Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

B2B Marketers, Meet Jeremy Victor, Entrepreneur, Editor in Chief, Consultant

It's been a long time since we introduced someone from the community. When I created the About You page, I envisioned a more active exchange, albeit limited by the tool. Some of you may have moved on to new pursuits since you left your introduction. We want to hear from you and learn what you're up to. Today, we're meeting Jeremy Victor. He spent 15 years in the technology space and has grown to love all things digital, with an emphasis on the B2B exchange. You should definitely check out his work and that of the community he built. We... Read more →

Creating a Content-Driven Community

For many B2B companies -- that is companies that sell products, services, or information to other businesses vs. consumers -- building a sustainable community means providing access to content that is fine tuned to their needs. Which presupposes you know your customers. You will also want to infuse the company values, associations, ideas, and perceptions you want to transmit customers as well as offers or rewards in your content. First, figure out where you're going Purpose has a way of focusing activities and interactions, until they provide business impact. Declaring your objective, attaching goals to it, and making them measurable,... Read more →

Do Social Networks See Organizations as Customers?

With the maturity of many social networks, we should be seeing a better fine tuning of what those networks offer individuals and organizations alike. However, to an observer it seems that the plan was to enroll oodles of people to put their stuff there and charge advertising money to companies in exchange for eyeballs. You can see from this chart here that many organizations are maintaining company-related accounts or profiles on social media sites. Someone has to pay for the data center hosting all the information -- and to keep the lights on -- right? Looks like that role was... Read more →

Earned Media and Influence

We call earned media the result of an organization's mainstream media and blogger outreach. We've been thinking about this relationship as an attempt by the organization to influence third-party content providers to write about the company, its products, or services. In the old model, the public relations professional sends a pitch, the journalist, editor, or blogger either responds requesting more information, or the PR team follows up with a subsequent reminder about the pitch -- typically, another email or a phone call. This is still done today, despite the widespread adoption of new media by both the pitching and the... Read more →

Facebook's About Face on Conversation

Let's recap a few things that have happened in the last couple of weeks with Facebook. At the f8 developer's conference, Facebook told its users what they think about privacy, proclaiming a new age of openness and the default sharing of information previously restricted to a user's trusted network. Pronouncements aren't conversation. Unsurprisingly, people were offended -- starting with the early adopters and the influencers. Mainstream media jumped in the fray. They attempted to restart the conversation via an increasingly passionate stream of blog posts, tweets, and posts on Facebook itself. If you search for Facebook and select blogs, you... Read more →

Getting People to Care

You probably will agree with me that getting the word out about an initiative, an event, a program, a product has gotten much easier. Look at the array of media available to the average person. You can tweet an event, do a press release about it, tweet the release, list it on LinkedIn, push emails out to lists, put a big banner on the front of the building, list it on your optimized Web page, etc. You get the point. In fact, that's exactly what is happening at the moment. Take the same message, tweak number of words, if you're... Read more →

The Power of Pull

Have you ever wanted something so much that you spent all your waking hours working towards it and your dreams uncovering new avenues to pursue it? I've always been very interested in achieving our potential as individuals and as businesses. Up until quite recently, this was done mostly with organizations that could forecast needs and then design the most efficient systems to ensure that the right people and resources are available at the right time and place using carefully scripted and standardized processes. In other words, through push. I don't know about you, I really dislike the term "resources" when... Read more →

B2B Content Strategy is Sexy

In most B2B organizations, marketing is slowly making its way out of the secretarial or admin pool perception. You will still get the order of isolated sponsoring ad and stand alone sell sheet (with fries on the side) and in some cases even the dictation of a cover letter in your voice mail. That's because many B2B organizations started life with a strong sales component, and now culture. Sales sees marketing as subservient, and not leading the charge when it comes to customer acquisition and retention. However, in recent years, increased competitive forces and the faltering economy have opened the... Read more →

Five Companies that Fix their Story to Inspire Service

Branding as a strategy means little if the customer experience is not there. If your story doesn’t align with what you do, all of the clever tactics you can come up with to follow your lofty goal will not make the cut.Unless you can fix your story by inspiring a culture of service from the inside. You instill a belief as well as make an example of behaviors to follow throughout the organization. You know that this cannot just be a grassroots effort, it needs to come all the way from the top. Which companies are doing that today? Here’s... Read more →

How To Harness Influence

"Influence is not something done by certain people to other people. It's the result of those people we call The Influenced doing something in response to those we call Influential." [Mark Earls] Influence is not something that is done to people. Public relations professionals work on identifying the people they'd like to reach and crafting messages that appeal to them in order to get the word out and sway publics. To understand why your PR pitches may strike out, we'll take a look at the three main components and six drivers of influence through a PR lens.(1.) the content of... Read more →