Web Business Marketing Blog

Powerful tools for market intelligence are emerging on the web. And the best part: they’re free of charge. The secret to a successful web intelligence initiative is in the selection of the tool suite.

1. Everything starts from rss

Initially, there was html which gave us websites. Then came embedded languages (such as php etc), which gave us web applications. And now we have rss, which allows web applications to talk to each other, without the need for any coordination.

For an introduction to rss, see rss in 3.5 minutes.

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Knowledge management is the flip side of business marketing. Selling complex technical products and services requires broad and in-depth knowledge.

Blogs are natural knowledge management tools, but they do have a tendency to crumble when processing a lot of content.

This is the area where Drupal as a content management system performs extremely well. Its content module allows you to define a variety of content types, and process them as a single content stream. Its taxonomy module allows you to tag information with its various attributes (country, author, journal, organisation, …).

I’ve just had a good look at Drupal 5.2, the latest release, and it’s very impressive. Although I’ve gone where no business marketeer has gone before (the server side), I’ve also wisely decided not to ever write a single line of php-code. Still, downloading and installing Drupal is a breeze, as is installing most of its many modules.

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A few months into this blogging project, I want to re-focus on the use of web-based techniques in B2B marketing.

Every conventional marketing technique now has its web-marketing equivalent that can be used as a substitute or complement:

• from printed to electronic newsletters, and eventually rss feeds
• from printed materials (application guides, catalogs, case studies, white papers, …) to pdf’s
• from CD ROM to flash or downloadable software tools
• from video to YouTube or Google Video
• from seminars to webinars
• from meetings to webmeetings & intranets
• from trade fairs to virtual worlds
• from Rolodexes to social networks such as LinkedIn or Xing
• from press releases to blogs
• from call center to forum + FAQs
• from trade press advertising to web advertising

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Ted Demopoulos bundled 101 case studies on blogging and podcasting in 8 themes (basics, business uses, planning, making money, promoting, podcasts, other and the future). The idea is simple, but inspiring through its excellent selection of the case studies.

With 101 bloggers covered, the book gives a broad description of the blogosphere in its various segments: blogs, book blogs, podcasts, blog networks and even splogs.

The book lends itself well for modular reading. Just flip it open, and read any of the case studies. A few of the fascinating case studies:

• #17, the use of blogging as a sales research tool
• #27, 800-CEO-READ, a website, blogs and podcasts about business books
• #35, GMP Training, using their blog as a web portal
• …

This book targets bloggers who have already covered the basics, set-up their blog and want to broaden their horizon on the blogosphere. But even seasoned bloggers could pick up an idea or two.

And as a small bonus, the book is also full of benchmarks from other blogs that allow you to check how well you are doing as a blogger.

Via Ardeth Albee’s Marketing Interactions blog, I came accross Junta42, an ‘expert and user-generated search engine about content marketing’.

So what exactly is content marketing? A Google search leads to a Squidoo lens on the very subject, but we have to scroll down the lens to the “Must have resources” section to find the first elements of a definition:

Content Marketing is:

• Editorial-based (or long-form) content. It must tell a relevant, valuable story. Must be informative, educational or entertaining.
• Marketing-backed. The content has underlying marketing and sales objectives that a corporation, association or institution is trying to accomplish.
• Behavior-driven. Seeks out to maintain or alter the recipient’s behavior.
• Multi-platform (print, digital, audio, video, events). It can be, does not have to be, integrated.
• Targeted toward a specific audience. If you can’t name the audience, it’s not content marketing.

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Maybe you will conclude that I have too much free time, but on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I put following sites in Alexa:

• www.europa.eu, website of the European Institutions, employing 25,000 people and regulating the fate of almost half a billion citizens
• www.siemens.com, a major corporate brand, employing several times the number of people the European Commission does
• problogger.net, a ‘lone’ blogger in Australia

And the result is:

• it doesn’t look good for Siemens
• usually, the European Institutions beat Problogger, but on the occasional day, competition is neck and neck

If you’re a business marketeer, considering blogging for your organisation, or a blogging evangelist preparing to introduce blogging in your organisation, Debbie Weil’s book is for you.

Not only does it contain a 360 degree description on the blogosphere. The book also includes a selling kit for the skeptics, and prepares you for the cultural barriers you might face. A few of the arguments:

• Blogging allows organisations to communicate more easily, more broadly and more regularly
• From talking to the media, you become part of the media, and have the possibility to communicate directly with your target audience

A common theme is the continuum between e-mail and blogs. If you accept that blogs are a logical extension of e-mail, it can be quite liberating to write blog posts as if you were writing e-mails. This gives blogs their conversational style and puts a face behind the communication.

It also works the other way - write e-mails as if you were writing blog posts. If you keep in mind that you’re e-mail will ‘live forever’ on the web, it helps to avoid some of the pitfalls of using e-mail. And in some cases, the e-mail you’ve taking trouble to compose might be a very suitable blog posts, re-using the content you’ve already created for other’s benefit.

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