Over the past 3 months I’ve talked to over 25 companies primarily in the Business-to-Business (B2B) space and mostly technology companies (software and hardware).

 Specifically, I was asking questions including:

• What types of traditional marketing activities are you maintaining (webinars, website development, paper-based sales and marketing collateral, seminars, etc.)?
• What types of digital marketing activities are you engaged in (blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn lead generation, Facebook, partner driven digital marketing, SEO/SEM, etc.)?
• Are you combining the two disciplines and in what ways?

 The types of responses were a little surprising as I thought there would be more push toward exercising these emerging techniques around digital marketing.

 What I found was the following in regards to digital marketing:

1. Most companies were taking a wait-and-see strategy. That is they were waiting to see what their partners or competitors were doing before they invested a lot of time and effort.
2. They were unclear about the ROI from digital marketing activities. Some said that they didn’t see any early returns from looking at how their market was engaged in these activities.
3. They were indeed monitoring digital trends and activities – usually informally – until the time they thought would be appropriate for them to take the plunge.
4. In general, they didn’t see the value in Twitter but did see some value in LinkedIn – as this was a professional community – one that they could have meaningful discussions through. However, even with LinkedIn, almost none of them had anything truly formal going on.
5. There seemed to be an executive gap. Mid-level managers and rank and file employees were more apt to use informal social media communication than senior management. Security and trust were important issues at the senior level.

There were some clear trends that I plan on illustrating in some follow-up blogs and reports, but this is a quick readout of what I found.  Keep in touch or sign up for my future reports.

And please add your comments as I’d appreciate what you’ve found.

Note to above: About 15 of these discussions were formal – that is they followed a prescribed set of questions that lasted approximately one hour. Discussions with the remaining 10 companies were more informal although in general the same types of questions were asked.

And there are always more than a few good articles at B2B Magazine for which I used their logo as an illustration above.

And The Race Is On!

After developing and selling technology for the capital markets and financial services industry, I’ve learned some things about the value of real-time information. The same now seems to hold true for online social information sharing. Let me explain what I mean.

In the world of capital markets which includes brokerages and wirehouses, such as Morgan Stanley, and traditional banks such as Bank of America and Citi, real time information becomes an incredibly valuable commodity (or more precisely necessity). First, the aggregators and distributors of capital markets real time information include the likes of mega-info companies including Thomson-Reuters and Bloomberg. Second, some of the suppliers of this data include stock exchanges such as NYSE. And third, the users of this information include financial traders, mutual fund managers, wealth managers and financial advisors – to name a few. Those users or recipients of this real time information spend a lot of money on purchasing and employing this data to give them an edge about a company or fund that they might invest in (or not).

What is evolving analogously in the world of social media is quite similar. While instant messaging was the early leader in delivering real time interpersonal information, it’s the advent of Twitter that is really making this a potential business phenomenon and necessity. Twitter is the supplier of all this instant opinion information.

Just recently, Microsoft and Facebook announced initiatives to aggregate and promote Twitter information. They are the equivalent to Thomson-Reuters at this point. Of course Facebook, not to be outdone, would also like to be a competitive supplier in this market and is now allowing some real time views (aka status updates) of information posted by its 200 million users to be more publicly accessible. While Microsoft, through its new Bing search engine, is providing an index to the most followed Twitterer’s , bringing Twitter information to its search engine in less than a minute (near enough to real time).

So why is this trend important? It may provide businesses and marketers the ability to look at consumer interests, buying patterns and the effects of new product releases in near instantaneous fashion.

There is one issue that should be important to everyone. In the world of capital markets, real time information is about stocks and investments for the most part – relatively innocuous from a personal standpoint. However, in the world of Twitter and Facebook, the information is about us and our behavior. This type of real time market segmentation information has the potential to infringe on our privacy rights. Many of us have already seen our personal data being used for purposes that go beyond our consent. So while I look forward to the next wave of social media progress, we also need to be vigilant in how this affects our social communities and privacy.

Current Trends for Facebook and Twitter

Answer: When the marketing and sales program is organized and facilitated by actors (& actresses).

I recently attended a 90 minute program with about 50 others sponsored by MENG (Marketing Executives Networking Group) and facilitated by the TAI Group in NY. Since this is my first experience with the TAI Group, let me say a couple of things. TAI has been around for probably 20 years and TAI originally stood for The Actors Institute. They started by training actors but found that their workshops were being attended by non-entertainers (or civilians, as they like to call us) as well. In any case, they have quite an impressive client list including The Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Digitas (in the marketing space), CEO’s and senior execs. Their entire facility and offices were quintessentially tasteful in an art-meets-business motif.

One of TAI’s main goals in helping you or your organization is to get you to recognize your inner self a little better so that you can understand how you are presenting yourself and reacting to others in business, as well as hopefully understand their motivations that much faster.  Actors, for one, often need to use this talent or ability to quickly prep for a film or show. As TAI was saying, actors have to team immediately for success whether they get along with their counterparts or not. And the acting failure of one performer can immediately doom the show. Personally, I think good sales people have that same talent, not only in knowing what their motivations are (make the sales of course), but in reading their client so that they quickly and accurately interpret their issues, challenges and of course motivations.

Marketers often use this talent but they apply it to a wide range of customers or buyers typically. Marketers also have to understand the psychological and behavioral mathematics across their customer bases. We call this market segmentation, demographic analysis, psychographics, etc. But while marketers have to deal with the law of large numbers, sales ultimately comes down to mano-a-mano.

Since I’ve been on both the sales and marketing side of the business…in fact I often feel that I’m in the middle ground somewhere, I’ve usually found these programs refreshing and rewarding. And in this case, ditto. Maybe there is a similar program in your neighborhood so to speak.

I guess Shakespeare got it right…All the World’s a Stage. If Shakespeare were around today, maybe he too would be training actors and marketers alike.