That said, some of the best expertise on the subject of Facebook for B2B comes from SocialMediaB2B.com’s co-founders Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen. At MarketingProfs B2B Forum , Jeffrey, along with Deirdre Walsh, and Susan Solomon, presented on the topic: Facebook for Effective B2B Marketing.

Below is the presentation used for the session. I encourage you to check it out. While it is my bet that the overwhelming value of the session was delivered in that room, the presentation is one of the most succinct I’ve seen on the topic. It’s definitely one I would use with anyone to answer the question, is Facebook marketing for B2B?

The world of marketing is undergoing a massive evolution, consider these three ideas shaping the future of the CMO.

1. Technology Transcendence

For kids today, technology is omnipresent. It’s just there, in everything they do. They are born digital natives. Technology is just a part of life (kinda like sliced bread is for us).

If you hold the highest marketing position in your company, it’s time you become a digital native too. Replace any fear of technology with the acceptance of it. It is no longer a separate “thing” to think about. It must be a part of your subconscious. You need to look through the technology lens and find all the ways it can help you.

2. The Collaborative Strategist

Did we really need the marketing automation software industry to be born to realize how important it is for marketing to be in lock step alignment with sales? One wouldn’t think so, yet it seems that it is the catalyst sparking more and more alignment conversations.

The CMO’s role is to open the door to collaboration and work together with your sales counterpart to determine the next best moves to optimize revenue growth.

3. An Open Point Of View

Working to control your marketing messages today is futile. It is no longer a battle that can be won. It’s time for the brand police to retire.

Changes to the way marketing messages are perceived and consumed have forced the need for a deeper understanding of consumption habits and an open approach to interacting and communicating with your customers. Consider the ease at which your message can be hijacked by consumers (think: BP Oilspill or Nestle), and you quickly realize why CMOs must relinquish control and be open.

How are you changing your view?

Jeremy Victor

By nature, I am an analytical person. Growing up, I was that kid in class that was constantly raising his hand, asking more questions and wanting to understand why. I haven’t changed.

Lee Odden of TopRank (a personal favorite blog), wrote a great article this week titled, Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media?

It really got me thinking. It brought back to mind a wonderful metaphor I learned over 10 years ago during Franklin Covey’s Helping Clients Succeed™ Consultative Sales Training program. It goes something like this.

In helping clients, before providing a solution, you need to discover the core of the problem. It’s typically something that is most shielded from view or not yet revealed (the core). As you peeling away each layer (by continually asking, “Why?”), you learn each of the surface issues until ultimately you are led to the deeper truth revealed at the core. The root cause of the problem.

In Lee’s article, Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media?, he identified a number of the issues (layers of the onion):

• Part of the problem is that most companies are not inherently “social” to begin with.
• Marketing on the social web is less about the tradition of packaging and distributing information.
• Companies that are trying to understand how the social web can work for them are looking for specific formulas.
• Copy cat techniques don’t always prove successful, “Cisco’s attempt to leverage their take on the Old Spice campaign didn’t work so well(6,900 views). However, Brigham Young University did a parody of the Old Spice campaign and nailed it (1.8 million views).

And Lee touched on what I see as the deeper truth (the core) in this statement, “Companies need to figure out what works best for the social channels, media and content that best resonates with their customers.”

But I think it can be said more simply. The core of this onion is:

Let’s be honest, they don’t, at least not at the level necessary to get and keep their customer’s attention and stand out. But to me, that is ok, it’s great actually. Because you can’t fix something until you first understand what the real problem is (the core).

That’s our focus at Make Good Media. Helping you through the process of intimately learning your customers and developing strategies to effectively reach them in all the channels they consume media, including the social web.

Tell me what you think. Do you agree me with me? Is that the root of the problem?

Jeremy Victor

——————————————————————————–
Here are some helpful resources to begin the process of really getting to know your customers:

•Humanize Your Marketing With Buyer Personas
•Buyer Personas: Where (and How!) to Start

Photocredit: Genbug – Flickr Creative Commons

Now as someone who is very active on Twitter, and knows all the ins and outs, this can come as a quite a surprise. It’s not until you sit down with someone, begin going through it, and say statements like, “That’s a DM.” Or “You see this, that is a ‘mention.’ To reply to that, you just type in the at symbol followed by their username.” Pretty quickly you realize you are almost speaking a foreign language, and there are several things that need to be learned for someone to really grasp the basics of Twitter.

This is a rather big obstacle and it’s getting in the way of many b2b marketers. I’d even go so far as to say at this point it is impacting the rate of adoption of Twitter for B2B marketing. Couple the difficulty of learning the basics of Twitter with the fact for the 1,000s of times we see statements like, “Start engaging on Twitter” or “Build Your Followers,” (the more advanced topics) very rarely are they supported with the HOW to do those things.

