Firstly social media nothing new. It’s no different from meeting someone for coffee and sharing your excitement about a great product or service you just experienced. Social media is really just word of mouth marketing, which has always been the most trusted form or outreach.

Twitter for example is like a cocktail party. All different kinds of people are at this party, friends, colleague’s and of course your competition, yes they are present as well.

There is so much you can accomplish at this cocktail party. You can get to know new people and your competition, ultimately you can sell things. Not at the party of course, that would be cheesy, but you can promote your services and really begin to build solid relationships. You can find out what people want, listen to them and then tell them about what you are offering. This all sounds great but the trick is….you have to be there.

The best part about this event is that while you may be thinking you don’t have time for another evening gathering after a long work day, you don’t have to worry as you can go anytime you want. I should also mention that you are able to leave at any time as well. Sure you might be thinking that you simply just don’t have time to be wasting. With digital media you control the time you want to spend and unlike a regular set party that starts and finishes on a set date, social media is always occurring at any time of the day and night.

Of course then there’s the networking. When you make a connection with someone you instantly gain access to their entire contact list. Since the goal is to make connections everyone is happy to share.

Success is becoming part of the Twitter party flow.

5 things you need to do:

1. Commit to time. Decide how much time you can spend at the party and then commit to it. If it is 20 minutes a day, great but if it is only 15 minutes a week, that’s fine as well. Become part of the flow and you will notice things grow. If you are still worried about it all just give it a try and find someone you find interesting and listen. It will likely surprise you how easy and successful it can be. The key is being consistent.
2. Make unique connections. Avoid the DM trap and desire to send out to the masses. Find someone interesting, follow them and send them a personal greeting. Avoid sending out a blast to everyone and anybody. It’s tempting to do this but it won’t build lasting relationships, the one’s that count for your business. Twitter isn’t an elevator pitch for your products or services. It’s a conversation. Build relationship that will make a difference.
3. Complete your Twitter profile. Would you go to work in your Pajamas? Don’t tweet without your Twitter profile complete with a good quality picture or company brand. Many people would not bother following you if you don’t cover the basics.
4. Don’t give up. It takes time to build your brand online. Most people give us after signing up because they don’t know what to do next. Observe, keep learning. Twitter is the best place to learn about Twitter. Watch other successful brands and see what they do.
5. Build a solid strategy. If you go in without a plan and wing it, you will likely have to step back at some point and reevaluate. Sit down and develop a 6 months to a year strategy and follow it.

Big tip that is always true. The way to getting what you want is to help others get what they want. Connecting with people and communities and building lasting relationships is key. Find them and make those connections.

Now get out there!

Social Media ROI & Socialnomics:

Produced by “Socialnomics” author Eric Qualman, this video highlights some of the big successes for Social Media Marketing in the past year across the B2B and B2C spectrum. If you’re looking to get your board excited about the potential of social media marketing.

Social Media Revolution:

This one will get everyone’s blood flowing. If you were awake during the last decade, we’ve all seen how quickly our marketing dollars have drifted away from traditional media. This video shows how much the pace of change should allow people to acknlowledge, that just like global warming there really is no ‘debate’ .. this stuff is real and it means business!

While they don’t make any concrete conclusions about why this is, we have certainly seen that SMM campaigns generate significant return on investment and return on effort for businesses of all sizes. Despite all the arguments of great ROI, customer loyalty and engagement, I have a simpler reason: everyone was taking the wait and see approach just like they did with the web, and then finally the CEO walked in and said;

“One of our board members just alerted me to the fact that we’re not even on Twitter yet. I think this stuff might be here to stay, let’s get on with it. Didn’t Obama win the election with this stuff??”

Wait and see quickly turned into “time to catch-up!”

Full Article: 2010 Social Marketing Budgets Defy Economic Concerns

1. Make the Webinar an Experience
With YouTube videos, online television, and hundreds of thousands of websites that might interest your webinar attendees, you need to make your online meeting something to keep them from jumping to those other things. Plan your webinar to be interesting for even the person in the group with the least interest in what’s being said. How do you make it engaging and interesting? Present the information you have in a lively way. And keep your participants reminded that they’re part of the webinar, not just spectators.

2. Know Your Audience

Having them fill-out surveys or questions in advance to be touched on during the webinar will help engage them. Always ask an open-ended question if you can:

“what is one thing would you like to learn?”

“what is your biggest challenge relating to _______”

3. Engage Your Attendees

Interaction will keep webinar attendees interested. Stop and think–would you rather sit through 30 minutes of slides, or have a couple of sessions in that 30 minutes where you can ask questions or present ideas?

