I’ve found another somewhat expensive offering that gives me a good idea of our company’s weighted search engine exposure –both paid and organic– on the keywords that matter. The service is called CIRadar. Compete.com can also give you an idea of your web site traffic trends compared to the competition provided you have enough volume to show up on their radar.

I’m also intrigued by the possibilities of other tools that help measure share of voice and analyze the value of coverage. Products like Meltwater and Factiva. Have any experience with these products? Are they worth the price? Would love to hear from readers about their value for the small and medium size business B2B marketer.

Share on Facebook