The WebMarketCentral Blog A blog about B2B marketing, Web 2.0 social media, business blogging tools, micromarkets, B2B lead generation, interactive PR, and web marketing tools and resources. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 52 0 11 1815

Articles from The WebMarketCentral Blog

B2B Vendor, Customer Perspectives Differ on "Affinity" 2008-01-02 07:17:00 The CMO Council recently released a major study entitled Profitability from Customer Affinity, on the difficulty faced by vendors in establishing customer-centric business practices. According to the study, "Despite an increased focus on customer engagement, most B2B technology companies continue to fall far short of meeting customer expectations and commitments...Most technology vendors badly overestimate their effectiveness in addressing customer needs, while a majority of customers feel ignored and trapped in vendor relationships that are marred by broken promises."Virtually all customers said they would terminate or scale back relationships with vendors who failed to "build customer trust." Yet customers and vendors have very different views regarding the current state of affairs: while 56% of vendors perceive themselves as being "extremely customer-centric," only 12% of customers agree. And though 85% of vendors are convinced that they are getting better at responding to customer ...

Merry Christmas from WebMarketCentral 2007-12-23 05:22:00 Merry Christmas and best wishes for a blessed and joyous holiday season from WebMarketCentral. It's the time of year to enjoy time spent with friends and family, see the priceless expressions on the faces of children, and remember those less fortunate by giving back in any way you can.The WebMarketCentral blog will take the Christmas to New Year's week off, but interesting stuff is planned for January. In the meantime, season's greetings to one and all, and enjoy a couple of photos—the Pick homestead at Christmas time, and Santa watching over the neighborhood from the tree deck. ...

Social Media Now Top Information Source for B2B IT Buyers 2007-12-20 07:43:00 Following up on its first study on the value of Web 2.0 social media sites by B2B IT decision-makers, researchers at ITtoolbox and PJA have just published their second report on the topic. ITtoolbox/PJA IT Social Media Index Wave II updates the earlier findings and concludes that "IT decision-maker and influencer audiences (now) spend more time consuming or participating in social media than they do consuming editorial media or vendor content." IT buyers spend an average of 3.3 hours per week consuming user-generated content (such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networking sites and online forums) versus 3.1 hours for published editorial content and 2.9 hours on vendor-produced content.Other key findings from the new study include:Executive decision-makers spent more time with social media than any other level, at nearly four hours per week. This group was also the heaviest consumer of online content in general.Discussion groups and peer-to-peer networks were the most frequently used ...

4 Ways to Use Social Networking for B2B PR 2007-12-18 07:15:00 As noted here previously, from both the B2B vendor perspective and buyer perspective, social media is becoming an increasingly important channel for B2B communication. It's no longer just about teenagers discussing their favorite bands. Vendors are using social media to raise awareness and build market credibility, while B2B buyers are using these sites to seek out "the real story" on suppliers, products and services. With that in mind, here are four ways B2B vendors can use social media to spread their messages.1. Get connected on Facebook and LinkedIn.Creating and maintaining a profile on both sites, then creating connections to other people you know, can pay B2B PR dividends in at least three ways:- Profiles (particularly those on LinkedIn) show up well in searches for terms related to your position (so make sure your profile includes those key terms). This makes you—and ultimately your company—easier to find.- You can link names of your executives used in press releases back t ...

Wii Would Like to Clarify 2007-12-15 08:25:00 I came down a bit hard on Circuit City in yesterday's post—not unfairly, but a brief clarification is in order.Essentially, at the corporate level, Circuit City appears to have a policy against treating customers with dignity and respect. Their automated email on the topic of Wii game systems basically states, albeit politely, that we don't have any Wiis so quit bugging us. Their automated phone system (try this: 1-800-843-2489, option 1) somewhat courteously says: we can't help you, goodbye (CLICK).At the store level, however, beleaguered but decent managers are doing their best to take care of understandably frustrated shoppers, despite corporate policy. The corporate folks could learn something about customer service from these individuals. ...

