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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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I have a confession to share with you. And, to most readers of The B2B Lead, this will come as no surprise. I am a metric-aholic! My professional life is ruled by metrics. Metrics help me plan my day. They buy my credibility and expedite decision-making. They inspire my competitive spirit and drive me to produce more. They help me justify the purchase of $30,000 worth of t-shirts without a song and dance. Best of all, they empower me to utter the dreaded “No” when asked to use resources unwisely.

So, when it comes to B2B marketing techniques, I rarely invest in programs that do not result in a demonstrated return. Leigh Anne recently posted that she struggled with social media and its effect on lead generation and asked the question “Is social media like traditional PR? You have to do it but there is no way to measure results?”

Well, Leigh Anne, I’m happy to tell you that you can track and measure the results of social media. My post on viral video marketing provides a real world case study of those metrics in action. But the post did not include all of the metrics I track. Nor did it include the tools I use to track these results, some of which may break the average startup budget. In this week’s post, I’ll share a few metrics for determining if your Web Site, blog and social media marketing techniques are working for you.

Here are a just a few of the metrics I track weekly:

Website Traffic: Ensure unique visitor trending is “up and to the right.”

Top Referrers: Monitor the sites that are contributing the most traffic to my Website. Hopefully, your blog is in the top 5.

Unsolicited Inbound Leads: Provided you use Salesforce.com, track the source of all inbound leads using Salesforce.com web-to-lead tracking codes. This will give you insight into your campaign results. Track all leads without a campaign separately and monitor the trend. You can attribute growth in these leads to a combination of PR and social media.

Blog Rankings: Monitor your Technorati ranking and authority rating. This will enable you to monitor your position in the blogosphere.

Conversions from Blog to Website: Is your blog converting readers to your Website? This is critical. If you are providing valuable, relevant, and actionable content on your blog, you should see a high rate of conversion to your website. If you are tracking web-based lead growth, you should be able to make some correlation between an increase in blog conversions and inbound leads.

RSS Subscriptions: Monitor your Feedburner stats to see how many people are signing up to receive your RSS feeds. Once again, make sure that number is growing and experiment with promoting your feed to fuel growth.

Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: Social media is a wonderful tool for search engine optimization (SEO). And, when it comes to SEO, there is nothing better than a large number of high value optimized inbound links. So make sure you are tracking an increase in inbound links that use the proper anchor text.

Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: Sadly, page one search engine listings don’t just happen with a call to Google. Monitor and measure performance of target keywords and your exposure for both search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO.

That’s probably enough to get started. In my next post on The B2B Lead, I’ll share insight on a few of the tools I use to track these metrics and assess the value of NetQoS search engine marketing and new media programs.

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Here is a great blog post from Opinionated Marketers I found today about social media and leveraging it for lead generation.

I struggle with this issue on a daily basis. As a B2B marketer at a small start-up, I have to use my budget wisely, which for me means all of my activities need to generate leads in one way or another. Social media is so prevalent that I feel as though I have to be a part of the movement, but is it ultimately doing anything for the bottom line?

Is social media like traditional PR? You have to do it, but there is no way to measure the results. You spend time and money trying to get something out of it but it is hard to see the ROI. I keep trying to master having a blog, creating a presence in the right Facebook groups and leveraging twitter, but how do I keep my job if none of this ever results in real leads?

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Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an overview of the Social Media landscape and important tips for making it work for both brand awareness and lead generation.

The marketing analysts at Sirius Decisions just came out with a decent high level view of the Social Media Landscape in today’s SiriusPerspective newsletter. Some of the categories and descriptions seemed a little “old school”, so I’m adding my own edits to their categories here:

• Blogs/Blogging including the creation of a blog and participation in other writers’ blogs.
• Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook where people can network with other parties who are interested in a particular topic.
• Forums such as Yahoo or Google Groups that are moderated and focused on a particular topic or function.
• Podcasting or Vidcasting which simply means syndicating your digital or video messages via sites such as Odeo or YouTube.
• Media sharing on sites that let users upload and rate content such as contributed articles, videos and images.
• RSS/Web feeds that distribute blog articles or other content summaries which readers view via an RSS reader. Users then click through to read content.
• Wikis. Collaborative documents that are created using a Web browser. Contributors can add, delete or edit content, and notify other authors of their changes.
• Social bookmarks: Sites such as del.icio.us (owned by Yahoo!) and Digg that enable users to store, rate and recommend bookmarks. Many bookmark sites provide Web feeds to notify subscribers of updates.

The newsletter states that, according to their research, roughly 50 percent of B2B organizations are utilizing some type of social media. They also warn that social media may not be a good tactic for demand generation unless marketers play by the rules.

Let me first say that while I am typically not one to “follow the rules,” I do agree with that statement. It is vital that marketers have a solid conversion strategy for social media that is not “in your face” or overly aggressive. The important point in the social media arena is to network, build awareness, establish your expertise, provide high value content that buyers can easily find and make it easy for them to contact you when they need your product or service. The results of the NetQoS viral video campaign show that it works.

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If you are anything like me, keeping up with all of the different social networking tools out there can be a bit overwhelming. Now that you have joined Twitter how do you leverage it to boost your brand? It doesn’t really matter what your tweets are about if no one is reading them. I found a great article on building popularity on Twitter by Dan Zarrella.

Here are his top 10 tips:

1. Match Your Usernames and Avatars
2. Search Twitter for Twitter Users Mentioning Your Favorite Social Site
3. Search Google for Profiles on Your Favorite Social News Sites Mentioning Twitter
4. Link to your Twitter Account from All Your Social Profiles
5. Ask Readers of Your Blog to Follow You
6. “Twitter-jack” Active Social News & Twitter Users’ Friends
7. Ask Questions
8. Don’t Just Spam Twitter, Add Value
9. Post the Title with the URL
10. Consider Using a Social Media Specific URL Shortener

To get the specifics for each tip, click here.  I know I learn best by example, so here is a great TechCrunch article about Connie Reece and the frozen pea phenomenon.

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