An interactive webinar will naturally be more successful at lead generation than a static one where attendees just listen–or get tired of listening and leave.

Q&A sessions, surveys, and other interactive activities can mean the difference between an unproductive webinar and one that produces leads.

4. Plan Content According to Group Size
It can help you to plan the interactive portions of the webinar–and there should be many–by having a good estimate of how many will be attending. Large groups are by their nature the hardest groups to maintain this interaction level with. Very small groups like 5 to 20 can be treated “family style.” Family style meals have diners sitting around a table, sharing food from the same bowls and passing them around. These small webinars can benefit from that feeling of intimacy; they’re a small group all passing around and sharing ideas and information. Our firm’s webinars are typically in the 10-30 range, and if they are under 15, we will open the line at the end for questions, this is a great way to start a sales conversation.

For larger the groups, the more polished and engaging a speaker should be, and the more important things like surveys and text-based Q&A can help keep the audience involved.

5. Kick Off With Warm & Fuzzy & Ditch the Credientials

I am getting really bored of analyst type calls where it is all credentials, if you want your audience to engage, and you’re not a speaker by nature, make sure you plan a few jokes and trade credentials for honest humility.

If the group size allows and you want this level of interactivity, let attendees introduce themselves before the webinar starts. If there won’t be this level of interaction from attendees, then before the webinar starts is a good time for speaker introductions and entertaining or lively stories and intro information from the speaker or moderator.
6. Have A lead Generation Goal!

While the webinar is your core presentation, it pays to have a clear idea of exactly what you want your ideal attendee to do next. Make sure there’s a way for attendees to get further answers to their questions and keep the sense of connection and conversation going; and after the webinar, a crucial time for lead generation, ensure there is a clear call to action to move them from audience to actual sales leads (ie a free 30 minute consultation etc.).

“If you liked what you saw here today, there are a few ways you can engage with us..

• A Deal: You Can Purchase a Complete Guide on Our Site, We Will Email You A Discount Code…
• A Lead: Let’s have a chat – book free 30 minute consultation with a senior
• Subscriber: join us on twitter

1. Make good use of your time

If you come to IMC, you will get absolutely the best, the latest and greatest of thought leadership, best practices for everything from web analytics to social media marketing. So you can start the quarter right and not spend all your time in webinars.. (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

2. Meet Trusted Authorities of Internet Marketing:

Avinash Kaushik was involved with Google when Google Analytics was just someone’s little pet project.. He literally wrote the book on Google Analytics.

Avinash Kaushik - Author of Web Analytics an Hour A Day

Did I mention LinkedIn, Facebook & Yahoo! will be represented? All in, about 70 other speakers in 2 days.

3. Workshops!

The first day, (this Wednesday) is entirely workshops! So roll up your sleeves for some hands-on internet marketing.

4. Free Consulting / You Don’t Really Have a Plan for How to Boost Leads This Fall

If you agreed with above.. let’s talk this week! (At IMC) of course.

5. Everyone Loves A Discount!

This link will take you directly to my VIP rate reserved for IIMA Partners and Corporate Members. Please enter in the registration that James Carter referred you.

Register Now!

See you at IMC!

For read rates, my typical answer was more than 20% and more than 30% is great. As it turns out that rough estimate was pretty accurate.

In terms of click-through rates, we always seem to play in the 8-12% range.. which by industry standards according to this publication are on the upper end. I suspect that is because Mail Chimp services a lot of entry-level Small Business marketers who may not be as aggressive about click-through rates and testing.

I was convinced that the answers were tied up in some extremely pricey benchmark report from a research firm, but www.mailchimp.com has provided them free. These categories are broken out to cover several business to business and business to consumer industry types.

Mailchimp Small Business Email Benchmark Report – Full article here

Leaner times call for bigger marketing accountability and ROI. These 5 strategies are guaranteed to deliver leads for less.

1. Keep Your Customers First!

Before you run out in a panic looking for new business. If your company is like many, you took a bit of a beating the last couple quarters.. so the obvious focus becomes ‘new business yesterday!’ This sounds good, but remember, it costs 500% more to get a new customer than to get more revenue from an existing customer.

A recent article by Harvard Business Review recommended at the very least a very earnest call with all customers may help keep you off their cost-cutting list, and or even uncover opportunities to do more business with them.

2. Nurture Your Database!

Many companies with a little creative thinking and some effective segmentation, can drive as much as 20% increase in top-line revenue just by doing more with their existing database. Are you leaving big money on the table?