We’re left with a growing number of frustrated marketers who are beginning to question the value and benefits of Twitter before ever really getting started. All because the initial learning curve is fairly steep. Factor in the life of a busy executive and the B2B marketers dilemma, and you almost wonder if they’re not wrong in their thinking to throw in the towel.

While I can empathize, my advice remains, stay the Twitter course. Sending a 140 character message should be simple enough, however, it takes time to learn the language, how to use the site, and the etiquette of Twitter. The key thing to remember is if you’ve determined that your customers and prospects are using Twitter, then so shall you.

To help in the coming weeks we plan to write several Twitter “How To” articles that address the basics and beyond of Twitter for business to business marketing. With this as our definition of Twitter:

Twitter is a social networking/micro-blogging utility that enables people to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of brief (max. 140 characters) messages, known as “tweets.” Twitter offers the opportunity to share information and build relationships with people of the industries you serve. It also has great potential for traffic generation — by driving people to interesting content on your blog or website — for loyalty and branding building — by interacting with and influencing people and for discovering and sharing information real-time information.

We plan to focus on four areas:

1. What the heck is Twitter and how do I use the site anyway?
   From the simple definitions of friends and followers to the more advanced topics of Hashtags, Twitter chats, and how to use public and private lists.
2. Community Building
   Effective practices to grow a B2B community on Twitter, including where and how to look for the right people, what to assess when deciding to follow them, and guidance on tweeting – topics, frequency, context etc.
3. Conversing and engaging
   Once you find the right people, how do begin and sustain lasting business relationships through conversations and engagement on Twitter. (Hint: it involves a lot more than Twitter, like the phone and real-life meetings.)
4. Twitter Tools and Applications
   There are 100’s of 3rd party Twitter Tools available and Twitter has plans to build additional applications as well. We’ll cover them and point you to well done posts and reviews.

So stay tuned, join in, and if you have a refreshing, new perspective of Twitter for B2B marketing, then by all means consider writing for us, and together let’s lower the barrier to the B2B adoption of Twitter.

A final editorial note: Over the past several months Twitter for B2B marketing did not make the cut when we were conducting our editorial planning. It was very deliberate and intentional. Our view was that it was being covered. But as time passed, we noticed a void. We believe we’ve found a way to take a fresh look at Twitter for business that is centered in education and helping B2B marketers discover it usefulness for their marketing efforts.

Now your assignment, in the comments tell us, What Makes Twitter So Hard To Understand?

Yes, I am talking to you – a quick, two minute assignment. Kindly go to the comments, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I ask, What Makes Twitter So Hard To Understand? Thanks for your time, we’ll incorporate your responses into our editorial coverage.

Jeremy Victor
B2Bbloggers

The first is that the overwhelming majority of marketers I am speaking with are thinking of social media marketing as something separate and distinct from the rest of their corporate marketing plans. I don’t believe this is being done intentionally, it’s just happening. We saw this same thing (and still do to some extent) happen when companies were first considering how to begin marketing on the internet.

While this approach may work on a small scale for a limited time, to realize the full benefits the social web has to offer your B2B marketing, your social media marketing needs to be integrated with your overall marketing plan and targeted to specific buyer personas. It needs to share the same overarching goals, share the same voice, and most importantly, share the same performance metrics. Thinking of it separately will not be giving it the attention it deserves (and the resources it needs) to truly help you realize its benefits.

Resources, that’s the second trend, B2B marketers are underestimating the amount of time and resources necessary to integrate social media and content marketing with their overall marketing plan. While the majority of social media tools and web sites are free to use, they all take time to manage. Lots of it. A blog can be especially time consuming due to the writing involved (at the same time though, it can be the most rewarding). My advice, prioritize and start small. But start, please start, as the benefits are far too great to ignore and to wait until you have all the available resources on staff.

The third and final trend is the continued finite “marketing campaign” thinking rather than regular, ongoing content production for social media and content marketing efforts. In essence with social media and content marketing, the job is never done. There is always something next on the schedule (or at least there should be). This is a very important shift in thinking for a variety of reasons, though to me the most important is staffing. My prediction is that many of the people who lost their jobs in the print publishing industry will begin finding their way into the marketing departments of tomorrow.

So let me summarize the three trends into actions for you:

• Integrate (don’t separate) your B2B social media marketing with your existing corporate marketing plans.
• Add a factor of 10-15% when estimating your resource requirements (both time and labor).
• Ensure the next person you hire in your marketing department can write on a deadline.

Are you seeing or experiencing these trends? Are there other trends you are working to avoid? Let us know in the comments and together we can work through them.

Jeremy Victor
B2Bbloggers

With well-defined buyer personas, your content suddenly becomes for *someone* versus *everyone*. And that makes all the difference when trying to build a relationship with your customers through your content marketing strategy.

What is a buyer persona? Here is my buyer persona definition:

A buyer persona is a description of a specific person for whom your products and services are intended. It goes beyond statistics and demographics, and defines behaviors, motivations, likes/dislikes, traits, etc. Its intent is to help you reach your customers on a human level.

