6 things the iPad means for B2B Marketers

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced Apple's latest device, the iPad. A 10 inch, touch-screen tablet with Wi-Fi access, and an extension of the iPhone/iPod platform for both application development and media purchase. It's a beautiful device, as is expected from Apple, and will surely see plenty of uptake over the coming year.

The transition that this causes in the consumer market, and to book sellers, has already been much discussed. As a marketer focused on selling to businesses, however, there remains the question of what effect this will have.

Here are six important changes that we will likely see, as B2B marketers, as the iPad and its peers become more commonplace:

1) Returning relevance of print media: the iPad is designed to shake up the print landscape, for newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. If it succeeds in this, we will see the transition of that subscriber base from off-line to digital. This means that print advertising, long too untargeted to be a mainstay of B2B marketing, may make its return. With pay-for-performance price models and highly precise targeting, the advertising opportunities may be as interesting to B2B marketers as search engines were 5 years ago.

2) Integration of offline and online experiences: the form factor of a tablet makes it extremely easy to have with you at all points in the day. For B2B marketers at offline events such as seminars and tradeshows, this means that the online and offline experiences can be melded seamlessly. A salesperson carrying an iPad can easily segue into a live demonstration if the conversation goes that way, and a prospect carrying an iPad can be guided to online resources during the booth conversation if it makes sense to. The integrated experience can be much greater than either alone.

3) Books and whitepapers become interactive: as books and whitepapers are more and more read on devices like an iPad, rich interactive aspects become increasingly possible. Embedded videos within a book, links for more detailed exploration of topics, and interactive experiences to highlight a point all become possible, allowing us to rethink the book and whitepaper formats entirely.

4) Location awareness in everything: Although only the 3G model of the iPad appears to have GPS, the Wi-Fi will enable location detection, and it is not a great leap to assume that GPS will be commonplace in future models. As more devices become location aware, more applications will be re-factored to take advantage of that location knowledge. New applications like foursquare, or older applications like LinkedIn will build deep location knowledge of people in your network, allowing new forms of social networking to increasingly bridge the physical divide. Similarly, this will allow much more accurate location-based message targeting and may revive the local breakfast or lunch event as it becomes easier to connect with only local executives.

5) Application explosion: The prevalence of iPad devices, if successful, in the executive audiences who make most B2B purchase decisions could mean a great opportunity for freemium iPad applications that would help those executives in one aspect of their daily lives, while building the case for your full solution.

6) Sales enablement enrichment: A field sales person is another likely candidate for iPad adoption, and their ability to remain mobile while working with a full-size form factor device means that their need for insights and data on leads will greatly increase. Rather than just wanting the name and phone number of a lead sent to their Blackberry, they will insist on rich activity data and deeper insights being available on their iPad.

If the iPad is successful, it will certainly affect all aspects of society, much as the iPhone has done. As B2B marketers, we will benefit from watching these trends as they unfold and hopefully being ahead of them.

What are your thoughts on these trends? Any I have missed?

Four Reasons for an Information Concierge

There is a role in modern sales and marketing that is just starting to form. I call it the “Information Concierge”, but I suspect a similar role is called many things in many different organizations. This role bridges the gap between potential buyers and the information we have that is of value to them.

In many ways, this is what many of us are doing in social media, discovering conversations that relate to the topics of interest to us, and helping the people in those conversations through sharing data, perspective, anecdotes, and frameworks.

This, in essence, is the role of a concierge – helping to connect those seeking information with the information itself. But, it’s not purely an altruistic pursuit, we do it in order to ensure that our data, our perspectives, our anecdotes, and our frameworks make their way into the conversation. We do this in a non-salesy way, but we do it in a way that works to guide prospects our way slowly over time.

So why not search?

We’re all aware of the power of Google and Bing to find information, and the trends in the market towards deeper searches with more words. It is the main driver of website traffic for many businesses, and many of us have put great effort into being found by the search engines, so it may seem a little counter-intuitive to need an “information concierge” role. After all, it seems like it is an inefficient, human-based way to solve a challenge that the search engines solve so much more efficiently.

The Need for an Information Concierge

I believe though, that there are four reasons that the information concierge role is necessary, and will continue to grow, even as search engines continue to improve:

Clarity: As buyers look for deeper and deeper content, the clarity with which they must craft their search query increases. If you are looking for “measuring email deliverability rates for dedicated sending IPs”, you may or may not find an article that discusses “monitoring email sender reputations and non-delivered email counts by sender address”, even though it may be precisely what you are looking for. The information concierge role, however, can put these two together easily, and guide a person who asks that question in a discussion to the right discussion.

