Friday Roundup 11th June 2010

Seriously. Do I have to write anything today? There are so many great posts on MarCom Professional this week that I feel a tangible improvement in my personal development from just having read and thought about every single one.

But you only have to read the 22 I've selected for the Friday Roundup! :-)

Seriously. Maybe I should pick a short-shortlist? Or group them by theme... Yes, it appears this week was a good week for B2B social media.

On the one hand we have the Rolls Royce Comms Director saying "Social media is a waste of time", but, as if on cue, the MarCom Professional members pipe up with:

Seriously, you're always a step ahead with the Friday Roundup. Why not forward this list to everyone you know?.. well, in marketing and PR I guess.

Have a great weekend.

Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

P.S. I did look just now to see if Mr. Morgan had offered up a correction or qualification given that his reported attitude towards social media has caused quite a stir, ironically, on the social Web, but could find none.

Nerdy white papers vs hip and stylish ebooks

by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott

One of my favorite riffs is: "Ebooks are the hip and stylish younger sister of the nerdy white paper." When I deliver the line to B2B marketing or technology audiences, it gets a lot of laughs. But there are also a few people who are incredulous. Their body language says: "How can David be so rude to white papers?"

I wouldn't say I am totally dismissive of white papers. However, I do not agree with how white papers are typically used, which is why I talk so much about the ebook as different. More...

Social Media is a relentless taskmaster: Why and how to regain control

by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks

Social Media is a relentless taskmaster. Once you begin participating in a social media marketing or thought leadership effort, it is hard to stop posting -- even for a moment. It is a cognitive treadmill with no obvious stop button.  At least, that’s what so many have been told.

However, sometimes we must pause to regain control -- to buy time to think, to write with quality and assess the impact of what we have to say -- before we actually say it. There are certainly plenty of examples where someone should have stopped to think before sending. More...

21 Rules of Engagement in Social Media

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

What follows is a modified excerpt from Engage!, the complete guide for businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the new Web.

Chapter 17

Social Media is reinventing marketing, communications, and the dissemination of information. For many businesses and organizations, social networks represent hallowed grounds, bringing together customers, prospects and the people who influence their decisions in a shared, balanced, and interactive medium. While businesses now have access to these rich channels, the true promise of social media however, lies in the direct connections that are forged between people who represent companies and the people who define markets of interest. More...

Daily Mail article on social media critical of companies that actively seek consumer feedback

by Andrew Grill of London Calling

It must be a slow news week, because a recent Daily Mail article by Jason Lewis titled

How ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account: secret new software allows BT and other firms to trawl internet looking for disgruntled customers seems to suggest that companies that are actively seeking our customer feedback on public websites like twitter are somehow “spying” on customers.

Now I know that sensational claims like this sell newspapers, and hence advertising but I doubt the Daily Mail readers will see this as more than just a beat up. More...

Exclusive! Daily Mail actively using “prying” technology to influence reader behaviour

by Andrew Smith of escherman

Visitors to the Daily Mail website are having personal information about themselves captured for the purpose of influencing their behaviour to purchase goods and services, we can exclusively reveal. The Mail also admits that it will use information gathered on individuals to “deal with” comments made on the site.  Extensive research carried out by a crack escherman web team can reveal that the Daily Mail deploys an array of sophisticated web analytics and tracking technologies including Omniture, Sophus3, Google Analytics and ComScore.  More...

Social media, BMW and the way forward

by Michael Litman of Dare Digital

So here’s a little something I presented on behalf of BMW for AutomotiveWorld recently. The event was entitled ’Social networks and the global auto industry: the marketing opportunity’. I talked about social media trends from an automotive perspective with some key learnings from BMW.. and then answered a load of questions in one of those fancy Q&A things. I’ll admit that it was a moderately enjoyable experience on the whole.

Bizarrely, I was in quite illustrious company with the other two speakers being Leo Rayman (@leorayman), Head of Social Strategy at DDB UK and Mary Henige (@maryhenige), Director of Social Media and Digital Communications at General Motors. More...

Rolls Royce Corporate Comms Director: “Social media is a complete waste of time”

by Andrew Smith of escherman

Well, that’s how I interpreted the words of Rolls Royce Director of Communications Peter Morgan in the latest issue of Corp Comms Magazine. I appreciate that I didn’t attend the event where he is supposed to have made the statements below – but I don’t doubt that Corp Comms Editor Helen Dunne has faithfully recorded what he said.  According to Morgan:“I was communications director at BT for five and a half years. I’ve been communications director at Rolls-Royce for about six months. More...

Mobile Internet – If Not Now, When?

by Scot McKee of Birddog Ltd.

It would appear, that in matters of debate, I favour the alternative. Having been roundly thrashed proposing ‘the future of marketing was digital’ at the B2B Conference last year, imagine my enthusiasm when I was asked to propose the motion at the recent IDM B2B Conference, ‘This house believes that mobile marketing will be a crucial channel for B2B brands in the UK in the next 12 months’. I politely declined.

My reluctance to take the stage and wave my arms around in a passionate display of mobile affection wasn’t so much the fear of defeat (and the motion was squarely defeated…), it was more a response to the depressing realisation that the B2B industry is catastrophically unable to respond quickly to game-changing shifts in market development. More...

How Small Business uses Facebook for B2B

by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M

It's a question which is still asked everyday - isn't Facebook for friends and consumer brands why would I use it for B2B?

We all know about the big B2C guys, the Starbucks, Pringles Adidas etc, but how about smaller businesses and B2B? The big B2B guys are all over Facebook e.g. Intel, Cisco, IBM, we'll stick to small SMB examples.

Here are 5 SMB B2B Facebook pages:

How about Mid West Laboratories, for "analysis you can trust"? Tied to their blog, a basic but functional one, they take full advantage of a Facebook presence. More...

