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September 15, 2010, 9 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Central Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, 5 p.m. UK Time

Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Strategist at Intel
Angela LoSasso, Global Social Media Strategy and Programs at HP
Petra Neiger, Senior Manager, Global Social Media at Cisco
Holger Schulze, Director of Marketing at SafeNet

Ok, I’m back on it after a busy summer. On September 15, I will be chairing a round table discussion with these seriously knowledgeable industry experts to figure out how businesses can adapt emerging social media technologies to their existing marketing plan and how can they benefit from integrating social media into different functions of the business. Join me in grilling this panel on the impact and emerging issues of this fundamental shift in thinking, and the metrics involved to ensure a maximized ROI.

March 9, 2010, 9 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Central Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, 5 p.m. UK Time

Richard Brewer Hay, Chief Blogger at eBay
Michael Brito, VP of Social Media at Edelman Digital
Michelle Broderick, Marketing Director at Yelp

According to a survey by Edelman, just 25% of consumers say they trust their friends to give them good information about a company, compared with 45% in 2008. Social marketing is built on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust official voices so what does it mean for the future of social media? Join this roundtable discussion as experts from eBay, Edelman Digital and Yelp provide insights on how we’re social media today and what the future holds for this space.

As per usual, the panel will be grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…questions include:

Is trust in social media dying?
Do social media platforms need to change in order to adapt to peoples’ behavioral evolution on the web? How so?
Is there a difference in the community’s trust when we compare transactional and non-transactional social networks?
Is the future of trust likely to be the migration towards official voices or your friend’s recommendations?

Register free by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.

I’m surprised I even made this grilling – I suffered from the worst bronchitis in living memory in the run-up to this session. Fortunately, I managed to recover just in time. So, do analysts still matter? The live broadcast was positively animated with a few tense moments during the grilling phases of the discussion. And it wasn’t just me grilling – the audience thoroughly enjoyed unpicking the panel. And so they should!

Speaking of the panel, Michelle Accardi runs the shared services group at CA, a leading IT Enterprise Management Software vendor, and in that capacity oversees their global marketing programs. She is both a client of various analysts such as Gartner and Frost & Sullivan as well as an ‘end user’ – a subscriber to reports and industry research which is relevant to her as a marketer. “Analysts matter as much as my customers care about them” she says. Her big thing is trust. She advises any marketer to canvas customers and find out which analyst firm THEY trust and to invest your marketing dollars accordingly. For Michelle the whole analyst thing is not just about the products, but also about understanding her customers’ needs so that CA can deliver the right solutions (read: ‘make sure that the messaging aligns with the customer need’). Now, since Michelle is big on the trust issue, I challenged the subject of objectivity as analysts often seem to get ‘won over’ – directly or indirectly – by vendors such as CA. Michelle agrees that there is a perception that vendors use (read: pay) analysts to push their own agenda, but insists that more often than not, analysts remain true to their role as ambassadors of reliable and trustworthy industry insights.

Chris Ross, VP of Marketing at the Burton Group, arguably the most neutral IT research and advisory services firm, disagrees. He believes that there is no way for those ‘reliable and trustworthy insights’ not to be shaped by the tens of millions of dollars which vendors are pouring into these analyst firms. Chris believes that any analyst firm whose majority revenue is driven by vendors (e.g. Forrester, Gartner etc) will provide great insights to the vendor, but may have a penchant for more subjective recommendations to their buyer community.

The audience was getting animated, joining in the debate. One delegate was lamenting the difficulty of getting the analysts’ mindshare as a small medium enterprise vendor with limited budget, while another countered that analysts have a bias TOWARDS small medium enterprise who shake up the space and AGAINST the big incumbent players.

Naylor Gray, Frost & Sullivan’s Global Marketing Director turned the trust question on its head and put 2.0 on the hot seat. Frost and Sullivan are a well recognized analyst firm focused on accelerating growth for their clients. In his opinion, trust and the reliability of data gets established through questions such as 1. do they have a methodology, 2. is it transparent, 3. can the model be easily manipulated or is it ‘vendor proof’, 4. do they have the industry coverage and the capability? According to Naylor, social media cannot be trusted at a deep level. There is no methodology – there is no brand – social media is made up of individuals and individuals will never be trusted brands upon which professionals will make significant business decisions. He has a point – analyst brands play a role in empowering the buyers to make their business case. Going to your boss(es) for funding, validating your request with a leading analyst brand and related industry research/insights will go down better than ‘Someone on Twitter said’ or ‘this blog I read on a daily basis mentioned that’….