Priority: We all know that the first page of results on Google, and only the first few results there, are what generates nearly all the clicks. If a great article does not find its way to that top list, it will not be discovered by searchers in most cases. The information concierge can prioritize differently, and ensure that the best article, or perspective, for the question at hand is the one that is presented.

Ease: Let’s be honest, it can be difficult to find the information you need sometimes, and just asking a question in an active forum can result in a very quick set of detailed and valuable responses. As we move away from attempting to sell to buyers and towards facilitating their buying processes, the easier we can make it on them, the better.

Perspective: Perhaps the most important reason is the occasional need to change a buyer’s perspective. If they are not aware of your solution category, are thinking about the problem in an outdated way, or are attaching too much weight to the wrong decision criteria, only an information concierge can detect this, and provide them with a carefully crafted and well presented case for changing that perspective.

Search is an incredibly powerful and highly relevant way in which buyers obtain their information, but it remains only one part of the picture. As we move forward, I would suspect we’ll see a much clearer formalization of the “Information Concierge” role.

Does anyone in your organization currently perform this role? What department are they part of?

Dynamics of Influencers

One of the most important uses of social media in a B2B environment is to build and maintain relationships with influencers in your space. There is much agreement with that, but there is also the sense that this is somehow new within the world of social media.

An Old Challenge

Managing influencers, however, has long been a part of the role of marketing – analyst relations and public relations have long had this as their main goal. By carefully managing and cultivating good relationships with influencers such as analysts, journalists, and editors, you would find your perspectives known and understood by the writers, you would be included in mentions, and you might even find a slightly more positive perspective on your company than without such a strong relationship.

Influencers in a Social Media World

In today’s world, this core dynamic is still there. Good relationships with influencers can lead to being present in mentions, having perspective understood and appreciated, and having a slightly more positive bias. However, while the core dynamic remains, the approach that we need to use to manage influencers has changed significantly.

More But Smaller

The first major change is that the influencers have changed in number and in size. Whereas historically, there may have been a few analysts worth focusing on, and a similar number of publications, there are now many, many more blogs, lifestreams, content sites, and magazines (let’s call them all "publications" just to keep things simple). This is brought about by the fact that the cost of infrastructure needed to publish information has gone down to nearly zero. This explosion in the number of publications is matched by a corresponding decrease in their individual size. Many only have a few thousand viewers, or focus on a highly specialized niche that would have been unprofitable for a major news outlet.

Changing Relationships

With this change in size comes a change in how relationships are maintained. Major news and publishing outlets forced structure on the process in order to keep things under control. This led to formal briefing processes, embargoed news releases, and the use of news wires for the release of news. Now, with an explosion of publishers, each of whom influence a niche area of the market, this process is not necessarily as formal – it is a much more social process of relationship building.

However, these new publishers – bloggers, independent writers, and niche experts – do not want to follow the formalized briefing processes of yesterday. What they want are the direct relationships with the key people of relevance to their area of interest or writing. These are often the subject matter experts who truly understand the content that is relevant to the topic at hand.

To build and maintain these relationships, the same rigor we applied to building and maintaining relationships with analysts and journalists over the past few decades, but with two new twists:

- the relationships must be maintained in larger numbers

- they must be maintained by many key people on your team, executives, subject matter experts, and thought leaders, rather than just the PR group


Easier Relationships

Making this easier, however, is the fact that the dynamics of these relationships are changing quite a bit. As Chris Brogan and Julien Smith discuss in Trust Agents (link is to Kathleen Schaub's discussion on this specific topic), the technologies of social media make it easier to maintain relationships with “half strangers” – and in doing so it is easier to maintain a larger number of relationships.

These relationships can be maintained through much more scalable interactions – interacting on Twitter, good conversations on blogs, discussions on LinkedIn, and various other forms. Many relationships are developed this way while only meeting face-to-face once or even not at all.

New People, New Influence

This change, while seeming small, fundamentally changes the dynamics of how we as B2B organizations manage how we influence the influencers in our spaces. The number of influencers has increased dramatically, while their relative size and the formality of their briefing processes had decreased a comparable amount. At the same time, the people they are interested in having a relationship with are the subject matter experts in our organizations. This is the reason why it is critical to have more people in your organization “join the conversation” – each of them maintains a number of relationships with a few key influencers, and in doing so, broadens your influence in the overall market.

