Here was the LinkedIn:Answers question:
If you have any examples of a blog or other social media tactics that have worked with gritty B2B markets–particularly where complex buying processes are involved–, I’d like to hear about them.
If you have an opinion about the value of social media communications aiming to reach executives in the B2B sector, please share it.
Here’s my response:
I think that the biggest hurdle that you’re going to run into is the “chicken and egg” problem.
1) Typically a legitimately recognized expert is a pretty busy person doing “real work”
2) A new blog takes quite a while to build an audience without significant marketing expenses (in the B2B space that can mean a lot of off-line advertising in things like trade journals, etc.)
So now you’ve got the issue of trying to convince an expert at your disposal to spend a lot of time writing a blog that for quite a while no one is going to even be reading.
Yet without a lot of good, targeted content no one is ever going to find or read the blog!
It’s like having someone with the gravitas of Einstein giving a lecture to an empty hall.
So I’d say that if you really want to make it work in a B2B space you need:
1) A writer that people really are going to want to read
2) A significant marketing budget to “prime the pump” until the blog starts catching on it’s own.
The good thing about this is that if you are in a very specialized / targeted industry it should not take long for your particular blog/site to start ranking well due to the long-tail, niche nature of what you’re writing about.
For instance, I’ve been involved in e-commerce and internet/next-gen marketing in the motorcycle and powersports space for over 4 years. I’ve recently started focusing on providing consulting services on a more formal basis.
It’s a total B2B play where I’m writing to/for the OEM’s, disti’s, and retailers/dealers in that space.
Because of the sort of mom-and-pop nature of this market, I have the distinction of currently being sort of one of the only “experts” that’s focusing on this niche.
Good news: if you Google “motorcycle e-commerce” my site www.radicalpowersports.com is #1 after only like 8 months in existance
“Bad” news: there’s not a lot of people looking for this stuff now. So I sort of feel like I’m talking to an empty room. the upside is however that when someone does stumble across my little site, they are VERY targeted, and VERY interested.
But I also write for the leading offline trade publication for the motorcycle and powersports dealer community so I’ve got that offline leverage that helps drive qualified traffic.
So, there’s some general info from my own experience. Without more specific information on what market you’re looking to play in or what your specific goals are with regards to providing the information in question that’s about all I can offer now.
If you wanted to provide more information on what you’re looking to do specifically you might be able to get some more actionable ideas.
I’ve provided a link to a pretty good SearchengineLand post on B2B blogging that you might find useful.
Links:
Tags:B2B, blogging, consulting, LinkedIn-Answers
Here was the LinkedIn:Answers question:
Who is the BEST SEO Consultant out there?
I am looking for the best SEO consultant out there, to work with me on a content driven lead gen property we are working on.
This can be paid in Cash / Cash + Equity
This was my response:
There are some good recommendations here obviously, but I think it’s very important that you understand the scope of your question. I’m not trying to be pedantic, and if you already know this stuff then that’s great.
Fundamentally good SEO (and to a large extent SEM) is based around having a good site to begin with. That all comes down to having good content.
From there all the rest of the “stuff” comes into play:
-On page factors
-Intrasite link structures
-quality links to your site from outside with good anchor text
-Properly managed server infrastructure with all the appropriate redirects (if necessary)
-Good site hygiene (lack of duplicate content, etc. etc.)
In addition to that basic fact, SEO is VERY market dependent. If you are trying to compete in an area with highly sought after keywords, it’s a much harder row to hoe. If you are in a niche or long-tail market, it can be much easier. Obviously the nature of the market and the inherent difficulty of the SEO effort in each will determine how “best” you need.
Keep that in mind when you get recommendations as well. Someone with a niche site could have used Person X and gotten great results, but that same person in a more competitive market could have failed miserably.
As you’re evaluating an SEO consultant just be VERY careful of anyone that promises a certain result or rank. They can do all the “correct” work and it can still take a long time to see the results on your site.
That said, if you have the bank account to support it, the two heavy-hitters I’d look at are:
Bruce Clay (www.bruceclay.com)
Stephen Spencer (www.netconcepts.com)
Both of these guys/companies have a much more comprehensive outlook and toolset than a lone SEO consultant can provide not to mention the years and years of man-hours of experience that they can bring to bare on your problem.
I don’t work for them, and I’m not paid to shill for them. I’ve just seen them talk numerous times at shows like Search Engine Strategies, Internet Retailer, eTail, etc. and I’m always blown away by their presentations, and I’ve yet to meet a client of theirs that was not amazed with their results.
I write for and consult to the motorcycle and powersports market (www.radicalpowersports.com) which is a pretty niche space, so perhaps my outlook is different than say a large consumer goods space.
But I’d suggest starting with these top guys and if they don’t work for you, I’m sure they can point you a good, trusted company that would fit better for you.
Good luck, and my the Google gods smile on your efforts!
Links:
Tags:consulting, LinkedIn-Answers, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO
I just discovered this pretty cool feature on LinkedIn called LinkedIn:Answers. It’s a public forum where LinkedIn members can post questions and then other LinkedIn members can post their answers. Now one would hope that (at least for now) the LinkedIn community is a little higher class of people than the general unwashed masses out there on the interwebs so the quality of advice you’d get would be a little better as well.
I’ve decided that it might be kinda cool to try answering a few questions that I think I can offer a valuable viewpoint on and see what happens.
