B2B Twitterer of the Year

December 30, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

B2B Twitterer of the Year

The Marketing Consigliere saw that there was too much ado about Robert Scoble asking people to suggest a “Twitterer of the Year,” and came up with his own idea.  He Googled “B2B Twitterer of the Year” and nothing came up, so he felt obliged to take the initiative to honor a business-to-business company that had shown leadership in use of Twitter.

Earlier this month, Paul Dunay did a great job today assembling a list of brands that tweet in his Buzz Marketing blog, but he missed the one that the Marketing Consigliere has selected.  So have many of the “leaders” of the social networking, blogging, and micro-blogging world.  Have they been interviewed by Scoble?  No.  Covered by TechCrunch?  Of course not.  Blogged about by Jeremiah Owyang?  No.  Mentioned by Guy Kawasaki?  No.

Why did so many people miss out on this company.  Is it “sexy?”  No.  Do they have a silly name consisting of a color and a noun (i.e., OrangeMagnet) or an “invented” 2.0 name (i.e., Kwibango)?  No.   A Web-based product or service? No.  They don’t tweet every day.  They don’t follow many Twitterers, and they don’t have many followers.  So who could this company be and who is the Marketing Consigliere that he can pronounce this?  Well, first the honoree.

United Linen and Uniform Services

United Linen & Uniform Services of Bartlesville, Oklahoma is a 72-year old family run business with 120 employees and 20 more across Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas.  The company cleans 15 million pounds of laundry every year, from uniforms to napkins and welcome mats.  You can follow them @UnitedLinen.  They also have a blog and a Facebook fan page.

They were chosen as “B2B Twitterer of the Year” because it is not a popularity contest.  It’s a recognition of a company that has seized a concept and applied it to their world.  It’s not about being the “bon vivant” of the digital crowd, it’s about trying new things to grow a business and foster dialog with customers.

The technologies that the Marketing Consigliere passionately blogs about are not only for those firms in Boston, Austin, New York, Washington, DC, Seattle, and the Bay Area with a young employee base; they are for anyone that wants to better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon marketing data.  That includes companies that do what others consider to be mundane.  Like cleaning laundry.

So who does the Marketing Consigliere think he is that he can proclaim a B2B Twitterer of the Year and steal some of the thunder from the popular boys?  This award has nothing to do with the number of followers or the “coolness” of your product or facility. He just thinks he’s a nice Italian boy who happens to like to sit in Italian restaurants with clean tablecloths and napkins, for one thing.  And he likes to see net-centric marketing technology used by all, including SMBs in the heartland, not just those who live in the “bleeding edge” space.  Giving an award like this to a tech company is like letting someone hit a home run from third base…. And besides, no one else took the initative, so the “die is cast.”

Congratulations to United Linen & Uniform Services of Bartlesville, Oklahoma for being the 2008 B2B Twitterer of the Year!  And thanks to Scott Townsend, United Linen’s Marketing Director, for helping his company become more network-centric!

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, Blogging, Leadership, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing, SMB Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

While Leads were Converting Last Week

December 29, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

Last week was very busy for most businesses due to the abbreviated work week, and a noteworthly announcement announcement seems to have been missed by many of the major marketing trade rags.

On December 22, Eloqua announced that their Conversion Suite has passed a Type I Statement of Auditing Standards (SAS) 70 audit.

Eloqua

When an auditor assesses the internal controls of a service organization, they use SAS 70 standards as criteria.  Audits are important to client companies that use outsourcing services which impact their control of processes and data.  The type of report issued, a Type I report, states the auditor’s opinion on the accuracy of Eloqua’s description of   controls that are operating within their applications and the fitness of control design to accomplish the stated control objectives.

Eloqua also mentioned that their applications are hosted at MCI (now part of Verizon), a SAS 70 Type II facility- A Type II is similar to a Type I report, but also includes the auditor’s opinion on whether the specific controls were operating effectively during the review period.  The Marketing Consigliere performed a traceroute to verify this and smiled when he saw his ping go all the way to Ashburn, Virginia, into a datacenter which was once part of UUNet before the telecom consolidation and dot-com implosion.

Congrats to Eloqua for making this step toward maturity and management of their brand; and thank you for providing B2B companies with a higher level of datawarehousing and security.

The Marketing Consigliere has always thought highly of Eloqua but has one question for CEO Joe Payne:  Who was the auditor?

