Social selling – get on the bus or be flattened by it

If you think “social selling” is just the latest marketing buzzword, then spend a half hour checking out the websites of the startups covered on TechCrunch on VentureBeat each day. Every one of these dynamic young technology firms, which are raising millions of dollars in venture capital funding, has one or more blogs and multiple social network accounts. This at a time when the most recent research by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth finds that blogging among the Fortune 500 is actually on the decline. What these growing companies understand that many big corporations apparently don’t is that the terms of engagement wit…

25 B2B Marketers Sound Off on 2016 Priorities

I was delighted when B2B Marketing Zone – a website and newsletter that I devour - asked me to be one of 25 contributors to its "B2B Marketing Trends for 2016" e-book. I love this content concept, and it’s an idea more B2B marketers could adopt. Contact influencers in your market – or even your own customers or subject matter experts – and ask them for short paragraphs on a topic, then combine that content into an e-book. Then do what Tom Pick and Tony Karrer of B2B Marketing Zone did – make it easy for people to compose posts like this one and share the book through their social networks. Your contributors will be flattered …

Are your employees doing your brand more harm than good?

If you’re a savvy marketing leader, you’re already implementing or thinking about implementing an employee advocacy program.  Employee advocacy is a popular topic with B2C and B2B marketers these days. It should be. But are your employees doing more harm than good? What is employee advocacy? Employee advocacy is not a new concept however the name and the tools to implement it are relatively new. Employee advocacy is empowering your employees to extend your brand’s reach to their network. Not so complicated, right? And thanks to social media and platforms like Dynamic Signal’s, employees can quickly and easily share corporate-appr…

Up Periscope!

by Victoria Bianchini, September 22, 2015  When Periscope burst onto the surface, it quickly captured the attention of technology pundits and early adopters across the globe. Live streaming video is not a new technology, but putting the ability in the palm of your hand is a powerful proposition. Still, plenty of people stood back and waited to see how it would be used. Travel brands were some of the first to take us along for the ride and now you can find organizations like the National Forest Foundation, the Weather Channel and the Delaware Tourism Bureau adding real time video to their media mix, calling viewers to tune in with the now …

The Klout Challenge

by Robin Scharpf, September 15, 2015 I do not believe your Klout score matters.  I’ve been coaching B2B executives to build social media skills and habits for seven years. My team at Profitecture has coached over 4,000 B2B professionals. To date, there are no instances where a Klout score positively or negatively affected a B2B professional’s success with social media. But yet, Klout is still around. It launched in 2008 and Klout scores still appear on Twitter profiles when viewed in HootSuite. I no longer see scores on profiles viewed in Twitter, but then I haven’t looked too hard for them. You see, I believe influence and socia…

The Ideal LinkedIn Profile: Tips and Suggestions

by Catherine Cameron-Heldt There is no doubt as to the power of LinkedIn for professionals. But, doubt does arise when people put together a LinkedIn profile for the first time or those who are in our class and want to make their profiles “active”. So what makes a LinkedIn profile strong? Here are just a couple of tips and suggestions: Profile Picture: One of the first things people see is your picture. We’re visual people. It’s essential you have a professional picture on your profile. Research again and again demonstrates that a profile picture legitimacy and confidence. Vennli reports that your profile is 7x more likely to b…

Yes, you can, too, publish on LinkedIn

In 2014 LinkedIn opened its formerly exclusive publishing platform to everyone.  On your homepage you might have noticed the button “Publish a post”.  This creates an exciting new opportunity to broaden the audience for your content, with very little downside. Content posted on LinkedIn is automatically shared with your connections and visible to everyone.  LinkedIn’s built-in sharing features also make it easy for others to recommend your stuff to their networks on LinkedIn and elsewhere. If you already contribute to a blog on a regular basis, consider cross-posting the content to LinkedIn.  Vary headlines to measure impact,…

Instagram for Business to Business

By Catherine Cameron-Heldt, first appeared December 2014 You’ve heard the phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’.  Now-a-days, a picture is worth a thousand clicks, or at least we hope so! Instagram is a tool, an app really, that allows B2B an additional resource to capture the user’s attention as well as build an additional social network. Let’s break it down into three areas. Photo Sharing: All you need is your phone (Droid or IOS) and the app to take pictures and add filters and frames -- if you would like.  These pictures can then be easily posted directly to your company or personal Instagram account from your p…

Getting Started with Twitshot

Increasing engagement through your Twitter account is always a plus. And there is no better way to help get your tweets noticed than by adding a photo. Today we are going to talk about an easy way to attach a photo to your tweets using a very simple application called TwitShot. What is TwitShot? This is an online and mobile application that connects to your Twitter account that allows you to attach a photo easily to your tweet. The app takes photos from the article you’re posting, or from a direct URL for an image. There is also an option for uploading photos from your own computer to attach to the Tweet. Why Should I Use TwitShot? Pla…

Meerkat for Business-to-Business

Hundreds of new applications are released on a daily basis, which makes it hard to keep up with them all, but for our students at Profitecture we want to highlight one app in particular that has the potential to add gasoline to your social media fire and let you engage on an entirely new level. And that application is called MeerKat. What is MeerKat? Meerkat is a mobile application that lets you stream videos on Twitter in real time. That means you can capture and present videos in real time versus taking a video and uploading it from your device. The only downside is that it’s not recorded and cannot be viewed again later. However,any…