Most of you reading this probably use Facebook to post photos of what you got up to last night or to post denials that the picture your “friend” posted of you lying in a gutter was not actually you. The point is – you probably don’t use it that much for business.That’s because most people on Facebook are there for social reasons, not for business reasons. Save the white papers and heavy discussion for LinkedIn, where it will be appreciated.

Many B2Bs, however, still keep a presence on Facebook, so it’s definitely worth keeping your business page as up to date as possible.

Recent Facebook Cover Photo Changes

When Facebook launched its Timeline set up in Feb 2012, it had a hard and fast rule about using no sales/marketing text in the cover photo – such as calls to actions, prices or purchase information. Pretty much it had to be just a picture and a name. Like this one:

Pretty uninspiring, eh?

Recent changes mean these rules no longer apply and there is much more scope for business owners to add text to their cover pictures, directing the audience to a particular feature, product, service or link. The only rule remaining is that the text must not occupy more than 20% of the cover photo.

For the time it takes to put a new photo and some text together, it’s well worth making the most of this opportunity. Here are a few ideas for using the cover photo creatively to market your business:

• Tell them Who You Are – people have notoriously short attention spans. Visitors to your page want to know what you do immediately and what’s in it for them. Tell them in the first 5 seconds what benefit you provide:

• Point them to your Website – for many B2Bs a website is where everything starts. New prospects find out who you are and what you offer; customers keep updated; and it’s where you can start to turn online interest into offline sales. It won’t be a clickable URL, but it can still generate traffic and leads.

• Advertise a New Product, Service or Event – Perhaps you just created a new mobile app for your customers to use or you have a new upcoming event that you want to draw attention to:

• Offer New Content – Generating quality content is the quickest way to add authority and credibility to your online presence. If you have just produced a new survey, white paper, infographic or article of interest to your community, show them how and where they can get a copy… and build your following by “unlocking” the content only after the visitor “likes” your page.

• Get them Thinking – Why not surprise them with a unique observation, a question or something that gets them thinking a little differently. It will capture their attention and may just engage them:

• Display Contact Info – it’s amazing how many B2Bs miss the opportunity to display their contact info clearly. Having a telephone number, email address and physical address visible shows that you are open for business.

If you are serious about this, it’s worth creating a few different cover photos and alternating them. It shows your followers and prospects that you are not a social media “dead fish” and are actually an active and responsive human being running the business…well, most of you anyway.

That’s a familiar overture from business leaders who have dipped their toes in the water of email marketing and cobbled together a campaign with their limited in-house resources. Like most things, if it’s not done well it doesn’t work well.

Take a look around. Understanding how people are increasingly using their smart phones to communicate is an important consideration if you want to shape a campaign that will produce desired results.

The main steps to focus on are detailed below.

1.      Hook them with the Subject

Whether your email will be read on a desktop or phone, think of your subject line as a title. People open books and click on links that engage their imagination, promise them relevant information or offer a benefit. This usually means a short, concise, benefit-driven line. It needs to be bait; otherwise they don’t bother to open it.

Ask yourself why they should open your email…what’s in it for them?

2.      Tailor Emails to Different Segments of Your Target Audience

Importantly, the content of your emails must relate specifically to those receiving it. Your database will usually contain many different types of prospects using different devices and looking for different information. Your Sydney clients won’t want to read about a Melbourne seminar, to quote a basic example.

If you have been working on developing a diverse pool of content, it probably covers many facets of your business field. You can segment your database and tailor email campaigns to each segment, using different content. This takes a little more work, but is far more effective than a shotgun approach.

After you have sent out the initial emails, check who is opening them and the Click Through Rate. Monitor and adjust content accordingly to improve performance next time.

Remember, if it’s not relevant, it’s essentially spam and it will cost you not only that section of your audience, but possibly your wider reputation. Many businesses get this part wrong.

3.      Make Them Readable and Spam-Free

Another common mistake is making a pig’s ear of email design. Regardless of the content, if it’s difficult to read on a mobile device, then you’ll lose that section of the audience.