Wii Don't Want Your Business 2007-12-14 06:27:00 If you're a parent of a child anywhere from five to 17 years old (and quite possibly even if you're not), you know that THE hottest gift this Christmas is the Wii game system. You also know that these overpriced, screamingly popular yet appallingly underproduced gadgets are as elusive as Vikings Superbowl victories.The ultimate blame for the situation of course falls squarely on the manufacturer, Nintendo. This product has been on the market since March--one would think that, in nine months, the company's management team would have figured out a way to beef up production for this obviously hot item.Where the rubber hits the road with consumers, however, it at the retail level. True, retailers have no control over the supply of Wii consoles or their allocation, but they do control their response to the situation. That response to date has ranged from blatant price-gouging to forcing potential customers to wait in absurd and often ultimately pointless lines, sending most home empty-ha ...

WMC Interviews: Jeff Rusinow 2007-12-12 07:17:00 I recently spoke with Jeff Rusinow, a very busy guy who now heads up the Web 2.0 site TopNetPix, which has been described as "a combination of Mahalo, Yahoo and Netvibes." Jeff has been an active member of the early-stage venture capital community in the Midwest since 2000, when he founded Milwaukee’s first angel network, Silicon Pastures. He earlier spent 22 years in retail management, holding senior executive positions at Macy’s, Gimbel’s, the Hudson Bay Company and, most recently, Kohl’s Department Stores, where he served as an Executive Vice President until leaving the company in 2000.Here's our conversation.WebMarketCentral (WMC): What did you do before TopNetPix? What’s your background?Jeff Rusinow (JR): I've been on the Board of Directors of a number of private and public companies over the past several years. Most recently, I was Chairman of Internet retailer Buyseasons, Inc., which was acquired in 2006 by Liberty Media. I'm currently Chairman of Neurognostics, a ...

Book Review: Your Inner CEO -- Unleash the Executive Within 2007-12-10 06:25:00 When I first began reading Your Inner CEO: Unleash the Executive Within, the eighth book from best-selling author and executive consultant Allan Cox, I honestly didn't think I would get much value from it. "Too squishy," I thought. "Not going to be much here I can use." The book begins with such lines as "Successful CEOs, I have discovered, share power with others...and treat all stakeholders in their enterprise with kindness, generosity and humility" and "By looking at boundaries (those ubiquitous dividers you seldom see) in a new way, you'll master the art of redefining your life on a daily basis, consistently connecting to a spiritual dimension that adds richness to all aspects of your work and life." See? Squishy.However, as if anticipating just such an objection, Cox writes on page 34: "Does all this strike you as too touchy-feely, too abstract and philosophical, too ephemeral and ungraspable? Trust me. It's not. I'm as straightforward, level-headed, and down-to-earth as any o ...

How to Write a Strategic Marketing Plan 2007-12-06 07:15:00 With so little written on this topic (at least according to Google Blog Search), one could easily conclude that marketing professionals must be born with knowledge of how to write a strategic marketing plan embedded in their genetic code. If you didn't enter the world with this capability hard-coded into your DNA, you may find the following helpful.The first step in developing a strategic marketing plan is to identify your target markets. Include both current customers (can we sell them more of what they are already buying, products and services in addition to what they are already buying, or a more premium version of our products/services?) and new prospects. For new prospective buyers, develop a separate plan for each micromarket (e.g. hospitals, insurance companies and community banks, all of which buy very differently).Next, ask the question: what do these prospects need in order to buy from me? (NOT "what do I need to sell to them?"). Divide this into three sections—strategies, ... Marketing

Excellent Podcast on Interactive PR 2007-12-04 07:53:00 When two of the smartest people in blogging and interactive PR have a conversation, it's worth listening in on. Paul Dunay at Buzz Marketing for Technology yesterday posted his podcast interview, PR's Role in New Media, with Cece Lee of the PR Meets Marketing blog. Here are few of the highlights: PR professionals are taking advantage of online marketing tools and back-end analytics to increase and track coverage of company announcements. For example, they are no longer just search-optimizing press releases, but also using keyword selection tools and trackable URLS.Corporate blogging has to be more than product promotion or another avenue for distributing press releases. It enables companies to share their perspective of the industry and establish a dialog with customers and prospects who choose to interact that way. But while a corporate blog shouldn't mimic the firm's PR, it can't contradict public statements either—the market will notice.For PR professionals to effectively pit ...

