How to ensure more productive meetings in 2012

Lots of companies and marketing and sales teams are busy pulling together their master plans for the coming year. Often this means lots of onsite and offsite meetings. Meetings get a bad rap in business because people use them to avoid work, avoid decisions and to look busy.

In the spirit of starting the new year with a bang and doing things differently (better even) in your workplace, try giving some thought to the meetings you host and participate in.

As a host:

1. What decisions can be made without the need for a meeting? Email, file sharing, web and video conference can all be used to bring ideas to life with micro teams managing different project elements.

2. How can you manage expectation, secure the best input and minimise conflict – all in the shortest time? By being prepared. Expansive agendas and pre-reading usually assist this, but how many meeting hosts actually take the time to do this thoughtfully with the end goal in mind?

3. How critical is it that all the people involved need to be there in the room? Consider who makes decisions, who influences them and who is a ‘nice to have’. (Every person in one of your meetings for one hour is costing you two hours of productivity).

4. What tactics can you employ to keep the meeting short and on point? Think about employing pre-reading and preparation, detailed agendas, firm timekeeping, different venues, removal of chairs, tables, laptops and screens, removal of snacks, drinks, burst brainstorms and action focused takeaways.

5. What is needed after the meeting to ensure that decisions made are actioned? As the host you need to decide, and if necessary obtain buy-in from meeting participants to support you. At the very least, they should be kept up-to-date as a courtesy.

As a participant:

6. Can you be bold in fielding meeting requests and demand more from the host? Reduce the amount of time lost to meetings by being a little stricter with your time, for example by stringently focusing on the positive/negative impact on project delivery?

7. Can you add value? Establish quickly if it is a meeting you can add value to. There is no point attending to ‘hear it first hand’. That’s dead time.

8. Do you understand what is expected of you? If not, ask. If the host can’t tell you, politely decline. If you don’t have time to prepare, politely decline.

9. What is your involvement after the meeting? If you don’t get a definitive picture on this before you commit, the chances are you’ll have a whole load of work to do afterwards.

10. What’s in it for you long term? What are you going to get out of being involved?

Summary:

Sure, face-to-face contact is critical but in 2012, more than any other recent year, time is money. How are you going to ensure you keep projects moving forward, keep teams engaged and keep clients and customers happy without spending too  much time in unproductive meetings? Share your ideas below.

Six examples of how to use Facebook company pages for B2B marketing

I’m writing regularly over at SmartInsights. It is a great digital marketing blog with lots of collaboraters covering lots of urgent topics.

There is a real lack of good quality information online about B2B use of Facebook as the debate rages about its relevance.

Across two posts over recent weeks, I wanted to outline the emerging and evolving case for adding Facebook to your B2B marketing arsenal. And I wanted to offer some advice on the type of strategies you might adopt. In the second post which went live earlier this week, I identified a number of current B2B companies using Facebook to drive engagement and promote their business.

Q: How is Facebook working for you?

Five ways to integrate compelling video into your B2B marketing

My latest post as expert B2B marketing contributor on Dave Chaffey’s excellent Smart Insights blog went live today.

 

Video is an incredibly powerful way of bringing a product, brand or company to life and really positioning features, benefits and personality that can’t be conveyed using static media.

But, companies need to avoid gimmicks if they are to be seen as credible. The post offers five ideas for developing engaging video and offers five examples of businesses that have used them.

SmartInsights is fast becoming a ‘go-to’ digital marketing resource for marketers and business owners at every level of digital confidence. 50,000 unique visitors hit the website every month, 10,000 are subscribed to the weekly email newsletter, 1,650 follow on Facebook, 1,200 are members of the Linkedin group and 2,400 follow via Twitter. Bookmark the site now sign up for the weekly email by clicking through here.

Why email still matters in b2b marketing

My second post as b2b digital marketing expert commentator has gone live at SmartInsights.

 

Email may well be in terminal decline with the next generation of business professionals more likely to rely on SMS and social network messaging if recent research is to believed.

Yet, most B2B companies still use email-based newsletters as a primary way of attempting to communicate with and engaging customers and prospects.

Find out how you can still make email work for your business by clicking through.

SmartInsights is fast becoming a ‘go-to’ digital marketing resource for marketers and business owners at every level of digital confidence. 50,000 unique visitors hit the website every month, 10,000 are subscribed to the weekly email newsletter, 1,650 follow on Facebook, 1,200 are members of the Linkedin group and 2,400 follow via Twitter. Bookmark the site now sign up for the weekly email by clicking through here.

