The Truth About Marketing November 2009 Archives

B2B Social Media – How Do Your Efforts Stack Up?

Earlier this week, I did a post that looked at how businesses are using social media to find business-related info and how you might be able to reach customers and prospects via these mechanisms. I thought it might be interesting to flip this on its side and look at what social media related initiatives companies have in place, top activities, how much time and resources they are committing to these efforts, and how they measure success.

Take a look at the statistics below from Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study and see how you stack up.

- Over 1900 participants in the study indicated that they work for a company involved in social media initiatives. 92% are directly involved in planning or managing these initiatives.

- On average, these individuals spend 18% of their time in any given week working on these initiatives. 

- 71% of the companies surveyed have less than two years of experience with social media.

- The average company in the study is currently involved in 7 different social media efforts.

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Posted by Ruth White-Cabbell at 05:15PM PST

Executives & Social Media – The Door is Open

At Cisco Partner Velocity this week in Paris, France, using social media for marketing will be a hot topic. Many Cisco partners are in the process of developing their strategy for social media and some are still struggling to justify to their management team why social media is an important component of any marketing strategy. If you fall into the latter category, you may find the following information useful.

As marketers, we should know where individuals that meet our target customer profile are spending their time online, how they get the information they need in order to make purchasing decisions, and we should make sure we’re providing relevant information about our solutions in a way that matches to this. Basically, a “fish where the fish are” approach.

Are your target customers leveraging social media? Two recent research reports may shed some light on this.

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Posted by Ruth White-Cabbell at 02:57PM PST

7 Easy Ways to Integrate Twitter into Your Marketing

 Lately I’ve been spending some time talking to partners and my Cisco Channel Marketing counterparts about how and where we can integrate social media into our overall marketing efforts.  Frankly, I am a huge proponent of starting with objectives and strategy versus tactics – see my earlier blogs posts that touch on this subject relative to social media - Internet Marketing, Social Media, eMarketing… It’s Still Marketing and Social Media ROI: What Do You Measure?

However, I recognize that there are situations where you just need to try some things and see where they can take you. As most of you know Cisco has a fairly large presence on Twitter with Twitter feeds for marketing, product launches, Cisco executives etc. We frequently encourage both our partners and customers to follow us. With this in mind, I thought I would share some easy ways that you can integrate your Twitter presence into your overall marketing efforts. So, if you find yourself in a situation where the proverbial train is leaving the station with social media, this may give you some immediate things you can do to unify your marketing efforts.

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Posted by Ruth White-Cabbell at 04:09PM PST