CEOs and Marketing Metrics

CEOs may not be involved in the day to day challenges of the marketing department, but they can strongly influence its evolution through the questions that they ask and the metrics that they track, both in the marketing and sales teams. Done well, this structure and encouragement can facilitate a transition to a buyer-centered, efficient marketing and sales organization. Done poorly, however, the structure and metrics that a CEO imposes on his or her team can prevent the needed transitions from taking place.

High Level Framework

At the executive team and board levels, CEOs should measure marketing on objective, standard metrics around marketing’s ability to create, nurture, and qualify sales-ready buyers. By looking at Marketing’s ability to manage the top end of the revenue funnel through balance sheet and income statement metrics, CEOs will instill the discipline of defining the stages of the buying process, measuring leads against these stages, and facilitating buyers’ movement through each stage by carefully targeted campaigning.

Similarly, CEOs must work to have Sales and Marketing present their views of revenue projections, and the needed investments, in a coordinated fashion. The hand-off of a lead from Marketing to Sales should be based upon a mutually agreed-upon definition, and thus should enable a common view of the entire funnel from the earliest stages of awareness to the final closure of a deal. With this in place, and with an understanding of the conversion times and percentages between each two stages, there is an ability to see potential revenue shortfalls well in advance and adjust investment across the entire Sales and Marketing spectrum accordingly.

Conflicting Metrics

Without this coordinated focus, it is easy for conflicting metrics to develop. For example, if a Marketing team is focusing on only handing highly qualified leads to Sales, they will naturally reduce the number of leads that are passed. If, however, the Sales team is managed and measured based on activity metrics such as the number of calls per day, they will resist the reduction in lead volume from Marketing, even though the lead quality is significantly higher.

In measuring Marketing, CEOs encourage the right behavior when they think in terms of the buyers’ buying process:

- How is awareness of your solution category first developed?

- How do buyers educate themselves, and is that education process something you should be a part of?

- When prospective buyers understand a business challenge or opportunity and seek to solve it, do they discover your company?

- How are solutions selected and validated in your category?
What criteria are used, and how have we educated buyer on why to select us?

These questions focus marketing on understanding and facilitating buyers throughout the entire buying process.

What this may mean, however, is that Marketing focuses more on processes that continuously nurture prospective buyers, continually allow your solutions to be found, and gradually establish buying criteria that allow your solution to be selected. This can often reduce the number of large, one-off campaigns that attract significant internal attention, but may do far less to engage with buyers, as they are timed and targeted based on the company’s needs and schedules rather than those of the buyers.

Results in Terms of Buyers

CEOs that ask Marketing for results that are defined in terms of the prospective buyers – such as the movement of prospects between one stage of their buying process and the next – allow Marketing to better focus on campaigns that facilitate buyers. While large one-off campaigns can at times be useful, they often attract a disproportionate amount of internal attention due to their higher internal visibility. CEOs that avoid the temptation to only ask for and look at large one-off campaigns are guiding Marketing teams in a direction that is more focused on the needs of buyers.

Driving a Marketing team to look at hard metrics for their campaigns, and to take responsibility for those metrics has some interesting repercussions. A marketing team can commit to revenue metrics, delivery of objectively qualified leads, and to managing an overall healthy and predictable revenue pipeline. With this responsibility and measurement, however, comes the associated ability to associate compensation with directly measurable performance. CEOs should not be afraid to challenge long-held beliefs on compensation levels between Sale and Marketing. Even institutions such as Presidents’ Club, long the purview of Sales, should be opened up to anyone in the Marketing organization performing sufficiently well against objectively defined metrics.

CEOs that set the right framework and structure for their Marketing and Sales teams can drive an evolution of performance. However, simple actions and metrics, or long-held beliefs that are not challenged, can easily derail the best intentions of Marketing and Sales executives seeking to improve their own performance.

Re# (ReHash) - Rehashing old great posts on Twitter

The real-time nature of Twitter, blogs, and social media in general is fascinating, and much has been written about how this real-time nature changes how we discover and consume information. Interestingly, however, this real-time nature has a unintended side effect in that anything older than a few days is deemed to be “old news” and can’t be discussed.

Many of the topics we wrestle with however, as B2B marketing professionals, are less transient than this. Frameworks for thinking about problems, key questions to ask providers, case studies, and best practices to implement are all relevant over a much longer timeframe – quarters or even years. The interesting challenge with blogging is that it is oriented to be a real-time discipline where a recent post buries a past post. This metaphor works well for current events and other time-sensitive discussions, but not so well for conveying the deep content that is of relevance for an audience in a specialty field.

