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Join Me for the White Paper Success Summit This content from: Duct Tape Marketing I am very excited to be a part of the White Paper Success Summit 2010: This live online event is packed with speaker after speaker focused on showing you the best ways to attract quality leads and grow your business with educational white papers. The world’s leading white paper experts will show you how. Join Michael Stelzner (author, Writing White Papers), Bob Bly (author, White Paper Marketing Handbook), Brian J. Carroll (author, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale), Jill Konrath (author, Selling to Big Companies), Roger C. Parker (author, White Paper Design that Sells), Joe Pulizzi (author, Get Content Get Customers), Ardath Albee (author, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale), Jonathan Kantor (author, Crafting White Paper 2.0) and me! Attend from your home or office. Tickets half-off until Jan. 6th. Go here and check out the free summit video Once other presenters show you how to craft a killer white paper, I’m going to show you how to Get Other Businesses to Promote it for you. Wouldn’t be great if you could enlist an army of businesses to voluntarily put your white paper in the hands of their customers and prospects? In my session I’ll share my step-by-step approach for enlisting strategic referral partners who will take advantage of and leverage your white paper. This is an event worth investing in and yes the links in this post are affiliate links – I’ve got to eat you know. Related Posts: The White Paper Marketing Handbook Opt-In Email Deliverability Checklist Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose What Does Sales Really Need from Marketing? Hand Made Paper Stuff Like this post? Share it with others

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Join Me for the White Paper Success Summit

My mother used to tell me the only stupid question was the one you didn’t ask. Thanks to social media, in business terms, the only stupid question is fast becoming the one you don’t answer. People are driving leads using Question and Answer forums like LinkedIn Answers , Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com . While most case study examples seem to be independent consultants, someone has finally put some quantification around the trend with some surprising results. Business.com released a report last week entitled, “ Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. ” You can download it for free from their website. It does require a simple and free registration to offer you future participation in Business.com research. The report is worth the effort and you don’t have to opt-in for anything to get it. Image by Tamar Weinberg via Flickr Polling over 1,400 professionals, some 59 percent of whom were business owners or C-Level executives, Business.com discovered some interesting information around question and answer forums, including: Webinars and podcasts are the most popular social media resource for business information While Q&A forums are eighth on the list of most popular business resources, 49.4 percent of respondents say they use them. Q&A forums are more popular than Twitter as a business resource by 14 percent (49.4 to 35.4 percent of respondents saying they use them). Among those who use Q&A forums, 92 percent say they are at least somewhat useful with 25 percent claiming them to be “very useful.” LinkedIn Answers dominates the category usage, claiming 59.2 percent of use for companies participating in at least one Q&A forum. Yahoo! Answers is a distant second at 37.1 percent. 79 percent of B2B respondents use LinkedIn Answers, compared to just 46 percent of B2C respondents. MarkeingProf’s Know-How Exchange is far more popular than I imagined, generally falling just behind the aforementioned Q&A forums and WikiAnswers in most used forums. The report is full of further insights and contains a list of best practices for generating leads by participating in Q&A forums. Download the report to see their list , which I won’t try to circumvent with my own. It would only appear as if I stole theirs, so why try? In essence, the best practices (theirs and mine) remind you to be helpful first, don’t go in trumpeting your sales pitch and focus on long-term relationship building and benefits rather than seeing a sudden influx of leads because you clicked a button on a website. Nothing is that easy. It’s like being at an off-line networking event. You work at it a while and you get results. I’ve been investing some time in my own LinkedIn profile lately and decided to use the site’s nifty Polls application to see how often my network used LinkedIn Answers to drive business leads . As of Sunday afternoon this morning (I updated shortly after publishing) I had just 52 respondents, but some interesting parallels. More than half (59 percent) of those who answered admitted they never used Answers on LinkedIn. Some told me via Twitter they didn’t because they weren’t sure how to do it and not seem spammy. The above should help them out. Of those who did, 26 percent do so once each month, five percent once per week and seven percent 2-3 times per week. However, if you break it down by job title, you see that all 12 percent who indicated using Answers 1-3 times per week were business owners or C-Level executives. The were all over 35 years of age as well. While I expect demographics and behavior will change with increased adoption of social media tools, it’s worth noting that today’s business leaders think Question and Answer forums are useful enough to invest time in them. Sure, the usage set skews toward companies already using social media, but, if anything, the numbers tell us that LinkedIn Answers has become a trusted source for business information. Since you are just as able to provide that information as anyone else, doesn’t it seem logical to do so? The only way to start is to start. Check out the best practices on Business.com’s report . Log in to your LinkedIn account . Visit your industry in the Answers section . Find some questions you can provide value by answering. Do this consistantly over the next three months and see how many leads, qualified leads and even new business accounts you can attract. You might be surprised at the results. And do report back. We’d love to chronicle your successes … or failures and challenges. If you have already had some, please, tell us about them in the comments. Related articles by Zemanta 13 Best Sites to Get Your Questions Answered! (thenextweb.com) Yahoo Answers Still Does Not Support Twitter (mwd.com)