The secret here is to use a professional service like Mailchimp for newsletters. You can create templates that are, more or less, universally display-friendly and work on mobile devices and desktops, even if sending in a single campaign.

Spam is measured by overuse of colours, certain words, font sizes, pictures etc. A good email is full of information with minimal formatting.

There are a few free services on the web to test whether an email will get through the spam filters. Use them – or you may fail at the first hurdle.

4.      Consider Fingers and Mice

Mice and fingers have very different accuracy levels. When using a desktop, the mouse is precise and allows you to navigate and click on exactly what you intend to; with a smart phone, the small screen means everything is bunched together and it is more difficult to click on the correct links.

So, if you need to include buttons for readers to use to click through to your website, make sure they are big enough and are positioned away from each other. There’s nothing more annoying on a mobile device than clicking through to a site by mistake.

5.      Timing is (Almost)Everything

Just as with desktop email, the question of when is the best time to send a mobile email crops up time and time again with customers. Get to know your audience, but assume initially that the best time to send them will be during the working day, Tuesday to Thursday, with the afternoon often preferable to morning.

Some people take a day or two to open these emails, so sending on Friday, Saturday or Sunday means they are only going to get lost in the Monday inbox cleanup.

More generally speaking, the best way to get noticed in B2B is to nurture a mailing list over time. Send your list informational content that positions you as the expert, with very minimal marketing. Clients can receive content relating to their projects, while prospects should be sent information to help them get across the line.

It’s been around long enough for you to have formed an opinion; even if that opinion is that you you’ve seen no compelling reason to use it, and you’re already too busy with all the other social network sites you have to maintain.

Usage statistics released in January 2013 showed that Google Plus (343 million active users) replaced Twitter as the second most popular social network.So, with Google’s latest attempt to rein in Facebook (almost 700 million active users) seemingly making good headway, should we, as B2B businesses, be looking to use it as a marketing tool in our arsenal?

My view is that yes, we should. Here are some reasons why:

• Google continues to drive search and traffic. When you share content on Google +, it is indexed very quickly by their engines and it is more likely to appear prominently in search results. This means more traffic. Create and share content with well thought out, keyword-rich titles and you will boost your search presence.
• You can link to your other social networking profiles AND embed followed links into your Bio. Insert as many links as you like into your posts. If your content is good quality and shared widely, the potential for back-links to your main sites is huge.
• Connecting with industry leaders and key influencers is vital for B2B social networking. Google + helps you to do that through its notification systems.
• You can use Google + for sourcing great content to help your business. It has an excellent feed for “what’s hot” in your industry.
• The unlimited editing feature allows you to add to or change a post at any time. This is really useful for content that has been shared widely, because you can update it regularly.
• It has great monitoring tools. For example, a new tool lets you keep tabs on the growth of your followers list and check if your content is being shared.

As you may expect from a search monster like Google, their social media platform brings together the worlds of social sharing and search in a way that Facebook is still trying to do.

That’s something that any small to medium business should take seriously, because we all still need to be appearing on page one of Google and sharing our quality content with the world to enhance our reputations.

Isn’t anything that helps us do that worth considering?

Unless you understand the type of person available in the field how will you find the right one?
From my experience working with people of various backgrounds and personality styles in Social Media roles, I’ve seen that it generally boils down to three types of people to choose from. I go through these below.

1.   Escapees from Advertising

These people have perhaps been movers and shakers in the PR world, with the gift of the gab and the creativity to press all the right buttons that engage an audience, ultimately getting them to buy.

They may have a communications degree and have recognised the changes in the world of marketing and advertising quickly enough to embrace social media; and they have developed the skills to make the transition to use it effectively for their clients.

They fit well into the corporate world and their experience in communications and advertising may help them design Social Media Marketing strategies that target long-term relationships with online influencers.

Their knowledge of SEO, design and media-buying may be lacking, however, limiting the advice they can provide.

