Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media but...

Last Monday was the last Webinar in the four part series on social media that I organized with the Software and Information Industry Association. The goal of the series was explore all the business applications that you can use social media for and show real world examples of how this was being done. We gathered a impressive line up of panelists to share their insight and best practices, including marketing executives from BurrellsLuce, Deloitte Services, Jigsaw and Vocus, among others.

If you are curious about how companies today are integrating social media into their overall marketing programs for applications like:

• Lead generation
• Enterprise sales support
• Competitive intelligence gathering
• Deal capture
• Distribution partner identification and cultivation
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Executive visibility and thought leadership
• Reputation management
• Employee recruitment
• Team, culture and morale building

...then I highly recommend that you listen to the discussions and check out the slides from the Webinars below.

Overview of Business Applications of Social Media (Audio | Slides)
Social media has already begun the transformation of how we interact, and has the potential to transform the way we do business. Understanding and effectively implementing a social media strategy can have a major impact on how businesses are perceived and how they interact with their customers. Nowhere is this more evident than the PR, marketing and sales departments. In this 90-minute webinar, you'll hear how social media tools can be used in lead generation, enterprise sales support, competitive intelligence management, employee recruitment, team culture & morale boosting, and branding & awareness

Moderator:
Karen Leavitt, CEO, Marketing Fusion

Panelists:
Angela Lauria, CMO, AppAssure
Gail Nelson, SVP, Marketing, BurrellesLuce
Jeff Majka, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group

Enterprise Sales Support - Using Social Media to Support the Enterprise B2B Sales Cycle (Audio | Slides)
With new service-based models and the rise of "freemium", the sales cycle is getting complicated -- and every advantage counts. Social media has the potential to connect these new models to the customers that want them, but how do you implement it? Where do you start? Hear how social media can transform the way you approach lead generation and sales cycle support.

Moderator:
Ian F. Strain-Seymour, Director of Product Strategy & Development, Apogee Search LLC

Panelists:
Steve Lunceford, Director, Public Sector Strategic Communications, Deloitte Services LLP
Adam Mertz, Product Marketing Manager, Jive Software
Jay Hallberg, Co-founder & VP of Marketing, Spiceworks

Using Social Media to Target the C-Suite and Close Deals (Audio | Slides)
Many of your customers are using social media to communicate with THEIR customers. How can you tap into their social media programs? The first step to closing the deal is to conduct a social media audit of your principal prospects. How can this be completed efficiently and comprehensively for a large number of prospects? How can you facilitate social media for deal capture?

Moderator:
Jeff Majka, Director Marketing & Business Development, Strategic Communications Group, Inc.

Panelists:
Steve Ressler, Founder, GovLoop
Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw

Social Media for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Other Traditional PR Activities (Audio | Slides)
Social media should be an integral part of your PR strategy, not just your sales function. To run a successful campaign Marketing, Sales and PR need to be integrated using today's popular social media tools. How can you effectively integrate your social media strategy across the enterprise?

Moderator:
Robert Carroll, VP Marketing, Clickability

Panelists:
Jeff Majka, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group
Kye Strance, Director of Product Management, Vocus
Richard Dym, CMO, OpSource, Inc.

New SIIA Webinar Monday, Dec 7- Social Media for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Other Traditional PR Activities

The good folks at the Software and Information Industry Association and I organized a four part series of Webinars looking at the various aspects of social media marketing for companies targeting the B2B marketplace. We have had three of them already and each was a fascinating discussion of how social media is used for business applications like lead generation, sales, cycle support, recruiting, competitive analysis and closing deals.

Our last Webinar is coming up December 7th and is going to focus on the public relations applications of social media. Most people, when they thing of social media, probably think of it as being a PR related activity, and it is. We have a great panel (including your truly!) which will talk about real world examples of companies using social media to target influencers, journalists, analysts as well as communicate directly with stakeholders.


Click here to register: Social Media Webinar Series: Social Media for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Other Traditional PR Activities
DECEMBER 7 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm ET

Social media should be an integral part of your PR strategy, not just your sales function. To run a successful campaign Marketing, Sales and PR need to be integrated using today's popular social media tools. How can you effectively integrate your social media strategy across the enterprise?

Moderator:
Robert Carroll, VP Marketing, Clickability

Panelists:
Richard Dym, CMO, OpSource, Inc.
Kye Strance, Director of Product Management, Vocus
Jeff Majka, Director of Marketign and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group

(There is a $89 charge to register- however, since you’ll be my guest, you can register for free if you use the following code- PRMSTRAT.)

Sales and Marketing are Still Sales and Marketing. Right?

Today, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com said that "Facebook and Twitter are a phenomena" , according to ReadWriteWeb. He also let it be know that Salesforce is actively integrating both services, something he calls, "the biggest development for the company in the past ten years."