Unless they do deep searches, or dig for specific information, this real-time nature of social media, blogging, and Twitter results in an interested audience not being able to easily discover potentially very valuable information just by the fact that it was not written in the past week.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m interested in performing an experiment. I’m going to restart the conversation (via Twitter) around a few old posts that I feel are still timely, interesting, and relevant today. Each one will be quite old, many of them from the earlier days of this blog when it was virtually unknown, and of a topic that I would gladly write about again today. I’m interested to see the reaction to the posts, and whether these posts have the same effect and pickup in the market that I would expect for a brand new post.

Any tweets about these posts will be tagged with Re# (ReHash) so there’s no mistaking the fact that they have been brought back to life from times past.

What are your thoughts? Is this experiment going to work? Or is it as bad of an idea as the Auto-DM?

Is there a reason that the real-time nature of the discussions on Twitter should be left to solely real-time conversations? What have you found with social media and content timeliness? Is it the content itself, or the medium it’s discussed in that determines whether the content is still relevant? I would love to hear everyone's perspectives on this - and I'll report back the outcomes of the experiments.

The Foundation for Great Marketing is Great Data

Data is key to all your marketing efforts. Whether it is segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, lead routing, or marketing analysis, if you don’t have clean and consistent data, your efforts will be built on the shakiest of foundations. However, when thinking about your marketing automation efforts, data management can often be an afterthought.

However, some minimal upfront efforts to understand and improve the quality of your data can greatly improve your effectiveness as a marketer.

Current Database

First, you need to understand your current database. There may be a significant amount of data in your database, but unless it is data you can work with, it will not be adding value to your organization. Some simple analysis should give you a good sense of your current state:

- Growth and Total Size: The simplest of metrics; analyzing both the total size of your database and its growth over time gives you a clear sense of what you’re starting with. Net new contacts add to your total, while bouncebacks, and unsubscribes detract from it. In this measurement, be sure that you are truly measuring unique contacts, without any duplication. The overall database size should be growing in a healthy manner, although growth rates can vary depending on the growth rate of your company and your industry.

- Active/Inactive: Of equal importance to size of your marketing database is the analysis of what percentage of your database is active or inactive. A basic definition around “active”, such as a certain number of emails opened or clicked, visits to the website, or form submits will give you an objective definition of who is active. Those who are inactive may have “emotionally unsubscribed”, and are unlikely to be future buyers. It is more important that the active component of your database is growing over time than the overall size.

- Completeness: Each field that is of importance to you should be analyzed for its completeness. In many marketing databases, key fields may be only 30% or less complete, which leads to challenges in using those fields for marketing efforts. If your analysis shows that fields are less complete than ideal, you may want to use progressive profiling to add data to those fields

- Consistency: Even if a field is filled, if the data is inconsistent, it can be very difficult to derive value from it. Fields like Title, Industry, Country, State, or Revenue are very often extremely inconsistent as the data can be input in a wide variety of ways. Analyze each field for the breakdown of what values are in that field and their percentages to see if the data is generally consistent or inconsistent.




Some marketing automation platforms are able to perform this kind of analysis, but there is a lot of variation in the industry, so ask the tough questions if you are considering a marketing automation investment as this analysis will be key to your success.

Data Sources

With your own marketing database quality understood, you then need to begin understanding your sources of data to understand what will make your data challenges worsen if not controlled. Marketing data comes from many different sources, each of which has its unique opportunities and challenges.

- Other Systems: Marketing often sources data from CRM systems, data warehouses, or customer data masters. The data from these systems often must be brought in on a nightly (or more frequent) basis, and integrated into your marketing data. In many cases, there is limited opportunity to change the format or quality of the original data, and it must be dealt with on import automatically each time it is imported

- Continual Sources: Web forms, tradeshow leads, webinar registrants, and trial downloaders contribute a steady flow of data to the marketing database. The continual nature of these sources means that as a marketer, your database is being updated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This means that data cleansing must be done continually, and inline, rather than as a batch process once or twice a year

- Controlled vs Non-Controlled: Many of the sources you deal with are not sources that you are able to control. Lists from tradeshows, business cards, and many web forms are not sources that you are able to control, so the data from them is of varying quality and varying standardization

Given that you, as a marketer, are dealing with a variety of data sources, many of which are out of your control, and many of which are operating 24x7, keeping the data clean and consistent can be a significant challenge. The best way to approach this is to build a “contact washing machine” that standardizes and normalizes your data. Each time data is touched, whether from a web form, a list upload, or from your CRM system, it should flow to the contact washing machine.