Further, many have previously worked with big budgets; they will be more used to expensive, impact campaigns that were not highly targeted nor measured closely post-campaign; they are used to working towards “brand recognition” and “brand awareness” to create measurability. Just how relevant are these terms to small or medium sized business?

Online marketing nowadays is about pinpoint targeting potential buyers, then finely measuring what’s working and adjusting accordingly.

Some of these people may not have the necessary patience to work closely with influencers in B2B marketing, which can be a slow and time-consuming process.

2.   Techies Who Want a Slice of the Pie

Techies are a completely different breed. They are generally more reserved, very focused and detail-oriented. They get the work done, but often without a deep understanding, nor care for, the bigger picture.

In a Social Media campaign, they will build what is necessary to capture attention; they usually work with a good understanding of the need to optimise content for search engine visibility, as well as human consumption.

They will also be across the main digital trends of the day, which can help create new opportunities and ideas for interacting with the target market and managing online reputation. Pay Per Click (PPC) is an obvious example of a technology they would be able to advise on that other Social Media Marketing specialists may not.

Where techies often fall short is in audience engagement. They are often less social themselves, not always bursting with communication skills. They may also lose sight of the purpose of the campaign and get bogged down in technical details. When they have come from an SEO background, their content may also fall down in quality and be written more with the search engines in mind.

3.      Marketers and Social Media Marketing Business Owners

Experienced marketers, especially those who have built a business around social media marketing, are generally all-rounders.

They understand the broader company vision and the purpose of an individual social media campaign and will design a strategy based around the agreed-upon goals; then they will measure the outcomes of that strategy.

These people may come from one of several marketing backgrounds, but all should have the capability to incorporate social media marketing effectively into their strategies.

Direct marketers have always been comfortable designing campaigns to communicate directly with people and building loyal communities of customers; if they develop the talent to interact and join the conversation with these customers, they effectively cross the divide into Social Media Marketing.

For many young marketers, Social Media Marketing is second nature. Working with it simply becomes an extension of what they do every day, though they may lack the business experience to work directly with clients at first.

Who is Right for Your Organisation?

Major Corporates often fit well with advertising escapees because they have similar expectations and speak the same language. They have the budget to pay for the show and be awe-struck, but may not see much real end product.

Techies may be a good fit for the small business B2C world and are a marketing assistant’s best friend! They often do all the work while all the marketing assistant needs to do is come up with the “strategy”. The “strategy”, however, often consists of a few random measures that the techie will implement, such as a small PPC campaign, a website, and some landing pages. The results may not even be measured.

Marketing companies that have been born out of the social media age and are fully “integrated” are most likely to create rounded, effective campaigns with measurable results for businesses of all kinds. They will have people with the creativity to develop a purposeful strategy and who understand what it takes to turn social media effort into sales. They fit really well into the B2B, SME and the ‘progressive’ corporate world.

They are also the hardest to find.

What might this mean for people employed in advertising and for businesses looking for more targeted advertising to deliver better bang for their buck?

Online vs Offline

Online advertising has long been touted as far more targeted than traditional advertising methods, which big business has tended to dominate; after all, only big businesses could afford it.

A large billboard ad, a full-page ad in the Sunday papers, or a 20-second TV ad might create an impact, but it is certainly not targeted and it is certainly pricey! The fact is traditional methods have been beyond the reach of most small and medium businesses.

Online presents better value and is far more measurable – which should be important to every business owner’s marketing strategy.

Automated Facebook Advertising

Facebook has taken a leaf from Google’s book in the way it displays text ads. Google makes $46 billion a year from text-based ads in its search results it, so it’s probably not a bad model to follow business-wise!

Anyway, the point is that more and more of these ads are never touched by human hands. No longer does some edgy, creative type have to sit and agonise for days over an ad campaign for one of their clients; you just hand it to the bots to look after and hey presto! Ads are served on a plate!