4 reasons to consider outsourcing (some) of your b2b social media activities

Committing to any form of outsourcing in simplistic terms means you have to pay for a service. Yet Social Media Examiner’s 2011 survey found that over 72% of marketers still retain in-house control of social media campaigns.

So why consider outsourcing some elements of your social media activity when the whole point is supposed to be about personal engagement of prospects and customers and the creation of deeper relationships?

By paying for external support with your social media you will have to:

1. PLAN: Outline what you want to achieve to a third party which means you will have to provide a written brief detailing what you want social media to do for your business.

2. GOALS: Set objectives that will give you something to frame your activity within, to work towards and to evaluate your success against.

3. ROI: Deciding how success is going to be measured helps to quantify what the return on investment your management can expect to see.

4. CREATIVE: You may not have the creative spark (the big idea), technical expertise (to translate dry product information into high impact lead generating content) or in-house resource to develop a relevant and durable social media campaign.

Going through the process of explaining what you plan to do opens up your plans to scrutiny, which brings clarity. And whilst bringing in the experts naturally creates an additional cost,  managed well, you may just execute sharper, focused more creative and more relevant social media campaigns as a result.

Image: Tom Fishburne

Links worth a click #5

There have been some really interesting reads online.

Here is my pick from the last week, we 24 June 2011.

SOCIAL MEDIA:  Mashable offered up an interesting ‘Behind the Scenes’ on 8 Innovative Social Media Campaigns. My personal favourite is The Voice because it is a new take on reality contest TV and was perfect for social media.

B2B: I particularly liked the advice on keeping your mind on ‘next action’ as a driver on what and how to present in Social Media B2B’s post on How to Create Great B2B Presentations

FACEBOOK: Australia’s finest, Jeff Bullas has pulled together an overview of 5 creative Facebook pages. I was initially surprised in scrolling through to find games, movies, cars and lingerie, but hey it is Facebook!

SEO COPY: The ever useful Marketing Profs site published a handy little guide on writing with SEO in mind. Their Five Tips for Writing Content That Keeps Pace With B2B Searches included titbits such as staying aware and staying relevant.

BLOGGING: If you need to get your CEO on board with your social media thinking, here is a useful post designed to get them involved in the blog side of things.

Now, a three way tie for content of the week:

EBOOKS: First off Hubspot’s How to Write and Launch an Ebook That Generates Leads. Staggeringly useful.

INFOGRAPHICS: Secondly, a must try: Infographics are all the rage right now if you have a dataset you want to present in an innovative way. Here are 5 tools to help turn data into infographics.

WEBSITES: Finally, from Econsultancy, and just to make most of you feel your age, just look at how some of the UK’s top e-commerce sites have changed in the past five years (or in some cases not changed).

Hope you see something you like. More next week.

B2B content marketing trends

The search for greater clarity and return from our marketing means we have to constantly strive to predict the evolving needs of customers. Knowing what causes customers distress and what makes them happy is criticial.

To aid us in our quest, Holger Schulze has put together some interesting data from surveys of his b2b technology marketers community. With insights into the rationale, the challenges, the formats and the channels, this is worth looking at it if you are looking to generate incoming leads through inbound marketing techniques.

Look out for some surprises in relation to the most used / popular formats and how companies choose to position their content – it might inform and even re-direct some of your activity.

It’s another example of a great Slideshare in action. Quick to browse, usable free information collated by experts, if you haven’t tried it yet, check out my fledgling efforts here. Sign up as there will be more following soon.

But, do you really need another million?

Marketers often bemoan the fact that they don’t have enough money to implement the marketing campaigns they would like. None more than in b2b sectors.

It’s true that we always want more money for our marketing budget, but if it was given to you right now, what would you do with it?

No, really, what would you do with it? Invest in more telesales people, more disruption advertising, more PR, more direct mail to convince that niche audience to transact with you? Larger exhibition stands, a rebrand, ‘social media’? Some focus groups? How about a promotion with lots of giveaways? There’s an abundance of choice.

But, rather than bemoan the fact you never have enough, why not prove it?

As  a way of expressing value and return to a sceptical management team, you might think creatively the next time you submit a budget. For one, don’t wait till the day they ask you. Do it early. Shows initiative and preparedness.

And don’t work within the budget assigned, triple it. Show the outputs and outcomes that will be achieved. Then half it (and the outputs and outcomes), and then half it again. At each stage, illustrate the opportunities lost, the products in the range left unsupported, the sectors left unengaged.