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How To Drive Business Leads With Question & Answer Forums

The three most common reasons for not investing in social media up to now have been lack of knowledge and understanding (59%), company culture (41%) and lack of senior buy-in (41%). It would seem that change needs to start from the top, …

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Johnnie Moore's Weblog: Social media report

Source: Shutterstock (edited) Social Media is rooted in relationships, the dynamic interaction and collaboration between real people. We learned and continue to learn how to communicate in public forums, evolving our personal views on privacy and uncertainty as we transform from digital introverts to social extroverts. This is our industrial revolution and its reward for participation is relevance. The socialization of online societies democratized the publishing industry and equalized influence. The Social Economy Socialnomics is the study of what I refer to as the social economy. The truth is however, that the true method for studying the exchange, growth, depreciation, and path of social capital is a more human form of social sciences, those that embrace the methodologies and tenets of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. As the social economy swells and continues to flourish, many of us are abandoning the forums and systems where businesses held the illusion of control in favor of communities where we dictate the level of value we give and take. Accordingly, brands are turning in our direction. We are, after all, the keepers of social capital and with it, we make valuable decisions and also impact and influence the decisions of others. We’re now joining and creating our own communities online where we create, shape, and steer attention democracies. Individually, we’re realizing the power and potential of social media. Collectively, we’re changing how we learn, interact, discover, and share. The rise of Social Media resembled a global celebration of freedom and empowerment.  In many ways, this was a Summer of Love and Twitter was our Woodstock.  Every genre creates a movement. The 80’s championed the free market economy. The 90’s gave birth to the Internet revolution. The 2000’s engendered a more social Web.  We carry the spirit forward as we seek incremental milestones that deliver meaning and rewards, evolution is perpetually imminent. What’s next? In order for a value cycle to maintain relevance and usefulness, it must perennially pull innovation and insight from the edge and bring it to the center.  The time to close the chapter on our Summer of Love nears, but we will forever hold it sacred. The edge is already coming into focus. The Attention Economy Attention is indeed a precious commodity. Perhaps more scarce than we may realize or care to admit. It is why we are migrating towards the employment of attention dashboards to help funnel the content we attempt to follow. Essentially, attention dashboards are any one of the three screens (mobile device, PC, TV) within the Golden Triangle (mobile, social, real-time) and is usually experienced as an activity stream, TweetDeck, the Facebook Newsfeed, FriendFeed, any feed reader, etc. The attention dashboard is where we focus and it is how we keep our finger on the pulse of the social web – the conversations and connections that ultimately represent the human algorithm. To have any hope of connecting with discerning consumers in the social web, we have to gain visibility and momentum across individual attention dashboards, where, when, and how they’re tuned. To do so, the marketing infrastructure and methodology must shift from a broadcast framework to one of informed engagement and interaction without compromise or skepticism – all the while placing functional and meaningful forms of metrics and analysis. Identifying, understanding, and compelling new influencers requires an ongoing investment in listening, analysis, and cooperation. It is this practice that lays a promising foundation for implementing a social CRM (sCRM) or Social Relationship Management (SRM) infrastructure supported by established workflow, processes, and governance. Attention, however, is only thinning. To help, the social Web is on the verge of realizing the potential and corresponding benefits of real-time filtering technology. Gaining presence on attention dashboards will test the creativity, perseverance, and quality of those who choose to willingly participate. As we traverse the dynamic landscapes defining the social and attention economies, we realize that something much more powerful is required to earn ongoing attention in the social web. One of the primary principles and virtues of earning attention over time is to establish connections and interactions rooted in trust or the constant acts of earning it. Individualized engagement that attempts to deliver value contributes to the kindling of trust. The New Trust Economy I am me, but I already know that. Who are you, why should I care, and who am I (to you)? Social Media is ours and it’s up to us to determine who we let into our social graph. We are the gatekeepers for our attention and in order to earn our awareness, you’re going to need to know a bit more about me than my age group, gender, level of education, marital status, and household income. More importantly, you’re going to have to dig a bit deeper than the keywords I may use in online conversations. It’s the difference between demographics and psychographics . It’s the difference between listening and monitoring. The social economy now gives way to something much more substantial. The next stage in the evolution of new media is the trust economy. Whereas conversations served as the currency of social media, conviction credence, and value serve as the market for trust economics. While brands weigh the scalability and ROI of investing in relationships, as a consumer, I can assure you, a reasonable attempt at fostering relations is a noble and respectable endeavor. We’re no longer limiting relationships to friends, family and associates. As our comfort and interaction increase in social networks, the relationships we forge within each reflect our interests and aspirations . The curated micro networks we forge within each respective social network serves as a trusted community. Those who can participate or permeate these trust communities must first earn the prominence of what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith call Trust Agents – those individuals who are deserving of your time and attention as demonstrated through their actions and words. It is these concentrated communities that ultimately form the premise for a much larger and more meaningful human network – a collection of trust networks that represent the market and exchanges for your focus, investment, participation and ultimately your actions. With time, our contribution to the state of the social, attention, and trust economies is measured by reciprocity, recognition , value, and benefaction. Trust is earned and its stature is representative of our collaboration and contribution over time. If the Social Web is an ocean, trust funnels into distinctive and distinguishable rivers. Connect with Brian Solis on: Twitter , LinkedIn , Tumblr , Plaxo , Posterous , or Facebook — Click the image below to buy the book/poster : pr pr+2.0 pr2.0 public+relations marketing advertising interactive social+media socialmedia brian+solis social media media2.0 media+2.0 2.0 smo social+media+optimization marcom communication publicity advertising expert interactive spin brand branding guru social+architect