3. Social Media Marketing Basics

The payoffs of social media marketing for lead generation and branding are too numerous to be neglected. Almost every B2B firm should consider at very least a well-optimized and engaging blog strategy, and utilize some social media strategy around this.

The good news about social media, if you think it’s a ‘time-suck’ there may be some unlikely contributors in your firm; it doesn’t have to be a marketing-only task, take a poll you might be surprised where you find some hidden talent in your firm.

4. Pay Attention to Google AdWords

If you’re using AdWords already, take a deep-dive on your account, and make sure you’re not wasting money:

• test variations of ad text
• remove low-performing keywords
• modify bid prices on secondary keywords to get you in the #3 or 4 position without paying any more than you have to

Not doing AdWords?? Get started. Many B2B companies site AdWords as one of their top ROI generating strategies, and if times are tough, it will bring leads in the door quickly!

5. Work Closer With Your Sales Team!

Where does your B2B Lead generation accountability end? Do sales reps clearly understand where the leads are coming from? Do they understand the needs of that specific market? Have they ‘bought in’ to the campaign?

Thank you for shopping at IKEA!

Have you ever tried to “just run” in to Ikea? This map is what I was confronted with! Fortunately for IKEA, the only way for a visitor to exit is to walk all the way to the end! However, web browsers, can hit the back button in a split second, out or simply return to the browser’s search bar, and you’ve lost them forever.

If you suspect this might be a reality for your visitors, you are just delaying the inevitable – you need to take a deep dive on your usability

For B2B Sites, The More Ideal Customer Experience Should Be:

1. Welcome, You’re In the Right Place
2. Here is what you are looking for
3. Please take it.. no charge, really
4. Please come back

If You Can’t Prove That Your Ideal Customer Will Arrive at Your Site & Experience This.. Google Analytics is Probably Proving to You That They Aren’t Staying Long!

Before chasing down more traffic, it’s important to look at closely at how your site performs as a lead capture ‘pipeline.’ Unfortunately, most websites have pretty serious “plumbing problems.” Before you go out and spend money on putting more traffic to your site, make sure you ‘fix your leaks.’ It will pay for itself immediately!

B2B Site Usability Starters – Set Goals

It is important to try to keep a B2B site down to 3-5 ideal “goals.” One of the Best Ways is to think of 2 things:

1.    What You Want From Your Site

• Leads
• Direct sales
• Subscribers

2.    Demographics

Most importantly, define your ideal customer X the 3 buying phases & what they are looking for (example):

“Senior Sales Manager of Mid-Market Firm” that is..

• Buying Today – Contact Info & Evidence You Can Solve My Problem
• Early Research – Some Good Ideas & A Reason Why I Might Want to Come Back
• Solving a problem, unaware of solution

Existing Customer that is..

• Learning more
• Looking for help
• ??

Create Goals & Use Cases

Now that you’ve created a matrix of scenarios, actually start listing them superficially in order of priority. Use your existing customer’s real names to paint a clear picture:

Julia, has 10 years experience in marketing and is a Marketing Manager for Chapters Books. She typed “marketing recruiter into google” and found us. Her goal is to shortlist 2 qualified vendors by the end of the week to help her find a top-notch senior webmaster.

Now map write out the ideal path through your site Julia will take:

Where does she go from homepage?

• Practice Areas > Marketing Professionals

Does the next page keep her moving in a clear direction?

• Download case study
• Free 20 minute consultation
• Place a job order

.. these might all be obvious next steps for a recruiting squeeze page

Does the final landing page convert?

1. Relevant messaging
2. Clear value to complete inquiry
3. Clear call to action
4. No confusing links or buttons

If you want, these cases can be the underpinning not only for your own testing, but you may want to conduct small usability tests by assigning these tasks to test-subjects.

Turning Your B2B Site Into a Lead Capture Machine:

1. From homepage to lead capture in 3 clicks? (give or take)
2. There are no irrelevant calls to action from squeeze pages & landing pages
3. Value of completing an action is clearly stated “Get My Report Now” etc..
4. General landing page best practices have been employed
5. Deliver on your promise – give something and expect almost nothing in return (an email address will do)
6. Nurture leads & continue to add value
7. Clear call to actions for sales ready leads should be apparent in subsequent campaigns

July is Get to Work On Your Site Month! Stay Tuned for 3 More Usability Tools This Month..