Still, Chris argues that analysts are under threat if they do no position themselves correctly in this new landscape. Interestingly, Naylor quoted Google as a key competitor due to the accessibility of industry insights and data which competes with the ‘off the shelf’ reports which analysts generate revenues from. “If the customer can get everything they need through search and Web 2.0 tools and platforms for free, they should.” says Chris. So, the ball is in the analyst’s court to stay relevant. “The analyst business model is strong, but our related services need to evolve. These days, we’re so much more than creating documents – we develop ‘Google proof’ non-commoditized insights, we sit in on staff meetings, develop highly custom research. The basic subscription model works, but the value proposition is shifting from content to advisory.”

So, the reason why analysts still matter is that information is not insight. And – according to the panel – analysts have a role to play in deciphering the many moving parts in their subject matter area to provide unparalleled depth and breadth which is indispensable when making important business decisions. Another consideration is that social commentary and/or communities are not necessarily prevalent in all B2B industry sectors.

So, the whole notion of empowering professionals with credible, reliable and free knowledge is a pipe dream? Naylor dryly interjected that business isn’t quite that altruistic, but could definitely see how more credible ‘vertical’ social networks could start making a difference (i.e. Sermo vs. LinkedIn). Michelle pointed at her work with ‘community of interest websites’ which CA developed with TechWeb TO empower the community. Which brings us back to trust – an industry professional will rarely believe a vendor-driven resource (even if that fact is well hidden). What would be really powerful, Michelle argues, is to ask the customers which brands they trust and to use that social consensus to develop trusted professional communities to empower professionals to rate products, exchange experiences and trade insights. The audience agreed: 73% would like to see these type of resources for their respective profession.

Yeah yeah, I know – the only reason you kept reading, is because you’re into leads and demand gen. I’ll get back to marketing porn in a moment. Is there really a difference between lead generation and demand generation? Our friends at Marketo put it well: “Demand generation is the evolution of traditional lead generation. Unlike traditional programs that throw any lead over the wall to sales, it is about qualifying and prioritizing prospects, nurturing a steady crop of qualified leads that want to engage with sales, aligning marketing with sales, and measuring and optimizing the results over time.” That’s kind of true, but it’s a little simplistic. Large enterprise hardly ‘throws any lead’ over the wall to sales – the qualification process (often telesales) was in place way before the term ‘demand generation’ was even coined.

There’s no doubt that B2B marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in sustaining an ongoing dialogue with their prospects to improve the quality of the lead and ultimately increase conversion ratios – thus, demand gen rules. Now if you follow that logic through…as ‘bare bones’ lead gen (e.g. white papers, cpc, webinars) gets commoditized and marketers apply price pressure to vendors, will their budgets increasingly flow into data warehousing, data mining and marketing automation? Will marketers want to bring the entire nurturing cycle in-house by generating cheap leads and scoring and intensifying each ‘dialogue’, thus providing their sales organization with optimal inbound demand? Or will they want to outsource and be handed ‘the perfect lead’ at a much higher CPL?

Knowing the time and resource constraints of the 10,000+ marketers I have spoken to over the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess that what they would really like is control of the ‘demand generation’ cycle without the headaches of en masse data handling and interoperability. Here is – in my humble opinion – what needs to happen for this to become a reality over the next 5+ years (and yes, it WILL take that long):

1. ‘Marketing Automation’ will need to grow up and become a turnkey data warehousing/data mining/marketing automation environment and provide the technology and associated services to adapt to individual needs more intelligently. There will need to be a universal industry standard, developed by marketers and the various vendors in the field.

2. ANYONE who sells leads (online or offline) will need to use related technologies which will seamlessly integrate with this universal industry standard for data transfer and scoring purposes. This, in turn, will provide an opportunity for these vendors to play a more significant role in extending their services to nurture leads without the ‘scoring disconnect’ which is so frustratingly prevalent today.

3. Any company must measure its demand gen marketers ENTIRELY by pipeline or business closed, all whilst rewarding creativity and commercial smarts.

4. Once these steps have been accomplished, lead generation will be FREE and marketers will hold vendors accountable based on conversion to opportunity or even conversion to sale – which will of course become the new points of transaction. And yes, they WILL enjoy watching vendors fall over themselves to make sure THEIR ‘nurturing’ programs lead to the highest conversion ratios. Sound good? Since we need a soundbite to go with the times, let’s call that TRUPEBAMA (“true performance based marketing”). Needless to say, TRUPEBAMA is marketing porn.

On Thursday September 24, CQ-Roll Call Group, the media company formed after The Economist Group completed its acquisition of Congressional Quarterly from Times Publishing Co. in August, announced a restructuring that included the elimination of 44 editorial jobs.

