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“Large” creeps its way into just about every social media marketing endeavor. Companies want legions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. And a blog that isn’t highly trafficked and packed with comments almost feels neglected.

Resist the temptation to believe that big is beautiful, and refocus on marketing basics — you’ll get a greater return on your social media marketing investment.

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We all know that B2B and B2C are totally different animals. What works for selling toilet paper doesn’t really translate to virtual desktop infrastructures. In e-mail marketing, content reigns supreme … which is why we expect corporate blogs to increase in influence through the end of the year and beyond.

According to recent research by MarketingSherpa, 67 percent of B2B marketing professionals use e-mail to deliver “content relevant to segment,” compared to only 61 percent of B2C e-mail marketers.

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When you rely on tools like Twitter to support your marketing efforts, you’re assuming a certain amount of risk: you can’t control the stability of the platform. As we’ve seen with Twitter’s recent capacity problems, you can lose access to 125 million people because the platform is rendered unavailable. The alternative, of course, would be to sacrifice access to that profound amount of users — with the ante for Facebook up around 500 million.

You can’t stay away, but you can’t simply accept that availability risk will be a part of your future. Fortunately, there’s some space in the middle. Check out our recent guest post on SocialTimes to learn four ways you can hedge against Twitter platform instability.

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Sometimes it seems like IT sales professionals treat a full lead pipeline as a security blanket. They like to know it’s there … but they don’t do anything with it. The sense is that just having lead available means the future is secure. After all, they can pursue them anytime they want, right? Unfortunately, leads don’t get better with age – especially the hot ones. Eventually, someone will meet a prospect’s needs, taking away the near-term opportunity and giving another company the chance to turn it into a long-lasting relationship. In the end, a full pipeline actually provides little security, if it isn’t approached with swift action.

Of course, there are other reasons why leads are left dormant. Some sales professionals prefer to chase leads that have big tickets, not recognizing that a small client now can become a big one later. And, every rep has his or her favorite accounts, which provide a consistent flow of revenue with little opportunity for growth. In some cases, fear is involved: nobody wants to chase an opportunity and lose.

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The surge in video publication and viewing has obvious implications for B2B internet marketing. Though it provides another channel for communicating with (and engaging) the marketplace, the subtler implication is likely to involve the web as a whole.

Cisco recently predicted that total internet networking traffic is posed to surge in through 2014 — quadrupling in only five years. The driver behind this spike: video. According to the report, 767 exabytes of data will be pushed in 2014 (for reference: 1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes), and 91 percent of consumer web traffic will consist of online video — from both traditional online video and television-provided video on demand.

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Telemarketing is a crucial aspect of IT channel demand generation — there’s no doubt about it. Even in a world where we have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and e-mail campaigns, there’s definitely a place for having a bunch of guys work the phones … effectively. The problem with most telemarketing efforts is that they are basically random. Even if you buy or rent a list, you know very little about the names on it except company, title and telephone number. Fill your telemarketing campaign with actionable sales intelligence, and you’ll get better results.

Our approach is that telemarketing is best paired with something else — like a steak that’s screaming out to be joined by a glass of cabernet. Each on its own can be good, but together, they create an unbeatable taste. So, we tend to use telemarketing as part of an integrated program that includes direct mail and online surveys. The result is that our telemarketing team is able to focus on prospects who have already opted into the sales cycle. They’ve told us exactly what interests them about a particular IT challenge or solution set. In the end, we’re able to drive higher quality appointments for IT solution providers.

Telemarketing without other marketing tools lacks substance. Pour some intelligence into a vacuous telemarketing campaign, and you’ll get more than just calls: you’ll get results.

Social Media Marketing: Integrated or Standalone?: How do you handle social media marketing? Is it integrated into your overall marketing plan, or do you treat it separately? If you go with the latter, you’re in the minority, according to a new study by MarketingSherpa. The research indicates that 52 percent of respondents integrate social media with both online and offline marketing tactics. Meanwhile, 31 percent integrate social media marketing efforts with online tactics only, with 1 percent integrating with offline only. Sixteen percent of the respondents integrate social media with any other marketing tactics.

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New Twitter Terms Benefit IT Channel Partners: Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

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Marketing Automation: Be Careful: Technology adoption entails the temptation to expect over-simplification. We want to streamline to the bone, taking anything that even seems excessive out of the equation. Slicing manual intervention completely, sometimes, appears to be the goal. And, this kind of thinking finds its way to the marketing department. Push-button marketing would be great, right? Just let the marketing happen on its own …

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Don’t Forget about Paper Marketing!: The potential for social media to build your brand and drive sales is salient, but there’s more to marketing than electrons. Direct mail remains a powerful way to engage IT decision-makers and lure them into your sales cycle.

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A Contrarian Approach to Social Media Marketing: The growth in users sustained by major social media platforms means that some of the marketing tactics that have been pushed over the past few years are becoming less effective. Especially if you’re operating in a large market (such as virtualization or IP networking), the development of targeted audiences and communities may become quite difficult. Instead of trying to personalize the social media experience, therefore, it may make sense to do something that sounds strange — treat social media platforms like the internet as a whole.

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And, you may have missed …

Twitter Mastery Makes Money: Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

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Technology adoption entails the temptation to expect over-simplification. We want to streamline to the bone, taking anything that even seems excessive out of the equation. Slicing manual intervention completely, sometimes, appears to be the goal. And, this kind of thinking finds its way to the marketing department. Push-button marketing would be great, right? Just let the marketing happen on its own …

The only problem is that push-button marketing doesn’t always work.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a place for the inflexible, the templated, the boilerplate, the procedural. Not every marketing effort has to be people-intensive and high-touch. For every carefully crafted blog post, you may send an e-mail blast to tens of thousands of people. Rather than try to automate everything — or guide everything manually — the best approach is to find the right mix.

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How do you handle social media marketing? Is it integrated into your overall marketing plan, or do you treat it separately?

If you go with the latter, you’re in the minority, according to a new study by MarketingSherpa. The research indicates that 52 percent of respondents integrate social media with both online and offline marketing tactics. Meanwhile, 31 percent integrate social media marketing efforts with online tactics only, with 1 percent integrating with offline only. Sixteen percent of the respondents integrate social media with any other marketing tactics.

These findings suggest that social media marketing is moving beyond the experimentation stage. Marketing departments realize that the environment can’t be ignored – and that it actually requires a substantial commitment.

Social media marketing is no longer a differentiator: it’s part of the price of admission to your market.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

Twitter’s Big Change
For Twitter, marketing and advertising have evolved since its inception. What began with self-promotion turned into business promotion, ongoing marketing and then eh ale of space in your own tweet stream (i.e., advertising). For much of its existence, of course, Twitter had virtually no revenue and didn’t seem to have any prospects (or even interest) in changing that.

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