• Examples & Best Practices for Homepage Design
• Top 10 Mistakes (or Opportunties) with Site Usability
• the 2009 B2B Website Usability Self-Assessment Checklist Coming this Friday!

A 404 page is that useless page that turns up when you..

• click on a page link that has been moved
• click on a link in an old email where the page is no longer there
• or any other number of possible reasons!

Most of the default 404 pages are unintelligible for the non-geek. First of all, the page has the word “Error” preceded by a meaningless number. For most people over the age of 40 this, immediately gets them a little nervous, reminding them of blue screens of death and DOS commands gone wrong..

Aside from the internet explorer / IIS error, you will likely see this generated by default from an Apache web server:

When non-sophisticated browsers hit it, they often report thinking:

• this site is broken completely
• my computer is no longer connected to the net
• this site might be a bad site, might give me a virus
• it must be an old site
• etc.. etc..

Even sophisticated browsers will tell you they do not bother hitting the back button and re-starting their search:

• these guys don’t know how to maintain a site
• obviously they don’t have what I want
• I’ll just go to Google and start my search over

5 Things Your Custom 404 Page Should Have:

1. A clear, friendly un-alarming description

“Sorry, the page your looking for was moved.”

Also, because a 404 error can harm your brand, you may want to inject some creativity into it. Some fun & creative examples can be found at smashmagazine.com’s 404 revisited article.

2. A Clear Call to Action

“Please search here or use the sitemap to find what you’re looking for”

3. A Prominent Search Bar with a clear purpose:

4. Prominent Sitemap

Zappos.com is the world’s largest online retailer of shoes. When someone hits their 404 page, the first call to action is a summarized product catagory list that gets the buyer right back into searching products:

* What we can learn from Zappos is that displaying your entire sitemap probably isnt as effective as displaying the top  3-5 places that people go on your site / or the top 3-5 places you want them to go!

5. Prominent Homepage Link

The word “HOME PAGE” will suffice

2 Things to Drop: the words “404″ and “Error” both are fairly irrelevant to your average visitor.

My Top 5 404 Pages:

Additional 404 Resources:

Some Creative 404 Pages

Twitter doesn’t matter for a lot of B2B marketers and business people
and probably shouldn’t. If your target market is CEO’s of industrial waste management companies, buyers for Wal-Mart and Costco, or a handful of other “less-likely-to-give-a-darn” folks, you’re chirping up the wrong channel get back to your tradeshow booth and blackberry! Don’t get fooled though, there have been some huge wins in this space, but it does depend on your audience. If your audience is gen x or younger, or the marketing crowd, you will find them in the thousands on Twitter.

So if you’ve decided that your audience is of the “Tweeting” variety, and you’re ready to “get your tweet on,” here are a few things you should know:

1. Ditch the Inane Banter

I’ve recently taken a liking to following the daily ramblings of Darth Vader and it is amusing to hear about the first thing he did after he got out of bed this morning, but I’m not about to call him up and ask him for any business advice.

There are more than a few Twitter aficionados that will tell you Twitter requires much more personality to generate a true following, but I have work to do and so do you! When I have something really juicy and relevant to my B2B lead generation audience, it will go up there, and if not I’ll go silent for a day.. no inane ramblings about what I had for breakfast, how bad my drive to work was.

2. Add Genuine Value

Still spamming? Twitter is no different than email, don’t burn your list! Help people solve real problems and gather invaluable nuggets for their business. Big kudos for people like John Hossack at VKI Studios his tweets are generally the best of what he’s come accross in his daily research.

3. Don’t Ask for Anything In Return

I can’t believe how many corporate accounts I’ve followed over the past couple of months who still don’t get it!! DellSmallBiz is a prime example: great, value-add tweets but too many direct product plugs, the net result is much less buy-in. Help me deal with the bigger problems in my business, and I’ll buy from you because I like you!

4. Be Consistent In Message & Focus

Your Twitter persona and your brand are one in the same.. if you want to be the go-to -person for carbon footprint auditing services make sure you focus your content around carbon footprint auditing.

5. Add More Value

Repeat number 2 regularly!

6. It’s Social! Be Involved, Start & Be Part of Conversations

One thing we’re learning as we go, is how to create more of a conversation with Twitter. Conversations draw people in from the periphery and are the same as attending a party.

7. If You Build it They Will Come!

Be patient, they will come.

8. Read-Up On Some Twitter Do’s and Don’ts:

Ogilvy PR’s Do’s & Don’ts for Twitter

Twitter Best Practices Article

Stay Tuned for more on Twitter..

Next Twitter Article: Top 10 Tools for Twitter