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The Evolution of A New Trust Economy

Using an overview method to check your brand on social media sites is a business tip worth investing in.

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Social Media Overview Applications are Good for Your Business

Forrester Research has released a new report forecasting interactive marketing spend in the U.S. for the next five years. The report, authored by Shar VanBoskirk , is available in its entirety on the Forrester Research website . The report details how certain industries currently spend, and projects how they will spend, on interactive marketing. It also offers some interesting insights for businesses trying to ensure they are either catching, or keeping up with the Joneses. VanBoskirk talks more about it on the Forrester Research blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals . Current Interactive Marketing Spend – Courtesy of Forrester Research, Inc. (Click for larger version) The chart above shows what Forrester estimates brands are currently spending on Interactive Marketing. Display advertising is banner ads and similar, standard ads on websites. The numbers aren’t all that surprising, but think about where the industry is when you think of these insights: Display ads continue to dominate consumer goods and media and entertainment, among other categories. This despite the fact consumer trends indicate ads simply don’t work as well as other interactive areas. The industries that have been using the web the longest – travel and hospitality – spend three times as much on search marketing as display ads and almost 30 percent of their overall budget on Interactive. That’s 10 percent more than any other industry. Social media spend is last or second to last in all categories except business services. Social media consultants and agencies selling social media fall into that category. Email marketing, the interactive version of cash cow direct marketing, appears to be almost an afterthought across the board. It doesn’t surprise me that media and entertainment and consumer goods industries continue to buy display ads more than other Interactive media. They’re not only conditioned to buy ads to communicate their message and under the influence of media planning and buying firms who only make money when they buy them, but they’re the final bastion of people who don’t understand consumers have flocked to arenas like social media to get away from the bull horns of traditional marketing. Are they getting better? Probably. Do they have a way to go? Yep. Travel and hospitality industries have a few years experience on these others and are spending a ton more on search marketing and a ton more total dollars. I’ll give you a hint, GPG folks … they’re onto something. While the cost of social media essentially equates to labor costs, there should still be more dollars devoted to it across the board. I say this not because I want to make more money (though I won’t turn it away) but because social media — building relationships with your consumers — is the one interactive marketing method that is sustainable and cost efficient in being such. You’re investing in the lifetime of your consumers here. The dollars will go a lot farther. And if you aren’t taking advantage of good email marketing, you need to stop what you’re doing and figure that piece out fast. Email marketing done right, delivered to the right audience and with the right message is still the best way to consistently reach people in the interactive space. These are my ideas on how companies and industries should look to change some of these numbers. You’ll have to go purchase the Forrester Report to see if their predictions match up with what I’m recommending. (Warning: Forrester Reports aren’t cheap, but do come with a three-week, money-back guarantee.) In the meantime, what do the numbers tell you? What surprises you? What seems odd? A penny for your comments … Subscribe to the blog | Subscribe to the newsletter | Follow Jason on Twitter Related articles by Zemanta Effective E-Mail Marketing (ronmedlin.com) Should We Kill The Ads Or The Metrics? (threeminds.organic.com) Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2010: Flash, Crowdsourcing, Info-Art (marketingvox.com)