Again, this is an area to ask tough questions in if you are looking at making an investment in lead management software as it makes a significant difference to your success. Look for contact washing machines that are a single, centralized point of data cleansing, and can handle standardizing and deduping data fields from industry to title to revenue. The best option is to have a pre-built structure out of the box, that you can then modify to meet the exact requirements of your business.


Data and the User Experience

In thinking about data, there can be a temptation to burden your audience of prospects with the data requirements of your marketing database. This is never a good idea. Many studies have shown that the more fields you add to your web forms, the more likely you are to see users drop off and not fill them out. Similarly, the more you restrict the input options that you provide to your audience (such as only allowing drop-down select lists for an individual’s job title), the more frustrated your audience will become.

The best option is to approach the challenge in two ways. Progressive profiling can be used to ask for a minimal amount of data at each interaction, never ask the same question twice, but continually add to a modular profile. This allows you to minimize the number of fields being asked per web form, and maximize the conversion rate. For the data itself, given the user frustration added by constraining their options, and the fact that many sources of data are beyond your control anyway, it is often better to allow free-form data while managing its quality via a contact washing machine once it enters your marketing database.


Data as a Foundation for Great Marketing

Today’s best marketers are building their creative campaigns, precise segmentation, accurate lead scoring, and relevant personalization on a base of great data quality. In fact, when top CMOs talked about their marketing dashboards, the focus on quality data was key to each of their successes. Whether you have made a marketing automation investment, and are looking to maximize the return you get from it, or are considering a marketing automation investment and want to know the right questions to ask, data should be front and center. It’s the foundation upon which everything else in marketing rests.

(*this post was originally posted on the Focus.com marketing community)

Mapping the Buying Process - A Framework

One of the recurring themes in this discussion has been the concept of thinking in terms of a buying process not a selling process. Many times when I speak about this topic publicly, there is general agreement in the audience, but the question of how to map a buying process often comes up. In some industries, it is significantly easier than in others, but some common techniques can be used across all industries to best understand how buyers ultimately arrive at a buying decision.

Mapping this process is more art than science in most cases, but the following question framework can help analyze how your buyers buy and if there are opportunities for better facilitating their buying processes. In each main stage of the buying process, one set of questions (below) looks at understanding whether there is a problem at all in this stage of the buying process, a second set looks at understanding how current buyers make it through that stage, and a third set looks at how your overall marketing performance could be improved in that stage.


Awareness and Education

Is there a problem: Are prospective buyers generally aware of your solution category and what it can do for their business?
- Ask industry analysts their opinion on the general knowledge of the market among likely buyers
- Survey your sales team on their experiences with initial calls
- Perform some first-hand survey research with likely buyers

What currently happens: How do existing prospects become educated about your category?
- Survey existing customers and prospects on where they read about topics in the general area of business you are in
- Analyze the traffic sources to any of your educational or thought leadership content
- Become an avid reader of industry newsletters and sites to understand their content topics and whether messages about your solution area are included

What are the options: How would prospects become aware of your category if they were not already aware?
- Look at the search results that are returned for searches on some of the terms related to pains that you solve (not terms that describe your category)
- Survey your marketing team on what events, tradeshows, and publications are well attended/read by key buyers in your industry
- Discover which industry sites discuss you and/or your competitors frequently
- Analyze which sites are referring web traffic to your site



Vendor Discovery

Is there a problem: If prospective buyers are going to find vendors to look into more deeply, are you on their list?
- Review competitor wins to understand whether you had been in consideration
- Look at the percentage of search phrases driving traffic to your site that already contain your brand or product names
- Poll your sales team on the frequency with which they were added as a last minute option, based on a cold call or chance encounter
- Analyze the percentage of leads that are originally sourced by marketing or arrived as inbound leads vs being generated by a cold call

What currently happens: How have prospects typically found you?
- Analyze the non-branded search terms that drive traffic to your website
- Poll your inside sales team on how their inbound leads heard of you
- Report on the breakdown of inquiries by source to understand what is driving early-stage inquiries
- Understand the percentage of leads in your marketing database that have been nurtured prior to becoming a qualified lead