How Cults Seduce: A guide to Cult Marketing

by Michael Litman of Dare Digital

via michaelbatistich.com More...

LinkedIn gains B2B traction for business development

by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets

Image via CrunchBase Anyone else notice that LinkedIn is really becoming the de facto source for business to business (B2B) personnel checking? When you are doing demand generation for your business – do you use LinkedIn to background check?

I have been doing demand generation for my clients this week. And twice people I approached immediately went to LinkedIn and checked out my profile and invited me to connect with them.  They also replied to my cold approach and invited me to present my client’s business to them. More...

Making sense of social analytics

by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP

This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.

As I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:

If you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security. More...

The Economist on the survival of newsprint – “not dead yet”

by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications

Positive comment on the future of newsprint is hard to come by yet an article in The Economist today (disclosure: Speed client) is optimistic. It finds that newspapers have escaped closure by cutting costs. The decline in the fortunes of print has been widely reported. Consumer appetite is in decline and classified advertising has moved online to sites such as eBay and social networks such as Facebook.

The Economist reports that the response from publishers has been to cuts costs (staff and paper), raise prices and use syndicated content. More...

Are IT journalists abandoning a sinking ship; is PR the lifeboat?

by Danny Whatmough of Wildfire

PR Week reports today that legendary IT journalist and editor of CIO magazine is leaving journalism for the verdant pastures of PR (with Bite).

This follows on the back of some other notable moves in a similar direction recently.

So what does this mean about the state of IT journalism and, indeed, the attraction of PR (an industry which many of these movers no doubt bemoaned on a regular basis!)?

Media woes

The problems the media face have been well documented by myself and others for a long time and need no re-evaluation. More...

How much is BP really paying for those “oil spill” PPC ads?

by Andrew Smith of escherman

BP ‘manipulating search results’ on Google following oil spill - so said The Times today.

The piece quoted Maureen Mackey, a writer on the Fiscal Times as saying: “What it effectively does is that it bumps down other legitimate news and opinion pieces that are addressing the spill… and [BP are] paying big money for that.”

Er, not quite.

First, BP is buying PPC ads – so they are hardly bumping natural search results anywhere. Second, there is an assumption that BP must be paying “big money” More...

Lifestyles of the Rich and Social

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

In June 2008, I presented at a conference in Southern California where I debuted The Essential Guide to Social Media. While it seems like a lifetime ago, I remember this event distinctly because a couple of the questions at the end of conference addressed luxury brands specifically. And, they’re questions that many ask or have yet to ask today.

What role do luxury brands take on the social web and what is the corresponding voice and personality associated with the activity. When do luxury brands engage and does interaction take away from the stature and prestige of the brand?

The answer I gave then, I stand by today. More...

Real-time blog post gets Eloqua CEO tons of B2B ink

by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott

Imagine a huge company announces it is to acquire one of your competitors. It hit the wires five minutes ago. What would you do right now?

Not tomorrow. Now.

How about writing a blog post about it in real-time?

That's what Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua did when Oracle announced the acquisition of Market2Lead, a company that is also in the marketing automation arena.

I'm on the Eloqua advisory board and was having dinner with Joe, other advisory board members, and the Eloqua management team on May 24 in San Francisco when this went down. More...

So You Need To Hire A Community Manager - Now What?

by Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks

The Community Manager role is unlike any other position in the technology and online world. Rather than managing hardware or software, products, services or content, the Community Manager manages behaviors and interactions among the members – readers, clients, prospects, and analysts; whomever your community is designed to engage. It's all about the members -- which means it's about managing people.

More specifically, successful community management is about guiding those aspects of the interpersonal interactions that lead to greater engagement -- both the quantity of interactions between members (member-to-member) and between the member and the community or company (Company/Community-to-member). More...

Valuable Insights from Melbourne's 'Power Bloggers' (Videos)

by Trevor Young PR Warrior of Parkyoung

Social Media Club Melbourne this week held its biggest event yet (and the first time at 24 Moons in the city).

The event featured a panel of Melbourne-based 'power bloggers' - Duncan Riley (@duncanriley), Pip Lincolne (@meetmeatmikes) and Darren Rowse (@problogger) - plus Yvonne Adele (@IdeasCulture) as MC.

Darren is one of the world's most popular bloggers - his Problogger site is jam-packed with information designed to help people generate revenue from their blogging efforts. More...

CIPR Social Summer on mobile marketing

by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP

I'm not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn't until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won't be verbatim as I wasn't party to it, but it's a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:

_________

Marketer: We need an iPhone app?

Mobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why's that?

Marketer: Because they're really cool and cool's where it's at for our target demographic. More...

B2B buyer process fundamentally changing - video B2B stats

by Walter Adamson of NewLeaseG2M

Earnest Agency has been publishing some valuable summaries of social media B2B marketing stats, particularly Vital Statistics for B2B Marketers. They've just released a video of the stats, it's a great resource. They don't make any claim that all the stats are consistent, or precise, just that these are stats which have been reported by reasonably reputable groups. In fact they highlight the contradictions in order to challenge us to think more.

I loved the music Dave Brubeck's Unsquare Dance, took me back many years, but I love more the opportunity the video provides for conversation with B2B clients. More...

Q&A: The Impact of Social Media in the Enterprise

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

In the spirit of sharing dialog that transpires outside of this domain, I would like to invite you to read a recent discussion with good friend Jacob Morgan, co-author of Twitfaced (I contributed the foreword). While the discussion centered on Engage!, as you’ll soon see, it expanded to analyze the effects of social media in the enterprise.

#EngageorDie

Why is sociology and anthropology so important to understand for social media?

I believe that at the top level, all of social media is driven by anthropology and sociology – More...