Linkedin in is a powerful tool for B2B sales enablement, engagement and prospecting. This is a presentation given to our global sales force at BreakingPoint on how to use the capabilities of LinkedIn to move from being an online resume to online resource.
It seems the Twitterati are up in arms because Google went out and created something that didn’t follow their “rules”. Buzz was introduced this week with little fanfare and clearly in Beta mode, but that did not stop many folks on Twitter (several who I respect dearly) from dismissing it out of hand after one quick look.
Funny. I remember signing up for Twitter in December of 2007 and many people laughing at me for the following 24 months because Twitter was:
Perhaps it is because I’m in technology, but I feel that innovation does not simply happen in a vacuum. Great products grow when they are used and improved throughout their life. In fact many products completely shift in their original mission and find a new home doing something completely different.
Did it ever occur to the Twits out there that perhaps Buzz wasn’t meant for them. Perhaps Buzz is an extension of Gmail for people who don’t want to be on Twitter? That when combined with improvements to Wave, Buzz will provide a more complete way of communicating with the people you actually want to talk with on a daily basis? Are people just afraid because they don’t want to try something else after finally succumbing to Twitter? Or are we just in a time when it is easier to rip something down than help build it up?
The point is, take a breath before you start hating on Buzz and rather than typing #epicfail in your 140 characters, try and produce some feedback that might help a company develop a product you will want to use. That is what being a part of a community is all about.
It’s event season for most B2B companies, particularly in the technology world. In the next six weeks I’ll be going to a bunch of shows for BreakingPoint, mainly to demo our cyber simulation capabilities to folks. As you prep for your upcoming schedule of events how are you telling your community that you will be out and about? Couple of suggestions:
If you don’t tell people you are going to be someplace, don’t be surprised if they fail to show up.
What is the one habit you can’t kick? You have one; at LEAST one. Want to know one of mine? I have to drink two cups of coffee in the morning and then one diet Coke with lunch and then one more coffee at 4pm. There you go, I’ve included a habit with my obsessive compulsive disorder. Habits come in a variety of flavors, ranging from innocent to life-threatening.
Habits are often placed in a negative light, and in most cases rightfully so. Yet as a B2B marketer one of your goals is to create habit-forming campaigns in order to lead generation and cultivation. Why do you use drip email? Why do you execute webcasts on a monthly basis? Why are advertising buys predicated on daily, weekly or monthly runs? The list goes on and on, but ultimately you should be planning out your activities so that you can take advantage of the natural habit behaviors of humans, which I assume your customers are ultimately, until the robots take over.
The first time I came across this concept was after reading Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore
It’s time to introduce habitually good marketing to your audience.
The two tools I could not live without, or at least when it comes to my Twitter, are TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both appeal to me for different functionality and I use TweetDeck for @kyleflaherty and Seesmic for @breakingpoint. The main reason I like both applications are their ability to help me build personalized lists of people I follow, even before Twitter lists became a Twitter web UI feature. For example, in TweetDeck you will find six lists I have built:
Building these lists allows me to follow more people and focus on certain topics, but it has also expelled any thought of visiting the main Twitter site. Nor will I check my full list of people that I follow since I don’t like to give up that real estate in TweetDeck. And herein lies one of the pitfalls of lists (whether within Twitter or in an app), because once I build those lists I rarely add new people, since I’m only looking, well, at those lists. I love my lists, they are full of great information and great people. But with your lists you don’t know what you don’t know. My lists were missing people. People that I knew.
It finally hit me during a run. Yesterday as I was hitting my stride on a long distance jaunt I actually started thinking about Dave Fleet. Now, I’ve never met Dave personally, but we have had several conversations on Twitter and our respective blogs over the years. I’ve always liked the way Dave thinks and how he challenges people consistently, but in a productive method. Dave is a self-described “running nut”, hence why the run jogged my memory (sorry, had to), and I realized at that moment that I had forgotten to add Dave onto any of my lists in TweetDeck! As soon as I was back at the house I remedied this egregious error and realized I needed to go through my lists closely to make sure I’m not missing other folks like Dave. People who I have enjoyed talking with over the years and who teach me a great deal.
Here is how I’m going to do it:
Is this problem simply an element of my own lack of vision or something inherent in list building? Oh, and hey Dave, I have a few questions about stretching after a long run for you 
We talk a lot about “shiny object syndrome” or the trap of getting too excited about the next great tool, gadget, website, social network, etc.
It struck me this morning however that shiny object syndrome is talked about because it is so easy to fall into…and to be honest, I love being in this phase. I do love new tools, gadgets, websites, social networks and more. There is something about unwrapping a new toy that harkens us back to that birthday so many years ago. I love discovering people on a new social network, particularly seeing folks I already recognize from other networks; reminds me of running into an old friend on the street purely on accident.
This week I have been hit by the syndrome twice! First was starting to use Gowalla, a geo-location social network similar to FourSquare. It is a fun network that allows me to find different “hot spots” near me such as a restaurant, movie, etc. The long term usage of this type of network may be minimal, but right now I’m having a blast collecting tacos (you have to play to understand that one).
But this morning my shiny object syndrome hit a fever pitch when I started to unwrap my new Kodak Zi8. I’ll be back with a longer review of how I use it from a B2B prespective…but today I’m just going to enjoy the side effects of the syndrome!
URL shortening tools are a godsend for those of us who have been curtailed to a 140 character limit in life, saving valuable space on Twitter and other social networks. Size, however, is really not the most important element of the URL shortening tool, especially not for B2B marketers. Instead you need to be looking at it’s impact on your search engine optimization (SEO) and it’s level of analytics for measurement purposes. Ultimately you can use short URLs to boost your SEO and measure lead generation, the key is in the features provided and knowing what to look for out of your URL tool.