What are the options: How would prospective buyers likely build their list of potential vendors?
- Determine whether the key industry comparison charts and analysts list your company
- Search for terms related to your category to see if your content is featured in the results
- Listen to webcasts, videos, or talks from key industry influencers to see if you are mentioned
- Act as a potential buyer and do your own "research" into solutions for the problems you solve to see if you are findable


Solution Validation

Is there a problem: When a buyer evaluates your solution, do they select you?
- Look at win/loss ratios for deals over the past few months or quarters
- Compare growth rates of your business vs competitors
- Build a discipline of analyzing losses with the sales team to understand buyer reasons
- Determine if you are ranked poorly in industry comparison charts

What happens now: How are buyers currently making their selection of a vendor?
- Analyze competitors positioning of your organization and your solutions
- Conduct third party win/loss surveys to obtain deeper information on buyer decision criteria
- Scan search phrases that include your brand or product names to look for objections or decision criteria
- Look at the marketing resources (whitepapers, case studies, free trials) currently being actively used by buyers to understand their current experience

What are the options: How can buyers’ decision process and decision criteria be better influenced?
- Identify key analysts and influencers who guide the market on how to think about key decision factors
- Map buyer objections to changes in buying criteria or positioning that can be inserted into nurture marketing efforts
- Audit common objections against current marketing assets to determine if gaps exists that would be better filled with a different marketing asset such as a free trial


This is, of course, just a framework for thinking about the problem. Every organization, and every industry, deals with a slightly different set of buying challenges. However, this framework can be quite useful for identifying gaps, challenges, or opportunities in the way your audience currently buys.

Interview with David Meerman Scott

I had a chance to chat with David Meerman Scott recently on a wide variety of topics. As one of the leading thinkers on social media in a business environment, his ideas, examples, and perspectives are fantastic to hear.

In this interview, we talked about why B2B marketers are so hesitant to embrace “fun” as an element of their marketing, and why we need to think about selling to people, not amorphous businesses. As part of that transition, we need to focus on creating a steady flow of rich, interesting, shareable content. Once we do that, we will find our messages shared freely among thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of potential buyers.


See below for our conversation (if this does not load, please click here to see the full conversation with David Meerman Scott):


Interview with David Meerman Scott


Towards the end of the conversation, DM Scott also spoke about how to balance freely shared content with the need for a flow of qualified leads for our sales teams. When it’s okay to ask for information, and when it is less likely to work. I hope you enjoyed watching the conversation and got as much out of it as I did.


For more insights from David Meerman Scott, see his blog at http://www.webinknow.com/ or follow him on Twitter (@dmscott).

Influencers, Advocates, and the Mainstream

We've all heard the hesitations on social media - "I don't use it", "my peers don't use it", "our buyers don't use it", etc. Even if these statements are taken as true, the need to engage in social media in a B2B marketing context is just as great because of the effect of influencers and advocates, and their effect on the mainstream audiences.

On this blog, much of the discussion has focused on the ability to get an idea, message, or piece of content, based on its own merits, to be discovered by an intended audience. This is indeed the main challenge of today’s marketers. However, there is often a core audience of influencers, advocates, and fans who can be of significant assistance in this effort.

With the decline of the mass publishers, and the advent of micropublishing online, whether through industry sites, social media, communities, or discussion forums, marketers are faced with a highly fragmented set of audiences to deal with. Each individual who writes has a unique set of motivations, ranging from building their own audience and reputation, to being seen as an expert in a community, or developing a business.

By carefully building relationships with this set of influencers over time, and understanding how you can help them achieve their goals, you can develop a friendly crucible for each of your messages. Each of these individuals influences an area of the market , and collectively may influence a larger area of the market than you can influence directly. Many of the key influencers in a particular market space are also watched closely be the mainstream media.

As B2B marketers, involved in social media, we are all aware of the commonly stated goal in social media to "join the conversation", "help others", and "contribute to the community". However, it can occasionally be challenging to see how these philanthropic actions tie back to the metrics that we are all measured on by the companies we work for. It is with this audience of influencers that this connection becomes clear.

The value of contributing to, helping, and engaging with this audience of influencers and advocates is in forming a friendly launch pad for any of your messages. Each story, and each message, must still stand on its own merits and be appropriately non-salesy, but an audience of advocates and fans, carefully nurtured, will give each message a more open-minded look, and may be among the first to share it with their own audience.

When explaining the value of social media to individuals who do not participate, and believe that their peers don't participate, this "indirect" model is the important one to explain. I have seen more than a few "aaaah, I get it" moments on social media, when this indirect model is explained.