Review where the leads come from. Critically assess the things you do year in, year out and ask why you’re doing them? It’s no surprise that advertising and trade shows are commonly the first things cut from marketing plans. Expensive and arguably self absorbed.

Asking for more money is just cheap.

Searching for the SEO pot of gold

In a recent B2B Marketing magazine article (Feb 2011, Best Practice) SEO experts in the b2b marketing sector mused on the forthcoming changes in this space. Here I lay out the essence of what they said and discuss why I agree and disagree with some of it.

Mobile, undeniably, is the growth area. Smart phone use in particular (which asa device is slated to outstrip the computer in providing Internet access by 2013), is growing at phenomenal rates. Companies need to reconcile the importance of search to business customers in tandem with understanding how search is conducted differently ‘on the go’.

Google Instant Preview, was slated as the biggest change in search, completing search strings when browsers entered terms. I’m not sure. Doesn’t this take more time and need more clicks, just like when predicative texting was first introduced?

The main point about Social Search focused on how the recent tie up between Facebook and Bing could mean more search activity takes place within Facebook meaning more people stay within the site longer. Though important, social media optimisation is more than just Facebook based.

Sitemaps are undeniably crucial in directing visitors to relevant web content, and their role is growing as more rich content is used by website owners. And having greater visibility over incoming and outgoing social media links will make them more relevant.

New generic top level domains like .eco .sport and .music are going to fuel a goldrush scramble by existing domain registrants to secure the new variants that might impact on their business. Whether they will become mainstream remains to be seen.

Local focus will continue to grow in 2011 as the various geolocation services incorporate offers, benefits and other time sensitive and loyalty affirming promotions. Google already returns local searches, integrating mapping functionality. Ensuring your business is correctly indexed with Google Places, Yell, FreeIndex and other online directories is key to this, but often overlooked.

But without giving marketers to0 much to think about, I’d also add the following to the mix as critical in 2011.

Long tail search involving the use of longer, more specific phrases rather than overused, but increasingly generic single word terms garner more targeted results. Each of the main search engines has a keyword tool which can be used to inform your SEO efforts. Use them. And check them regularly.

Links are still strong currency, and it is an important strategy to build a credible bank of incoming links from related and high traffic sites to boost your own visibility and overall search rank. Linked to social media, it makes sense, in this respect to create profiles with back links to your website to support this.

Integration remains central to any and all marketing effort. Only when all your marketing activities are joined up, pointing in the same direction, formed around the same messages and using a consistent vocabulary can truly effective SEO have the right conditions in which to thrive. Remember that the visitor who has arrived at your site through search has probably been influenced by advertising, direct marketing, email, a trade show, editorial, a forum posting or other reference elsewhere online OR offline.

Interestingly, the article also made no mention of multi language SEO and regional domain hosting, presumably because no b2b companies operate abroad…but that is a point for another day!

B2B marketers, do you have Klout on Twitter?

Klout, is apparently the barometer for measuring influence across online social networks. It is becoming more important to b2b marketers migrating more activity online as it offers a way of validating that activity and create an ROI metric.

If you use Hootsuite to operate your Twitter account, you might have noticed it appeared several months ago, without much fanfare. But don’t be fooled, it drives the thinking of lots of social networkers and you should be aware of it.

The debate has raged as to how the score (anything from 1 to 100) is calculated, what it draws on and ultimately how relevant it is.

On the How we Measure page, Klout talks about True Reach, Amplification, Probability and Network Score. In essence, this relates to how often your tweets are clicked, commented on and retweeted.

To me, measuring on this basis and giving a comparitive score makes sense, but isn’t it simply skewed in favour of Twitter accounts with very large followings? And if you don’t get involved in conversations on Twitter – instead preferring to use email, the phone or face-to-face techniques – your score is heavily reduced.

My own case illustrates this. I’m a pretty active Twitter user. I use it to broadcast new blog posts from The Marketing Assassin, and BDB.  I also share a lot of interesting content I source from the web and other Twitter users and this is often taken up by other users. And I indulge in some conversations too. I’ve built my following steadily and resist automation. I roughly have the same number of followers as I follow and am well into the thousands.

My Klout score for a long time was 5 (out of 100) which to me, just didn’t stack up. Consequently, I paid little interest in Klout. Then a few weeks back it jumped to 48. I didn’t change my level or type of activity so it leaves me thinking is it really relevant.

I’m not convinced but I do credit the people behind it for trying to create a metric to determine social networking value. It does after all suck up time, and especially in the professional b2b space, time is money.

What’s your take /experience on Klout?

Image: Social Fresh