URL Shortening and SEO
Effective B2B SEO must be a passion and the way in which you dictate your URLs can go a long way in helping you optimize your key word. Check out what I can do when using BudURL:
Custom URL
In this case I’m minimizing a URL from the BreakingPoint blog and attaching our most important keyword to the short URL. Now whenever this URL is shared it will attach itself to our keyword and redirect to a page that has been optimized for that keyword. Although this is a win for SEO, it also helps you tell people more quickly where your short URL is going to take them if they click. This is becoming more important as we see malicious activity around short URLs. Use descriptive words to customize your URL in order to give you a SEO boost and help the people you are trying to reach.
Additionally in the realm of SEO and short URLs the choice to perform a 301 permanent redirect (versus the more typical 307 temporary redirect) can be very helpful. Again, BudURL:
301 redirects are better for SEO and actually Page Rank because search engines will assume that the destination URL will not be altered and they may actually cache the URL. On the negative side however it may also be cached by proxy servers and end up messing with your overall analytics, specifically click counts. The nice thing about BudURL is that they allow me to choose 301 or 307. Most of the time I use 301 redirects, since the page is not going to change and SEO is critical. However, I do use 307 once in a while for special campaigns that I know are for a limited time and therefore I want more accurate data around click counts. The key is to have the option and choose what is right for you, rather than simply using a generic service that offers you no choice.
Short URLs and the Power of Measurment
The beauty of services like BudURL is that they provide a plethora of data around click-through, IP address, browsers and more. Combine that with your web analytics and back-end it with your CRM system and you have a very powerful tool. Recently one of the web analytics packages we use, GetClicky, launched their own URL shortening service. The company even joked on their blog that this seemed a bit crazy since there are hundreds of options out there already. However, using a Clicky.me URL I not only get the custom URL option as before, it integrates completely into my web analysis dashboard and I can dive into individual short URLs:
Now I can see not only how many folks clicked on the link, but how much time they spent on the site, average actions, what search term they used to find the link, what site referred them and more. When you scroll down you also see each individual IP address AND all the action those folks took on the site, including if they reached any of your business goals. Ultimately we have back ended the process into SalesForce.com and can track the success of short URLs on our business.
They may be tiny, but short URLs are a highly powerful B2B marketing tool when you know what to look for out of your service.
Have you heard? Your website is your brand! Oh wait, maybe it’s Google.
People love to argue this point, but forget that the simple fact remains that your corporate website is most certainly the online face of your company. It provides your prospects with the information they need to make a business decision. A search engine may provide them with the pathway and social media might be some added directions, but they always end up at the front door.
As a smart marketer you already understand all of this information, creating a terrific website chock full of good content, fully optimized for your keywords and hopefully just a wee bit interactive.
Wait! Do you make real-time changes to your site based on real-time site analysis? If not, you should consider the practice. Here is how:
Using Real-time WebSite Monitoring to Make Real-Time Website Changes
You probably already use a tool for real-time site monitoring (or spying, if you want to use that dirty word). We (BreakingPoint) currently use GetClicky and I’ve just started to use Woopra. Both do a really nice job of providing real-time web analytics showing us who is currently on the site, what they are viewing, how they arrived, popular keywords, geography and much more. Additionally both are very inexpensive; GetClicky is $99 for the year and currently Woopra is absoutely free. Here is a screengrab taken from Woopra the other morning for this site (not much info because we just got going, but you can imagine how it can help):
Throughout the day I have this dashboard open on my desktop for BreakingPoint and it can trigger many different actions based on the data that you can watch. For example, we might see a certain keyword trigger a bunch of traffic to the site, which we did during the recent Twitter/Facebook DDoS attacks. At that moment it makes sense for us to place some of the resources we have for DDoS testing on the homepage so that visitors can find the information more quickly.
Another example might be a sudden rise in site actions, which is not always a good thing, in fact a sudden spike may mean that people are having a difficult time finding what they need. You can quickly discover what people are looking for and eliminate some of the hassle by offering it up in a different location, or perhaps crosslinking to the information. This happens quite a bit from older blog posts that are still relevant and coming up in search, but have not been updated with a link to resources developed after publishing the post.
Either way I would encourage you to start looking at real-time web analytics as an important tool in your B2B marketing.
This is the question that I’ve been contemplating for a few months. In July I actually started protecting my Tweets for two reasons:
Protecting your tweets may seem to be against all things social, but in my opinion it is exactly what a social network should be about; choice engagement. By protecting my tweets I not only protect myself, but I started to see myself change my Twitter habits. Each time someone follows your account you must approve them, otherwise your Tweets will not show up in their stream. In order to approve I was taking a much closer look at their bio and profile. Clicking through the URL they posted I was more deeply reading their blog or perusing their LinkedIn profile. By the time I approved a person I was highly confident they were going to be a great person to communicate with and I was following back in much higher numbers than before I protected my account.
By protecting my Twitter account I was becoming more social.
But what if it was an anomaly? Trying a bit of an experiment I went again to the default Twitter mode of unprotected Tweets to test the waters. This morning I noticed that my follower number had jumped about 100 over night and not matter how highly I think of myself I knew this was going to be a sign of distress. Going through the most recent 100 followers I found:
Three! Suffice to say I’m now back under the protected Tweet side and glad for the protection and increased engagement it provides.
A simple thought, “Life is what you make of it”, but poignant.
Did you get up this morning and decide to be productive? Happy? Sad? Frustrated?
Can you change that feeling around to something you want?
Social media is like life. It is what you make of it. A friend reminded me of that last night. The power of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is that you get to decide who you want to have discourse with and you can’t complain if that discourse is not what you currently need. It is what you make of it, and you have made it that way.
Change it. I am, starting today with Twitter and then this blog over the weekend. Stay tuned.