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Where Interactive Marketing Dollars Are Going

Source: ShutterStock What follows is my opening address to the Social Media World Forum … As we look ahead to 2010 in the world of social media, we should first stop to appreciate how far we’ve come in this journey to new found relevance and presence. Social media served as a great equalizer. The technology and the corresponding networks that freely connected us, democratized the ability to publish and share content, weave more meaningful relationships, as well reset the ecosystem for establishing and wielding influence. Perhaps most notably, Social networks made the world a much smaller place. As such, it also set the stage for the emergence of a new caliber and genre of influencers and communities that support their mission and purpose. On any given subject, these authoritative networks can incite change and galvanize action to govern, change, and direct market behavior. The power lies in the ability for anyone to find and forge connections with those who share passions, interests, beliefs, and aspirations. Our ability to form new ties online expands beyond friends, family, and associates. We now weave contextual networks , bonds that are adjoined through our ideas and representations. But just because we have access to the tools doesn’t necessarily entitle us to reach out to customers, influencers, and stakeholders. Simply because we believe we have something to say doesn’t guarantee that anyone is ready or willing to listen. Nor does it mean what we have to say automatically entitles us to a ready audience. Social Media aside, the act of communicating with someone is shaped by its intentions and interpreted by its purpose and design. In other words, the opportunity to participate and engage is a privilege. And, this privilege is rewarded with connections and community for those who realize that the minimum ante to engage is value. At the very minimum, Social Media revealed the people who define our audiences, giving us a glimpse of not only who defines are marketplace and landscape of influence, but also what they think, what they need to know, and what they’re seeking. It allowed us to truly establish bridges between people and information in ways that elicited more favorable responses while investing and cultivating, engagement, loyalty and trust. The fear of losing control of our message and brand transformed into the realization that we never had the level of control we assumed. Social Media didn’t invent conversations, it only surfaced them – giving us the ability to identify opportunities to steer and change perception – and learn, adapt, and improve in the process. The power of perception has never been more prominent. The art of listening and monitoring serves as the passage for identifying relevant voices and the communities that host interaction. More importantly, the powers of observation grant us perspective. If we are truly taking heed of this activity, we can’t help but feel the sentiment and emotions that govern and impact our online ecosystems and societies. In the process, we learn everything necessary to contribute value to the dialogue and to the greater community overall. We now feel, hear, and see the world through the eyes of those we wish to reach and inspire. We’ve not only earned the right to participate, but also earned a genuine sense of empathy along the way. This is the only way we can truly contribute and steer the direction of our markets. We must take an active role in its definition as a leader and also through the democratized leadership that stems from collaboration and community empowerment. This isn’t only a two-way street, it’s a road paved with mutually beneficial interaction to ensure that these roads attract meaningful traffic. Individually and collectively, we are forever students of new media and our work is only just beginning. Connect with Brian Solis on: Twitter , FriendFeed , LinkedIn , Tum blr , Plaxo , Posterous , or Facebook — Click the image below to buy : — pr pr+2.0 pr2.0 public+relations marketing advertising interactive social+media socialmedia brian+solis social media media2.0 media+2.0 2.0 smo social+media+optimization marcom communication publicity advertising expert interactive spin brand branding guru social+architect

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Our Journey Defines Our Future in Social Media