Speech today at Chicago B2B Event

Today I spoke to a group of B2B marketers at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketers (CADM) on the topic of B2B Online Lead Generation and Management.

After presenting here a year ago at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, I welcomed the opportunity to return to Chicago (see my photo below).

The timing was good: the results from our third annual LeadGen Tools Survey will be released in the next week.

The CADM audience received a sneak peek at some of the data (more on that later).

The premise of the presentation was that B2B marketers should join a significant number of their peers in deploying Web 2.0 media in lead generation programs.

Second, leads generated through organic search and social media, are of high quality. Unfortunately, our research shows that B2B marketers face significant obstacles in telequalifying quickly and effectively.

The presentation was well received with questions pertaining to the use of video in marketing programs, the role of Twitter and Blogging in lead generation and what other options exist in order to qualify some markets that are difficult to access via phone (e.g. physicians).

I had a good chat with Garth Moulton, co-founder and VP Community of Jigsaw, the sponsor of the CADM event. As it turns out, Garth does not answer his phone anymore because his contact details are featured in Jigsaw as a working example. Garth explained that with 1.5M hits a month, his name is turning up in many searches and folks are mistakenly phoning him, assuming that he is the designated contact at the companies that they are searching for. Ah….the price of success!

Garth and the two other co-founders of Jigsaw formerly worked at Digital Impact together in sales. Digital Impact, an email marketing service provider now owned by Acxiom, was a client of Direct Impact Marketing. It was interesting to hear Garth describe the evolution of the ultra-competitive email market.

I look forward to my next visit to Chicago.

This is not about marketing

This blog has been quiet of late as my family took a break to tour London, Belgium and France.

Who could ask for a better tonic to a hectic lifestyle than two weeks in Europe?

With the surprisingly good weather and the wonderful hospitality heaped on us by our Belgian hosts in Ghent, the economic crisis and the gyrating stockmarkets seemed far away.

However, a greater sense of perspective was realized gazing out to these broad expanses: the above photo was taken in Normandy, France and the one below, near Ypres in Belgium.


The picture in Normandy is of Juno beach where the Canadians landed on D-Day. This beach was the most heavily fortified of all D-Day beaches. Similar to the Americans at Omaha Beach, the casualty rate approximated 50%.

The second picture looks out to the fields of Passchendaele, where one of the most horrific battles of World War I took place with over 500,000 dead including 16,000 Canadians.

The horrors of these two wars are difficult to fathom from North America, let alone from standing in these battlefields reclaimed by Mother Earth.

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to those who suffered and those who gave their lives to preserve our freedom.

Lest we forget their sacrifices.

(For more photos, see my Flickr posts).

HubSpot's Social Media Delivers on ROI

In some of my previous posts, I suggested that social media is highly effective in generating marketing ROI.

Last week, I interviewed Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing HubSpot, for his perspective on social media ROI.

HubSpot is a stellar example of how a small business can excel in social media marketing and in the process, attract $17 million in venture capital for a social media and online marketing solution (read more on why small business succeeds with social media).

Mike started off our discussion by observing that most marketers believe that social media is only suitable for creating buzz and fostering brands.

However Mike disagrees and with good reason: HubSpot favors social media for demand generation.

HubSpot’s inquiries from social media support Mike’s position. Below are selected social media results for June 2008:

Editors Note: Although HubSpot defines ‘leads’ as any prospect who has completed an online form, it is more accurate to define these unqualified responders as ‘inquiries’.

Mike has calculated his cost-per-inquiry as $10 per inquiry and includes the marketing overheads for content creation. This compares favorably to the $75 per inquiry he would pay for traditional outbound marketing.

Although Mike was unable to share the ROI on his social media marketing programs, he indicated that the ROI on social media is many times more than traditional outbound marketing programs.

This has created a ‘fun’ sales and marketing environment where salespeople do not make cold calls and marketing managers avoid having to focus on marginal improvements in response rates and trying to avoid spam filters.

Mike’s advice is that social media should be viewed as any other top of funnel marketing activity. The goal is to build an audience rather than a database. Marketers should create content or tools that engage prospects to realize a social media outcome. Offers and calls-to-action will help move prospects along the buying cycle.

HubSpot’s audience numbers are impressive with 6,000 blog subscribers and 3,000 webinar registrants – far surpassing HubSpot’s forecasts.

Mike acknowledged that it can be difficult to measure interactions amongst social media and the impact on prospect conversions. However, HubSpot has generated a significant number of prospects and sales who can be attributed to clicking from a singular social media source.

I wish HubSpot continued success and applaud their success in defining ROI on social media.

P.S. I have to congratulate Mike on not once plugging his use of their own social media software as the key to HubSpot’s accomplishments.

A Community Turns One Year Old

If Social Media Today is a toddler, then that would make me a newborn.

A few weeks back I was invited to blog on Social Media Today and now would like to send my congratulations to the team.

Happy Birthday to you! Thanks for inviting me to the online Party!

Crowdsourcing: Wikipedia vs. The Economist

Two diverse questions came to mind as I read an article on crowdsourcing:

1. Is crowdsourcing losing its appeal?
2. Is journalism threatened by Wikipedia?

Recently, the Economist published an article on crowdsourcing that discussed the past and future of this social medium where idea generation is outsourced to online crowds.