Ardath’s Albee,, author and B2B marketing strategist, provides a definition in her outstanding book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, – (a recommended must read).

A persona is a composite sketch representative of a type of customer you serve. Personas extend beyond the traditional demographic profiles commonly used to summarize an ideal customer.

The common element of these definitions is that they suggest that you see your customers’ challenges through their eyes and begin thinking about your customers as human beings with feelings and emotions, not statistics and metrics in a spreadsheet.

This change in mindset provides you a more detailed answer to the question, “For whom am I creating this content?” It narrows your focus. Your marketing shifts from being product and company centric to useful, customer-centric content that is for a person – not a target audience. Your content begins speaking to what motivates your customers, what their priorities are, and most importantly, the real world problems that you can help them solve.

In addition to directing your future content creation efforts, buyer personas also provide you a tool to evaluate your existing content. Use your it to ask which buyer persona(s) does this content speak to (if any). You then have a guide for how to edit that content to fit the needs of your new buyer personas.

Bottom line, as David Meerman Scott first told us in The Goobledygook Manifesto, we are in desperate need of humanizing marketing … buyer personas are useful tools and are your first step in achieving that outcome.

Remember, we’re all people first. Bring that mindset to your content marketing strategy and you will create meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers.

Jeremy Victor
B2Bbloggers

The reality is though, you are having to fight that fight, and to me that is just one of the reasons why your job as a B2B marketer is so challenging. But moving beyond those discussions, your most important work is in solving this dilemma for your organization. It’s vital to your success not only as a company, but also as a B2B social media and content marketing professional.

So how do you do it? Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

• Reassess all your spending from a buyer persona perspective versus “target audience” – When you have well developed buyer personas for the people involved in your buying process (notice I am not saying sales cycle), you know them intimately. You know their online habits, their daily struggles, their education level and much more. Once you get this close to your buyers, you find an entirely different point of view to assess where and how you are spending your marketing and advertising budgets to reach them.
• Evaluate the structure and roles of your marketing department – When marketing is changing as rapidly and radically as it is today, new thinking in required. Now, I’m not talking about “new thinking” in the sense that you need to come up with some new breakthrough, magical formula. I simply mean looking at the old way of doing things with a 2010 mindset. Apply critical thinking and develop better methods to serve your needs now and in the future. This covers not only evaluating the skill sets of the people working for you, but also their job descriptions and operational responsibilities. Build your department to support ongoing content creation.
• Talent matters, it’s time to evaluate yours – Gone are the days when you leave someone on your team, “because they have been with the company for so long,” or whatever other reason you may be making for an under performer. In the new world of B2B social media and content marketing, each and every person on your team needs to contribute, every day. If they have the talent, but not the skills, invest in training and help them grow professionally.
• Outsource – I’ve long been a proponent of outsourcing because of its ability to allow an organization to stay focused on it core competency. The same benefits hold true for b2b social media and content marketing. So whether it be outsourcing the creation of a video, white paper, or hiring a writer or editor for your blog, these are sound business decisions and one you should consider if you are understaffed.

There you have it, a few suggestions to get you started solving the B2B marketers dilemma. Ultimately though, what lies ahead in solving this dilemma is transformation, renewal, and hard work (lots of it). But don’t let that prevent you from pressing on. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor will your b2b social media and content marketing strategy and execution.

Kindly share some of your ideas in the comments on how we can help each other solve The B2B Marketers Dilemma.

Jeremy Victor
B2Bbloggers

Every time I have done this over the years, I also ask myself, “What skills do I need to develop to be more successful in the future?” There are four must have leadership skills on my list this year. They are:

Learner

Every leadership book speaks about how important it is for leader to be able to handle and manage change (when it happens). Here’s a new flash — everything now moves so fast that the new norm is a constant state of change. The only way to keep up is to have an insatiable desire to learn new things and the ability to synthesis that learning into actions that will better prepare you and your organization. You must be a learning every day.

Champion

Unless you are the CEO or President, just about every project, initiative, or new business endeavor you propose is likely to be met with skepticism. That’s ok, it’s healthy, just be prepared for it. Consensus build every chance you get. You need to make things happen by continually gaining the support of those around you.

Futurist

An eye toward the horizon, knowledge of emerging trends, understanding of the impact of economic changes, these are just of few of the reasons it’s important to be forward looking. It is your responsibility to see the new openings in the market, the potential obstacles, and prepare yourself and your organization to deal with them.

Web Savvy

It’s a do it yourself world now. It’s time for leaders to have an extremely high level of comfort with all the web tools surrounding social networking like URL shorteners, monitoring applications etc, in addition to the actual sites themselves – like Twitter, LinkedIn etc. I’d even go so far to say that a basic knowledge of HTML is going to be a prerequisite for any job in a few short years. Get ahead of the curve and know more about the Web than your employees do.

What are your must have leadership skills for tomorrow?

Jeremy Victor
B2Bbloggers