There used to be a time when editors were superstars – their name synonymous with an entire industry, their word irrefutable. Who could  have predicated that three letters and their universe would topple this long-standing establishment? The World Wide Web has precipitated a change in the business information landscape, which is not only irreversible but puts in question the very existence of the media industry. As editorial voice gives way to user generated content and peer-to-peer communities, the controlled circulation model of free industry content is becoming increasingly unsustainable financially – en masse editorial staff lay-offs are testament to this new reality. So should you be investing your marketing budget in a dying business model? You can for now, but you really need to start thinking about alternatives. Especially as controlled circulation media owners are ruthlessly compromising their integrity by letting their sponsors and advertisers fill the empty seats of their editorial staff. Free content is now increasingly product-led which – ironically – is only accelerating the decline as their disappointed readers look elsewhere for knowledge.

So is the only reliable knowledge now something that is only available to your target audience on a paid-for, subscription basis? Not necessarily. Companies such as LinkedIn and BrightTALK are changing the knowledge landscape by offering viable and sustainable alternatives to professional audiences and marketers. Importantly, media and business information companies don’t need to die – they just need to reinvent themselves and adapt their business model so their communities don’t abandon their brand. As long as they can deliver engaged audiences, marketing budgets will continue to flow.

So how do I think they can achieve this? By empowering their community to shape content through measurable interactive and rich media experiences and taking a more open approach to their competitive landscape.  B2B media must realize that they don’t OWN communities – they own a database of names that are worthless unless they are engaged and responsive. Their survival will depend on cross-fertilization of communities with other brands and competitors. Their key differentiator will be the vibrancy of their community’s conversation.

Looks like the microblogging posse is getting $100 million in new funding from an investment consortium that includes mutual fund company T. Rowe Price Group, equity company Venture Partners and existing backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

Twitter is now valued at around $1 billion which is 4x its Jan 09 evaluation and it now has 54 million visitors a month, which is a 10x increase on the beginning of the year. Conventional thought justifies the investment in such staggering growth. But hang on…I nearly forgot – what do the revenues look like? Oh, they haven’t figured out a business model yet? Ah well, I’m sure they’ll get there eventually…

ARE WE SERIOUS ABOUT THIS?? This isn’t 1998!!! As much as I love Twitter, professionals and consumers the world over are ‘joining the conversation’ and Twitter STILL hasn’t figured out how to make money (Wikipedia shows projected revenues of $400k and this is their 4th year in business). Just to put this in perspective: LinkedIn – with 43 million registered users, is generating in the region of $75-$100m per year. Last October, one of their VCs projected solid revenue models for the first quarter of this year – that didn’t happen (the closest to a business model we got was a hypothetical e-commerce model in the New York Times in June of this year).

The latest idea is to introduce paid business services which include an “analytics dashboard” to help companies monitor Tweets about their business, or verified corporate Twitter accounts.  From a marketing perspective, this makes sense – especially if Twitter can offer integration with CRM and marketing automation systems and make its ‘touches’ part of the marketing scoring process. Still, it’s hardly big leap stuff – clearly Twitter is struggling to find answers, so why not turn to its users? The professional twitterati would be all too willing to share some thoughts on what they would pay for…personally, I struggle to understand why contextual content and advertising services remain unavailable to the marketing community. Twitter has a huge opportunity to generate revenues by facilitating more measurable connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways – let’s hope it figures out how.

In the run-up to next week’s round table on ‘making the business case for social media’, I have been getting great questions and feedback from various LinkedIn discussion groups. I look forward to what promises to be a very compelling debate with Intel, Cisco and the US Government’s Center for Disease Control on the grill.

Unlike consumer marketing, B2B allows us to be very precise in reaching targeted audiences through a variety of channels. Yet for many, social media is still a black hole when it comes to 1. profiling the target audience, 2. measuring engagement and 3. tracking ROI (and many more things that I couldn’t be asked to list). And with Web 2.0 communities giving a voice to buyers who can now share their experience and disappointments with their global peers, we’ve got to get on top of this. We know that social media can’t be ignored, but from speaking with my own clients, I know that marketers are not exactly being empowered to make the right decisions on integrating social media into the mix. There’s a lot of fluff and not enough substance – and in B2B, you need hard data to justify any investment: whether it’s time, money or both. So Forrester decided to survey 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation. They also did a little data collecting and audience profiling on the way and are sharing itsy bits of this knowledge for free and even making it user friendly to play around with (browny point to Forrester – but that doesn’t mean they won’t get grilled ).

The tool (see below) helps you design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers. You can get them to profile your customers in this way, but but there’s a custom price tag with that. Unfortunately, some of the categorizations are cryptic enough to require the underlying report which you can buy for $495. This debate has only started – be sure to join the round table webcast live or on-demand.