What I have heard the most from my fellow marketers is the statement “use the social media or be left out of something big.” I am always cynical about this statement, especially in the B2B environment. If you are operating in a B2B environment, you have probably noticed that everyone is caught up in this new trend. Before you dive into the social media, and believe it will fix all your problems, ask yourself the following questions:

1.  Who are your clients / customers?
Many of our clients are operating in a very niche market, with only one or two customers. Why waste resources and time on the cyber space, if you can have an old fashioned face to face communication with them, especially when the client prefers it this way.

2. Do you have resources for it?
Social media will help you to generate leads, but only if you do it properly. If you are not conveying the right message to your customers, the chances are you are conveying the WRONG message. Frankly, if you are conveying the wrong message, you are better off doing nothing at all. What does it take to do it properly? Marketing specialists on social media, time, and money. Many people think social media is cheap. Don’t get me wrong, it is. Social media a free platform for businesses, but marketing specialists and their time will cost you money, just like any other marketing campaign.

3. What is your short-term business objective?
Will social media help you drive sales? It will. But if you want it to happen tomorrow, forget about it. Social media is a very cost-effective channel for you to reach prospective clients; it is not a salesman however. Even if you are using the social media properly, it will take some time before it generates positive ROIs. Why? Because “creating transactional opportunities on the web takes trust, but trust takes time to establish” (Chris Brogran, Co-author of Trust Agent Says). If you are thinking of using it to drive short-term sales, there are better methods to leverage your efforts, such as direct mail, price incentives and enhanced sales support. 

I am not suggesting that social media is not good for B2B, instead I am suggesting that your reason to use social media shouldn’t be “because everyone else is doing it!”

If you find your situation is not as outlined above, or you believe you have a very unique experience with social media in the B2B world, let us know.

For those of you who administer blogs, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t – read on. If you’ve enabled comments for your blog posts and your website becomes more searchable and accessible by search engines, you will start to receive many comments on your articles. Some of them may be genuine and unique, but many will be simply garbage, or something defined as blog comment spamming. Such comments are usually posted by automated bots (scripts) across several hundred sites, and what isn’t unique about these comments is that they’re all the same, and don’t relate in any way to the original blog post. Some examples of comment spam are “I like your site, I will bookmark it now and add it to my RSS feed.”, or “Cool site, where did you get your information”. Some spam comments are much longer in content, but the one commonality for all of them is that they don’t usually directly address the article that they’re supposed to comment on. One way of figuring out if a comment is unique or not is to do a quick search on it in Google, but after a while it shouldn’t take you a long time to figure out if a comment is genuine or not.

Many of these spam comments are posted with a link, that links to the site in which the author is trying to drive more traffic to. There are potential consequences for both the spamming comment poster, as well as the site where the spamming comment is being posted on. Many search engines like original content – content that was explicitly written by you, and not repeated too many times anywhere else. For example, the more original content your website has, the higher it will rank on Google. If you allow comment spamming on your site, you run the risk of making your website less relevant to searches, because the content of your site (the spam comment) is duplicated across many other sites. The other consequence is that to the spam comment poster, in that they run the risk of getting their site delisted from the search engine indexes.

So time now for some tips. First off, don’t approve any comments that you may come across on your blog. Go through all of them with a fine toothcomb, and only approve the ones that address specific items in your blog article. Secondly, if you’re going to post comments on other blogs, make sure they’re unique, well thought out, and well written. Don’t do a copy and paste job, cause it will hurt your blog in the long run.

For comment moderation, blogging software such as WordPress come with an anti-spamming plugin called Akismet. All you have to do is enable the plugin by getting a WordPress.com API key. The majority of the time Akismet will find 99% of comment spam automatically. It’s not enabled by default, so make sure to turn it on.

Happy Blogging from Palmer Marketing …

We’re having a crazy week at the office here, as we’ve taken out the ceiling on the central part of the second floor to create an open concept look, as well to fulfill a summer mandate. Back in June we set out a goal of having all office staff on one floor, not only in order to improve communication between staff, but to make everyone feel like they’re a part of the team. So with the reno in full swing, as well as some IT issues with one of our servers, we’ve neglected this blog a bit, but now it’s time to get back at it.

In this week’s post, we’ll talk about creating a custom mobile site, and why you should look at creating one for your transportation business. During the past decade, mobile devices such as cell phones and smart phones have seen an exponential growth in usage, both by consumers and business users. A typical website does not view too well on the small screen of these mobile devices. Usually a user has to do some horizontal and vertical scrolling in order to get to the information they’re looking for.

This is where customized mobile websites come in. Think of a mobile site as a version of your own site without the bells and whistles. A typical mobile site will contain, at minimum, some basic information about your business such as the services that your company offers, a company profile page and basic contact information. Mobile sites should load quickly, as mobile devices do not have the required bandwidth that landline internet connections have. You can take your mobile site to the next level by integrating some interactive content. For example, if your website supports features such as shipment tracking, you can easily integrate that into your mobile site. This way the customer can quickly look up their shipment information through their mobile device. Another idea would be to have a simplified rate request form, with only basic contact details and shipment fields. The whole idea is to make things as simple as possible for the mobile user, because they’re on the go, and already limited by factors that they can’t control such as screen size and bandwidth limitations.

Most mobile sites will run in harmony with your existing site. If a user is using a mobile device, you can install code determining so they’ll be automatically redirected to your mobile site. You can also specify a sub-domain such as m.yourwebsite.com, a directory www.yoursite.com/mobile or go one step further with a .mobi domain to fully distinguish your regular website from your mobile one. For a good example of a mobile site serving the transportation industry, look to no further than UPS’ mobile site at m.ups.com.