The author illustrated the success of crowdsourcing with examples drawn from Wikipedia, the Library of Congress (using Flikr) and Google.

According to article, the cost savings on crowdsourcing can evaporate when intellectual property such as product designs must be legally verified as to their ownership. In addition, a volunteer model such as Wikipedia would be disrupted should Wikipedia evolve to a for-profit business.

Next I turned to Wikipedia for their perspective on crowdsourcing.

I was interested to see that many of the same success stories and pros and cons on crowdsourcing were shared by the Economist and Wikipedia.

We know that Wikipedia has trumped Encyclopedia Britannica but does this extend to magazines such as the venerable Economist?

As Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams observe in the book Wikinomics, the strength of Wikipedia is the substantial number of edits made by the Wikipedia community of volunteers - an average of 20 edits per article. In a similar fashion to open source software, the community is constantly updating and revising articles.

Given this dynamic state, perhaps Wikipedia is as much to threat to journalism as YouTube is to TV.

Delivering ROI on Social Media

My last post discussed why the nature of social media need not be compromised by pursuing lead generation through these new media.

Today, let's turn to some examples of how B2B marketers are embracing social media for this purpose.

A few weeks ago, McKinsey & Company released the results of their latest survey on social media: Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results. The buzz on this report included a post from Peter Kim, a fellow Social Media Today blogger.

The McKinsey survey struck a chord with me in that 94% of responding executives deployed Web 2.0 media targeting internal parties versus 87% who interfaced with customers. This indicates an almost equal propensity to use these tools to communicate to both external and internal parties.

In targeting customers, improving customer service and acquiring new customers in internal markets were #1 (73%) and #2 (71%) respectively.

In other words, a significant proportion of survey respondents are using Web 2.0 tools for customer acquisition.

So if organizations are using social media to acquire customers, then how can we measure ROI?

An easy answer lies with blogging - the rainmaker of social media.

If your goal is to attract visitors to your website, blogs are an ideal medium to publish fresh, relevant content with keywords that attract the search engines like bees to honey.

Leads generated from organic or natural search results are of higher quality and are more likely to convert to qualified leads than any other medium. You can ask yourself: what is the value of a page one search result on Google?

Bingo! ROI can be calculated based on the value of qualified leads and closed sales generated through organic search. (Personal note: this week I closed a $20,000 account that found my organization through organic search and whom we never would have targeted with our outbound marketing efforts).

In a much less scientific method than McKinsey, I asked a question on LinkedIn Answers to see if marketers were using blogs to enhance their organic (or SEO) page rank and to gauge the impact on their business development.

Here are the highlights:

• The small direct marketing agency in Silicon Valley who achieves top organic search results in only 24 hours.
• The tech start-up in Austin who has generated substantial lead volume through their social media efforts in only a short period of time.
• A highly ranked blogger on wireless technology who resides in India.
• A web design firm in Ireland who attracts 40 unique visitors a day through blogging and organic search.
• A web design firm in India whose blogging has been so successful in improving their organic search results that the firm has canceled their paid search (PPC) program.

These small organizations have demonstrated high ROI on social media through blogging and can easily quantify the benefits.

Do you know of other organizations who have a similar perspective on generating ROI through social media such as blogging?

Lead Generation through Social Media?

You can almost see the collective hand wringing and hear the teeth gnashing as angst-ridden B2B marketers are being pressed by their organizations for proof on the value of social media. It's clear that B2B organizations, being metrics driven beasts, are looking for more 'beef' beyond the measurement of engagement.

The premise of this blog, Acquiring Minds, is that social media, as with other online media, provide B2B marketers with a stellar opportunity to generate qualified leads and to impact ROI.

But wait one minute! It almost seems heretical to sabotage social media by attempting to generate leads. However, there are many organizations who have demonstrated that these two goals are compatible by building their business through social media while adhering to best practices (but more on that shortly).

The discourse on social media or Web 2.0 media almost entirely focuses on communication and collaboration with little discussion on how social media impacts the bottom line. And justly so: the opportunity to innovate, build competitive advantage and cut costs with Enterprise 2.0 tools is compelling (see Andrew McAfee's blog).

The advent of social media is comparable to other disruptive technologies in the area of collaboration & communication.

When Lotus Notes was launched in 1989, some of you may remember the bewilderment expressed by your organization.

Like social media today, Lotus Notes and other communication and collaboration technology is one of those IT expenditures where payback and ROI are much more difficult to quantify.

Lotus Notes
<=== So, how did you explain the value of this to your boss in 1989?








Social media creates the same befuddlement in executive decision-makers as do other communication and collaboration technologies.

You may be talking but your executives are hearing this:

"Gee, we are not quite sure on ROI but here is something different: we're giving a public voice to the 'unwashed masses' in our organization and let's not forget our disgruntled customers."

Is it any wonder that so few Fortune 500 organizations encourage their employees to blog?

Where social media happily deviate from their fellow communication and collaboration tools is their unique ability to dialog with not only internal but also external parties and to publish fresh content featuring keywords that attract search engines to your website.

In summary, let`s move beyond collaboration and communication and try to understand better how the B2B community is leveraging social media or Web 2.0 tools for lead generation. We all need to sell internally the value of marketing. Lead generation through social media will provide you with that ammunition.

Tell me - how are you using social media for lead generation?

On my next post, I will provide some success stories from B2B marketers.