Helpful SEM Advice from MarketingSherpa 2007-11-30 11:02:00 If you missed it, MarketingSherpa hosted a webcast on New Research: Top 5 Tests to Raise Landing Page Conversions earlier this week. Key findings from their presentation:Marketing results are generally getting better—either marketers are getting landing page design down to more of a science, or the strong economy is fueling more buyer interest, or some combination of the two.The most popular test was dynamic pages—changing the information displayed on the landing page to reflect the exact search term. Considering that half of the respondents don't or can't do even simple a/b testing, it's surprising that a sophisticated technique like dynamic landing pages would generate this level of response, but that's what their data showed. Here is MarketingSherpa's example of this practice, though it doesn't work quite right (I actually searched for "stratocaster guitar," not "stratocaster parts").Other popular tests included registration forms (shorter is better); creative design (the ...

SEO is Insanity 2007-11-28 06:25:00 If you've been in the business world for any length of time, you've probably seen the following somewhere—in a building lobby, on a website, or on a nicely framed poster in an office:The Definition of Insanity: Doing the same thing, the same way, and expecting different results.Seems reasonable and intuitive, so if you accept that statement as true, you'd also have to accept the logical extension of that statement:If you do the same thing, the same way, you should expect to get (roughly at least) the same results.This holds true across many if not most areas of business and life in general: manufacturing, research, software development, teaching, cooking...but not SEO.Before I began doing SEO work for clients, I'd done it for a number of other websites: my own, friends', and corporate employers. I coded, I tested, I read articles and blogs. I applied the methods learned to client websites, and got excellent results. Here's one example:55 total search termsBefore SEO:Top 20 posi ...

Top 100 Social Media Blogs for 2007 2007-11-26 05:59:00 The VirtualHosting blog just announced their list of the Top 100 Social Media and Social Networking Blogs for 2007. The list is divided into nine categories including Most Popular Social Media, Most Popular Social Networking, Web 2.0, Industry News, and Social Media and Marketing.The list includes both obvious choices such as JD Lasica's Social Media, Social Media Club, Mashable, The Web 2.0 Weblog, TechCrunch, BL Ochman's What's Next Blog, and Paul Gillin's Social Media and the Open Enterprise blog, as well as interesting entries like Alexander Muse's Texas Startup Blog, The Buzz Bin, PR Blogger, Todd And Marketing, and of course WebMarketCentral (I'm honored!).It's missing a few blogs I would have included—Shawn Hessinger's BootStrapMe, Paul Dunay's Buzz Marketing for Technology, eMarketing Strategist from Elge Premeau, the Integrated Marcom Minute Blog from Joan Damico, and PR Meets Marketing by Cece Salomon-Lee to name a few—but leaving out a few high-quality sites is ...

Off Topic: Signs of Canada 2007-11-21 06:58:00 Being the day before Thanksgiving, it's likely that few people are thinking about work, but many are thinking about travel. So, here's an off-topic travel post for the holiday weekend.We took a family trip to Canada in August—six days of getting away from cell phones (no coverage), the Internet (no connections) and normal life in general. There was plenty of scenery on the drive up Minnesota's north shore and around the top of Lake Superior, as shown in the first two photos here (although, by the end of the trip, the kids had grown a bit weary of "rocks, water and trees").There isn't much civilization between Thunder Bay and Sault St. Marie, leading us to spend one evening at a cabin that was "rustic" to say the least. Ah, but that's the kind of experience memories are made from. Also a lot of great hiking.Among the most interesting Kodak moments, however, were some of the signs we came across.First, there was the stop sign that was definitely Canadian—someone had spray-painte ...

TechTarget Acquires KnowledgeStorm: The Impact on B2B Lead Generation 2007-11-19 06:35:00 On November 7, TechTarget announced that it had acquired KnowledgeStorm for $58 million. The acquisition gives TechTarget--which gives them, in addition to their own huge opt-in base and network of portal sites, access to KnowledgeStorm's 800,000 subscribers, web properties and partners sites.This is a clear win for TechTarget, and a loss for at least some KnowledgeStorm employees (a number of very talented people have already left the company, voluntarily or otherwise). It may also be a win for smaller players in the white paper and thought-leadership content syndication space, including FindWhitePapers.com, NetLine and Ziff Davis Enterprise, as well as Insight24 (which syndicates webcasts, video and podcasts). Even TechTarget (reluctantly) concedes that there will likely be current KnowledgeStorm content partners seeking new syndication sources.The same week, CNet announced its acquisition of FindArticles, significantly expanding its content network.Around the blogosphere, Barry Gra ...