These ads are already all over Facebook, though you probably thought that they were designed by someone sitting in a room with a creative hat on somewhere.

Larger companies like Amazon particularly use ads that are likely to have been signed, sealed and delivered to your screen by an automated process.

Pinpoint Targeting

The real benefit to a small B2C business, of course, is pinpoint targeting to customers, twenty-four hours a day. Facebook is an all-day, all-night advertising machine that can potentially bring in the business.

With all these ads needing to be generated, it’s just not feasible for them to be individually designed – and, more to the point, there is no need when they can be tailored exactly to what a person is looking for, by a fully automated process.

Whatever you are selling, you want the right ad to be in front of the right pair of eyes at the right time. So, rather than selling your whole brand, you just need the appropriate product from your range to be displayed. Automated ads have the intelligence to do that quickly and cost-effectively, by loading product images into a database and serving the appropriate one based on a Facebook user’s characteristics.

What’s more, performance of these ads is measurable, so a business can identify the most effective ones.

What Does this Mean?

Ad industry pros might want to take a long, hard look at how their company is handling the shake-up in their industry. Ad writers, designers, directors – even those who work on online banner ads – may not be in such high demand in the near future!

A creative eye is still needed by companies who want to maintain a competitive difference on their pages and will hire an ad agency or marketing company to do it, of course. Plus a design head is needed when creating some of the resources that an ad will use – images, logos etc.

But with technical know-how on the rise, small businesses can look after much of the design work in-house, or by outsourcing to a talented social media contractor sitting on the other side of the world.

Small businesses can be the big winners out of all of this; it’s clear who the big losers are.

We often get asked by clients for our opinion on why their social networking strategy is not actually converting into sales.

By far the most common reason is that they focus too much on conversion too early in the relationship, without having the necessary conversation first.

Collaborative Marketing

You see, most of your potential customers are not on a network like LinkedIn to be sold to or read advertisements.

They are there to gauge the market, find opinion, voice their concerns and issues within their industry and to meet like-minded professionals in their network; they want to talk to you and learn.

Brandon Evans is CEO of Crowdtap, one of the companies promoting the idea of “influencer marketing”. He helps organisations influence their potential customers in a process they call “collaborative marketing.”

Collaborative marketing is, in essence, what we have been advising clients to do for some time now: using LinkedIn groups to connect with like-minded influencers in the industry, contributing to conversations and gaining credibility and authority – then taking the relationship offline, if there is business to be done.

So instead of blatant marketing “at” the audience – like with targeted mail outs, billboards or air time on TV – the advent of social networking has allowed a much closer interplay “with” potential customers, before the sales process kicks in.

This of course takes a little time and patience to get right, but for small and medium business leaders that learn to master it, the rewards could be great.

Trying to by-pass the all-important conversation and cutting to the sales conversion process too early will see you punished, with a drift away from your group or conversation; there is no short-cut to this process.

In a recent article, Brandon Evans identified five trends that sum up the effect of using a collaborative marketing approach.

He is talking more about a B2C environment but many of these points still apply to B2B. They are summarised below:

1. Democratized Product Development

Crowdsourcing allows collective brainpower to generate new ideas for products and to get them to market. Different crowdsourcing platforms target different parts of the product creation process –funding, production and distribution.

2. Close, continuous customer relationships

IBM’s Global CEO Study found that 88% of CEOs prioritised “getting closer to customers” as the main goal for their business over the next five years. They know that a genuine, real-time dialogue with their customers not only enhances the buy-sell relationship but also helps guide product development to closer suit the changing needs of their customers.

3. Open organizations

Secrecy and guarding of information has little place in the world of social networking and collaborative marketing; a competitive advantage is not so much gained by holding information but by sharing it and showing the world that you are the leader in the field.

4. Peer-powered media

Traditional mass media messaging is expensive and poorly targeted, with many other distractions meaning your expensive ad may get lost in the “noise”. Online content is tailored much more specifically to personal tastes and requirements; as well as being far less of a cost risk, it is more targeted at your potential buyers if done well.