Some of the features to be found in Service Cloud 2 Sales Cloud 2:

Twitter integration: In Sales Cloud 2, uses may Twitter stream into Salesforce so sales people can engage in conversations with people and add that information into the sales funnel. In Service Cloud 2, customer support may follow Twitter and respond to people with real-time customer support.

Answers: This is a pretty cool feature. A Dell executive showed how an "Answer," tab can be added into Facebook where customers may pose their questions.

Mobile: A sign that moble apps are here to stay. Sales people may use the platform to send documents through the Salesforce platform.

I say it almost every day, but the real value of social media is enabling PR, marketing and sales to work together more effectively. Generating a warm lead out of a conversation with a group of people self-selected to be interested in issues the surrounding your product or service is a hell of a lot more likely to close than a cold lead generated from a palm card sent to 10,000 names on a spreadsheet or an email sent to 100,000 names in some rental email database.

Social media is interesting in itself, but not compared to the real, measurable results you can generated when you align and integrate it with your sales and marketing strategy, plan and team.

Another interesting post that focuses on the idea that social media is just a part of the marketing mix. Read it here: Don't Call Me A Social Media Guy by Rohit Bhargava at Ogilvy.

Social media is just one of the tools that I use on a daily basis. To focus on just that and make it my identity would be like calling a runner a "sneaker guy." They might love their sneakers, but it's still the method they use to get from where they are to where they want to be. The way I use social media is similar ... I use it for marketing. I'm a marketing guy first and foremost. It's why my blog is called Influential Marketing and why you won't ever hear my introduce myself as an expert in social media. I use it often, and do know what I'm doing - but my expertise and my career is in marketing.

So many people are fixated on the tools of social media that they are missing the big picture. Marketing is still marketing, you just use additional channels- channels with some different rules and best practices.

Looking for a job? Have a high pain threshold? Then cover the Nats!! WaPo Seeks New Nats Writer

This is one of the most high profile and rewarding beats in Sports because our coverage of the city's MLB franchise is at the center of our department's mission. It is also a very demanding job. It involves covering upwards of 140-150 games per year, in addition to spring training and the off-season.

The beat writer is also responsible for regular posts to the Nationals Journal blog, which has a large and passionate following of baseball fans. A background in sports is not essential, though the ideal candidate would be someone who has high energy, a willingness to travel and a love for the game of baseball.

We would like to fill this position soon to give the writer time to acclimate before the start of spring training in Florida in mid-February.

Hmmmm. Tempting.....but no.

Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?

Every day I read lots of blogs, tweets and news stories. 50? 60? It's hard to count them all. Today seemed like there was a ton of odd stories that grabbed my attention, even though there was a great deal of hard news out there (HP-3Com, Intel-AMD, etc)

Here is a sampling:

"Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks? - A Look Back at Oddly Charming Cold War Ads"- Jim Edwards at bnet.com. Check out the "Communism, Hynotism and the Beatles" ad. A classic.

"Warm Weather And Raw Oysters Don't Mix"-Deidre Woollard at Luxist. Apparently, our governmental masters think that oysters are a danger to our Republic and want to ban them during certain times of the year.

The Nationals' Ryan Zimmerman won the Gold Glove and the team hired its interim manager as a full time one. Nats blogger, Federal Baseball has a recap here.

"Survey: 42% Say PR Budgets Will Remain Flat in 2010"- the fine folks at Vocus surveyed 1800 PR and marketing professionals to see what budgets will look like. Flat. Yay. However, five percent of the respondants said that budgets will increase "significantly". Hey Vocus- if you could email me the names, email addys and phone numbers of the people who said that, I'd be really grateful. Thanks!

Webinar: Using Social Media to Target the C-Suite and Close Deals

Last week, I had the great opportunity of serving as a moderator for a Webinar on the use of social media to target executives and close complex sales, hosted by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). There were two excellent presentations and a fascinating Q&A session. The speakers were:

Steve Ressler, Founder, GovLoop
Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw

Download the PDF of the 36 slides here and listen to the audio here (about 60 minutes).

What do you think? Please leave a comment or drop me a line!!

The fourth and final Webinar is coming up a few weeks. Take a second and mark it down on your calendar:

Social Media for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Other Traditional PR Activities
Price for SIIA Members: Free, Non SIIA Members: $89
Monday, December 7th - 1:30pm - 2:30 pm EDT
Social media should be an integral part of your PR strategy, not just your sales function. To run a successful campaign Marketing, Sales and PR need to be integrated using today's popular social media tools. How can you effectively integrate your social media strategy across the enterprise?

Moderator:
Robert Carroll, VP Marketing, Clickability

Panelist:
Richard Dym, CMO, OpSource, Inc.

Two other panelists are TBD