I’m creating a site tag for LinkedIn-Answers where I’ll cross post the questions and my answers.
Tags:consulting, LinkedIn-Answers
This month I’m going diverge from using social networking to strictly sell online. I’m going to write about using online social networking tools to get people through your physical doors and hopefully help you sell more stuff over the counter (of course doing all of this will also dramatically help your online sales as well because content is content and people and search engines both love content!).
This on-line/off-line thinking is sort of the as-yet undiscovered frontier. To date most of the social networking fuss has been about online activities. Chatting, bookmarking, reading, ranking, and commenting on news and entertainment sites, etc. This new wave of Internet enabled social networking I’m writing about this month is all about using online tools to get people offline and into the real world. In our case that’s onto the back of a motorcycle, scooter or PWC and more importantly into your dealership.
Our goal is to take disparate social networking entities and create a plan that unifies and leverages their capabilities to establish, strengthen, and utilize relationships with your local customers and then connect them all to your site and with each other.
A great example of a dealership that’s done something similar by leveraging the old-world, non-internet methods is Rick Fairless’ Strokers Dallas (and all of the other pieces of his empire). Rick apparently realized that it’s really, really, really not about the bikes, or even the dealership. It’s about the relationships between the dealership and the customer. The bikes are basically just the vehicle that initiates the relationship. It’s all the other stuff that strengthens that bond (the bar, the tattoo parlor, the events, the TV show, etc.)
Now Rick was able to leverage the force of his personality to drive this through the use of the mainstream media and by word of mouth. However, it’s interesting to note that as far as I can tell even he’s not doing a lot of the Internet based stuff I’m talking about (I did find a profile on Facebook, but there’s no integration, or even a link as far as I could tell, on his shop’s site). Maybe he just doesn’t need to?
Now you might be thinking that Rick’s operation is light years ahead of you. He’s on TV, he’s famous, etc. etc. There’s no way you could emulate that. And you may be correct if you are talking about a national or global level. But what about on a local or regional level?
The old media that made Rick’s operation (and of course Rick himself) famous is playing less and less of a role today. The Internet is bringing about an open stage that anyone can use to secure their own form of fame (albeit on a smaller geographic scale, but you never know where it might take you).
So how do we go about doing this? First keep this caveat firmly in your mind: this is all very new. From the sites/tools themselves all the way down to the very concepts that I’m talking about. Like, bleeding edge, don’t touch the wet paint, new. So you’re going to need to really switch on your right brain and think creatively about what’s possible, what you want to do, and how you want to do it. But trust me on this one. In no more than three years this month’s column will seem amazingly prescient. Maybe?
At the highest level you need to create accounts for your dealership on various established social networking sites and then create an integration between them all on your dealership’s website.
More social networking sites are realizing that they need to open up a bit and are providing API’s (application programming interfaces: ways for multiple, disparate computer programs to talk to each other) for developers to use. You’re even starting to see things like pre-built widgets from the established sites that allow you to embed part of their functionality on your site or on other social networking sites.
Here’s an example of how this might look in practice (the sites mentioned are just for illustration, there’s plenty of other ones out there):
1) Establish a primary social networking hub site. This will be the primary place where you create the social relationship linkages between your dealership and your customers. Sites like Facebook, MySpace are good choices. Most of the other elements of the social networking ecosystem have plug-ins that allow loose integration with these big players.
[Note: the realization is beginning to dawn that a potential, upcoming killer application is going to be the social networking hub or aggregation site. Currently the biggest hindrance to this is the walled garden approach that the big players like Facebook are imposing with their social graphs (the map/graph of all the connections between the user and his or her friends/connections, etc.). Initiatives like OpenSocial and Google's Friend Connect may help in opening this whole thing up.]
2) Because our big goal is to get people offline and out riding (and ultimately into your shop) you need a way to set up and publicise what’s going on. To allow your customers to participate in (or even organize on their own) rides and events (open houses, bike nights, etc.) create an account on the amazing site MeetUp.
3) Take videos, or better yet have customers take the videos, of rides and events and share them on YouTube.
4) Do the same with flickr for still pictures of rides, events, customer’s bikes, whatever.
5) Now embed all the various widgets and plugins that the social networking sites offer into your dealership’s own site(s). You will also want to make sure that there are links to your dealership’s site on each of the social networking properties, and that all of the various social sites are all linking to each other. Yes, conceptually it’s all a bit messy, but a clean execution will hide most the mess.
A step that is going to be vital for you to succeed here is going to be customer education and facilitation. If a customer (or a prospect! There’s no reason why everyone that walks in your door, whether they buy a bike or not should not be offered the opportunity to be a part of your community to see what your dealership is about) is not already on these sites (or even aware of them) you may need to do some hand holding and help them set up accounts, add your shop as a “friend” where applicable and so on. It would be a good idea to have one primary point of contact in your shop to handle this community building activity (read more on this community relationship management aspect)
This sort of piece-meal method of using social networking has the advantage being cheap and fairly easy. The disadvantage, as I mentioned earlier, is that it’s pretty messy. Next month I’m going to talk about how you can clean it all up by bringing all of this functionality under your own roof using something called white-label social networking platforms.
Tags:Column, community-marketing, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, facebook, flickr, internet, metacafe, motorcycle, myspace, powersports, social marketing, social-networking, web2.0, youtube