5. Measurement of Influence not Impressions

It’s more about quality than quantity these days – influence matters more than mere page impressions. How much influence are you having on potential customers? That should be the question you are asking to gauge the success of your social media marketing strategy.

Your online interactions with potential leads begin with conversations. We have found that a great way to do that, once you have gathered a group of like-minded people together, is to ask them questions about a particular issue that is universally important to them. This will generate responses and is a fantastic way to get the conversation going, presenting you as a leader who tackles the big industry issues in the process.

What are the New Rules?

The new rules concern the block/delete function used by group owners, managers and moderators and were first made public in late December 2012, with this announcement:

Now whenever someone is blocked and deleted in one group, they are put on Requires Moderation in all of their existing groups so that their contributions will be routed to the Submissions Queue for review before displaying in their groups. Any group manager can of course flip such a person back to Free to Post within her own specific group if desired.

Since then there has not been a great deal of communication from LinkedIn about the changes, and there has been no follow-up announcement, nor URL on their site where you can read the policy for yourself. This has led to a lot of heated discussion out there.

One blogger referred to it as SWAM meaning SITE-WIDE AUTO-MODERATION. That sounds pretty scary.

Possible Consequences of the New Policy

Clearly aimed at combating group SPAM – which is definitely a problem –concern has quickly started to grow that the new rules are too draconian and are open to abuse.

Basically if you get clobbered with this, then it limits your ability to function on LinkedIn groups at all. Your membership of all your industry groups will be set to “Requires Moderation.”

While a casual group member may not be too badly affected by it, an increasingly savvy group of professionals are using it as an important part of their business. They use LinkedIn groups as a key networking tool to connect with other professionals in their sphere, to generate web traffic and to create new leads. LinkedIn functionality has become critical to them and their business.

Open to Abuse?

The real fear is that the changes could be used by unscrupulous moderators to target individuals or other businesses that are in competition with them or who they don’t see eye to eye with.

Disagreements and differences of opinion are common on any discussion forum and a trigger-happy moderator could severely impact a member’s ability to use any of their groups, just by a single act of defiance.

Likewise, if Moderator X finds out that Mrs Y is a direct competitor, he has the power to make LinkedIn life very difficult for that member, simply by blocking them.

After all, group managers already have a lot of power over their members; they create their own group rules, group type (open or closed) and decide what types of posts are allowed. They can delete posts, restrict posting permissions for repeat offenders or completely remove members from the group. Isn’t that enough power already?

What if you are Innocent?

A member who gets blocked and “Requires Moderation” receives no notification of this; they become aware of it when their comments are no longer displayed on a discussion group. And they are not informed which owner/moderator blocked them.

If you feel wronged by the owner of the group who blocks you then of course you need to appeal to them to reset your status to “free to post”. This applies for all the groups you are a member of, so it is a painstaking task if you are very active on LinkedIn groups. Many of the group owners are too busy to be regularly checking posting status of their members.

Owners and moderators of other groups you are a member of receive no notification from LinkedIn that your status has changed; the only way they will know is if they check the sidebar and see a member with the “Requires Moderation” label – but this doesn’t tell them who changed it or why.
Also, other group members have no idea whether the action was because of behaviour in their group or in another group.

There is the danger that, once hit with a “Requires Moderation” label, your reputation is tarnished and all group leaders will be suspicious of you. This applies even if you did nothing wrong initially and received the block unfairly.

What do You Think?

I’d be interested to hear what you think.

1. Does this give group owners too much power over their members – and also members of other groups?
2. Is LinkedIn going too far and taking away the trust they place in the group owners to moderate their own discussions responsibly?
3. Does the need to control SPAM justify these measures?
4. Will this move encourage members to quit their groups altogether and become less active on LinkedIn?
5. Have you experienced this and, if so, how has it impacted your business?

