• Marc Meyer, Principle at Digital Response Marketing Group
• Jim Cossetta, cofounder of 4what.com
• Paul Mussina, President, Business Technology insight

Attendees from the building industry and related companies struggle with two simultaneous challenges:

• They are suffering from our a especially steep downturn in building that limits both people and dollar resources.
• They need to transform from traditional marketing methods to content marketing and social media.

Fortunately, there is a new generation of affordable tools and techniques that can make that transformation inexpensive—and with a bit of outside help—almost painless.

Here are some practical lessons on content marketing and social media that I’d like to share from the St. Patrick’s Day session.

CLICK HERE for the rest of the content marketing article…CLICK

Technorati Tags: Content Marketing

I am still sometimes haunted by the response I gave to an executive’s question in a strategy meeting a full decade ago. My then-employer was a B2B internet company struggling with its identity as the organization grew at an explosive rate and morphed from a publisher of online trade journals to a combination publisher, builder of B2B communities, and enabler of B2B commerce in the form of auctions, exchanges, and online lead generation.

The executive leading the meeting asked each of us at the table where our content and community efforts best fit into the equation. Should they come under the umbrella of marketing and audience development, reporting up through the CMO, or should they remain in Operations, which encompassed everything from site design to sales fulfillment to product development and IT support, all under the direction of the COO?

CLICK here for the rest of the article…CLICK

Technorati Tags: Content Marketing

By Kipp Bodnar from Social Media B2B dot com

If you are new to social media, or are someone who has been in the industry for a while, you are likely familiar with Mashable, the most popular blog dedicated to discussions about the social web. Jeff and I talk frequently about what makes Mashable so successful. Interestingly though, how they succeed has a lot of application on B2B content marketing.

I have decided to break down some of the strategies that make Mashable successful and show how they apply to B2B social media marketing. When a site has an audience of this size, they must be doing something right:

6 Strategies From Mashable For B2B Social Media Marketing

1. Headlines Drive Traffic And Sales – A quick scroll through the home page of Mashable shows you that they have mastered the art of simple yet attention grabbing headlines. This is a key component of their success because great headlines don’t just drive pageviews, they drive engagement and make people want to spread the content across the social web. Writing good headlines is one of the most important things B2B companies can do when publishing digital content. Good headlines make a possibly complex issue seem more interesting and more approachable.

2. Being First Is Important – The web almost always rewards someone for being “first.” Mashable has become a master of breaking stories before other news outlets. Am I telling your B2B organization to start breaking news? No. I am asking you to think about in what ways your organization can be “first” on the web.

Many B2B companies fail to realize that in niche industries where none of the players have begun publishing on the web, the first one that does gets a huge advantage. Google rewards those who talk about a keyword first by moving them up on the search engine results page. Being first in B2B is about establishing credibility and building a long-term, sustainable audience on the web.

Click here for the rest of the article.

Professor Content says,  first create a marketing plan, implement, manage, measure and finally adjust. This plan includes social media which is a part of marketing, social media is not a marketing plan. Here’s what the good old professor thinks, advertising is step one, which leads to marketing and then this leads finally to the sales process.

Technorati Tags: advertising, brand optimization, branding, content, Content Marketing, custom publishing, marketing, professor content, re-branding, re-content, re-contenting, stella, stella pop, stellapop, stellaspopfactory