I started reading warily, then started nodding in agreement and ended up tearing my hair out in disgust – anyone who’s seen a picture of me will know that’s not just a throwaway metaphor!

The application for most readers/viewers just isn’t there, unless you’re a huge corporate or advertising agency. At Lead Creation we create and direct campaigns for many types of organisations and have built up a fair knowledge base of what works and what doesn’t.

Here I present the slides to you with my critique on each one. But before I get to the real “meaty” slides, I just wanted to comment on the first one, which quotes Scott Stratten from Unmarketing:

Social Media doesn’t fix anything. It just amplifies things. If your restaurant sucks, it just sucks harder in social media. It doesn’t make your chicken fingers taste better or your beer taste bolder. Social media is not a good place to go if you’re terrible at what you do.

Many brands defy this example. Take Vodafone, which most of you know well. It’s a really poor product, but the company is now able to provide great customer service through Facebook. Without the visible comments on Facebook, which Vodafone is able to respond to and try to remedy , there would just be uncontrolled negative PR about Vodafone. People will talk about bad products regardless of whether you’re there or not. Being there gives you the chance to rectify things…and Facebook gives them this chance.

So the above quote from Scott Stratten may sound “cool” but is somewhat inaccurate.

Now, on to the rest of the slides, which I include in full:

Essentially I agree with the above.

However, the average company striving for a “great campaign” is going to have a lot of difficulty with these goals. They don’t simplify things. They simply raise the barriers.

A better four goals may be to:

1. Develop goals
2. Create a content plan and create an appearance to be active
3. Measure ROI
4. Allow an understanding of what to do better next time

Agreed, however you’ve missed out the Goals part.

You can’t have the four goals you listed on the previous slide. You need to have “reach xyz amount of people and have them convert” rather than “drive innovation”.

It is idiotic to think that Goal One – “drive innovation” – and Goal Four – “measure ROI” -are anywhere near correlated.

When planning a successful social media campaign you need to know Three Things.

That’s the two above AND what you want to achieve from the campaign. Then you need to measure that effectively.

Now we get on to the biggest set of misplaced advice. The above slide has a lot of the right information but in completely the wrong percentages. Talk about making the numbers fit into a 60-30-10 model!

• Firstly, strategy and content should definitely outweigh the media. This applies to all organisations that are not part of the world of mass advertising. Even if you are, you still need a strong strategy and good content, or you’ll blow your budget on unmeasured advertising.
• The second column is simply misguided – social intelligence, measurement and reporting are not ‘strategy’. Strategy is developing those goals, then developing a plan to attain those goals. Social intelligence may be a small part of that.
• Next, developing content is rarely creative unless you’re an advertising agency. It’s called “copywriting” for a reason.
• Both the last column and the next slide below are just wrong. Since when was creating content not considered “engaging with your audience”? This mindset clearly stems from the world of mass advertising, with the motive to sell airtime, instead of develop measurable physical results.

Where is the serious part about measurement in all this?

It should not be a small part of strategy (yes, planning how you’re going to measure is). You need to spend time and money ‘after the fact’ to ensure that you’ve used your marketing budget on strategies that actually work.

You also need to know how to react for the next campaign you run.

You’ve seen my thoughts on the above slide. This whole insight is short-sighted and over-simplified, as well as being geared towards a few companies with massive marketing budgets.

This “insight” is not helping SMEs or B2B companies or professionals, for whom the world of mass media is mainly far-removed and irrelevant to their business.

I’m off to calm down a bit.

Large B2B companies have traditionally been ‘walled gardens’. They had few spokespeople, and built huge success keeping their IP inside the walls, only releasing a summarised version to the world. They held almost total control, and often used PR firms to help shape and control their messages.

Now everyone can be a spokesperson, and the walls of the garden are hollow breeze blocks! But here is the problem:- Companies are comfortable writing about themselves and promoting what they do. But most B2B companies lack two essential skills for the Social Media age:

1. Professional Individual Profiles

It is simply the biggest ‘fault line’ between old and new marketing: the change in importance from what the company says and does to what its employees say and do. Every manager and professional has the potential to positively impact the brand. New age marketing is about the individual as much as it is about the company itself, and too many companies are wasting this opportunity. A related issue arises when employees are online but with incomplete or unprofessional profiles – this negatively impacts the company’s reputation. It is not sufficient to be merely present on social media platforms, it has to be professional.It is interesting how far personal profiles lag below the professionalism and engagement levels of the company profiles. This is particularly a problem with LinkedIn, the giant network that is all about business relationships and engagement.

In fact, for the best 30 Australian companies in our study, only one rating was not dragged down by the personal LinkedIn profiles of employees. In the majority of cases their ranking dropped significantly.As a proportion of a company’s overall BizClout rating, LinkedIn personal profiles were rated at 20% of their total rating. However, the impact for a company that understands and embraces the power of having hundreds of professionally presented and consistent profiles is way beyond that. It’s like having hundreds of new mini-websites.

In their industry, a company with hundreds of profiles would appear like Goliath and their competitors would be barely visible to those searching.

2. Valuable Content

Content that engages with prospects and other stakeholders, that starts relationships with hundreds, even thousands, is valuable and essential on Social Media. Most big companies have never needed to write such educational and informative material and are not allocating the resources to do it. Most are persisting with ‘brochure copy’ that is all about them. In today’s world, we, the buyers, usually discover what we need when we need it, we don’t need to be sent your brochures either online or in the mail.

Companies that address the related issues of empowering their employees and generating good informative content will dominate the increasingly powerful business networks such as the giant LinkedIn with over 200,000,000 members.

David vs. Goliath

Before the internet, small companies could not compete with the big budgets of big many advertising and marketing channels were simply out of reach.

But we now have a platform, and the good news? Many of Australia’s top 200 companies are not doing this platform very well. For once smaller companies can, and increasingly do, appear much larger than the real market leaders.

It’s the David and Goliath story with a twist, where David looks ten times more powerful. David becomes Goliath where it matters, on social networks where hundreds of millions are engaging every day. Could your SME be a “stone’s throw” from taking on a Goliath?

Take Orrcon Steel for example. On social (or business) networks, they look like the Goliath of the steel industry when really they are relatively small. Back in the day when big companies dominated the media with their huge budgets, Orrcon were forced to rely on great service and delivery to get sales. Today, they still have the best service, but now thousands know about them. David no more!

B2B companies face more marketing choices today, the world is not so simple. For example, should you spend a hefty amounts to attend a major trade show? Or over a hundred thousand on PR a year to get stories in the broadcast media? Or into telemarketing teams calling businesses endlessly? Or buying expensive advertisements in trade magazines/mass media?

All four of those traditional marketing approaches are rapidly dying as their value for money, their ROI, shrinks.

By making those expensive ‘business as usual’ choices, big companies have little money to invest in the growing and valuable area of Social Media, particularly Business Networking on sites like LinkedIn.

We have just finished researching the social media impact of the top 200 Australian B2B companies, and this lack of focus on cost effectively using Social Media became very clear.

We were looking to do some R&D and found an extraordinary gap in all the existing research – explaining how B2B sales are influenced online. We have reviewed the activity of Australia’s major players in 2012 – our study explains the most influential social media sales tools for 2013.

There are three reasons that make this study fundamentally different to previous research:

• The focus is only B2B, and there are no spurious comparisons such as comparing BHP with Kraft Cheese or soft drinks
• It’s not about being on the platform, but rather how and why it’s being used: 32 qualitative fields such as the content of status updates were evaluated, not just the numbers
• This is the most thorough study of its kind, with over 15,000 data points collected

We’ll be releasing the study shortly, and it clearly shows that the big companies are under-investing or investing wrongly (some of the key results are in the 2^nd newsletter article).

Meanwhile, some minnows, the challenger brands who never had the funds for mass media marketing, are rapidly stealing a march.