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, Brand Management, Datawarehousing & Security, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Too Many "Gurus" Who Don't Know the Basics

December 26, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

Although it was a long time ago, the Marketing Consigliere went through too much pain and suffering in business school to tolerate all the social media “gurus” who think they are marketing experts just that because they rank highly on Twitter charts or shave their head like some Seth Godin wanna-be.  Heaven forbid that overwhelmed, desperate Marketing professionals should listen to them or even pay them out of their dwindling marketing budget.

Because of his grueling ordeal of getting an MBA, when the Marketing Consigliere hears a “guru” refer to an early adopter, he slightly cringes because most people do not properly understand the Diffusion of Innovation as first modeled by Everett Rogers.

If there are 4 to 5 million Twitter users (both followers and followees) worldwide (Hubspot), and there are over 1.4 billion Internet users worldwide (internetworldstats.com), then only 0.36% of Internet users are Twitter users.

Diffusion of Innovation curve

While this is not the best exercise in statistics, there’s a point here. According to the Diffusion of Innovation model, Twitter is still in the Innovators stage of adoption, not Early Adopters.  While one may argue that “respectable opinion leader” users, which are characteristic of Early Adopters, are indeed using Twitter, the number shows where we are in the model – Twitter is still in an innovation stage.  And because so many Innovators are following other Innovators, and most of these innovators haven’t truly been “disciplined” marketers from an academic or even practical sense, they mistakenly think more people are using Twitter and also mistakenly label themselves as Early Adopters.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a technology still being in the Innovators stage.  However, it’s important for professional “working stiff” Marketers to know when they’re dealing with charlatans who love to tell you how early adopting and wonderful they are.  So if your “rock star” social media consultant keeps referring to Early Adopters and hasn’t done the math, you might be dealing with one of them.

Oh, and the Marketing Consigliere does not think he is a marketing guru because he earned an MBA with a concentration in Industrial Marketing (that was before the phrase “B2B” was coined).  For the record, his diploma is still in its mailer tube after almost 20 years.   He’s not a guru at all – he is a humble consigliere - an advisor.

Filed Under: Leadership, Marketing, Social Networking Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Gloria in Excelcis Venditor

December 25, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

Earthrise from Apollo 8

It was 40 years ago that the above photograph was taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman.  That picture helped soothe a world that saw a lot of turmoil that year and made a lasting impression on a young Italian-American boy.  Looking back as a man now older than those brave astronauts were when they took their perilous journey into the unknown, the Marketing Consigliere realizes how risky their endeavor was and gives them his highest respect; their leadership shall not be forgotten.

Although he never made it into the NASA ranks, he found himself always trying to learn new things and eventually found himself on the leading edge of a revolution in commercial technology.   Compared to the technology that kept those brave young men alive in the darkness of space, these new technologies are so far advanced and are allowing businesses and people to connect in ways never dreamed of, not even by rocket scientists.

As this tumultuous year draws to a close, the Marketing Consigliere wishes you all safety, happiness, and joy.  Remember to think positive, dare to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and embrace the network centric marketing technologies that will help deliver what consumers and businesses need in 2009.  This is a great time to be a Marketer.  Hopefully more young people will be inspired by today’s technology and choose careers that serve others in a multitude of ways, including through the path of Net-Centric Marketing.

Filed Under: Leadership, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

A Network-Centric Stocking Stuffer

December 23, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

Santa comes to the mall once a year (although he does get there earlier than he used to).  This year, when you bring your children to see him, imagine that after the photos are taken, you don’t need to get the hard copy right away or even wait for them to be emailed.  They’re on a photo sharing site where all your loved ones can enjoy them.

Now Santa is not on his usual North Pole LAN, but that doesn’t matter.  The photographer has an SD card that is special – it’s the Anniversary Edition SD Card by Eye-Fi.  This card is compatible with cameras designated for SDHC and uploads files directly to flickr, Facebook, Kodak Gallery, photobucket, shutterfly, TypePad, and many other photo sharing sites.  It even uploads to Wal*Mart’s Digital Photo Center and Costco.com.

Eye-Fi 4Gb SD Card

Now, this perfect world scenario does depend on WiFi access for the photographer in the mall, which can be problemmatic.  However, Wi-Fi is still a growing phenomenom and the Marketing Consigliere sees this as quite feasible by next holiday season.  Clearly, this mobility is great for B2C type of happenings, and can facilitate lead generation and social networking adoption.  Additionally, there is a B2B angle for this.

PropertyPreviews.com allows Eye-Fi card users to upload real estate photos and videos to specific sites.  This can be used for commercial as well as residential real estate.  While the network-centric capability for photographers already exists with either the manual effort of using a cable to hook a camera up to a PC or just inserting the camera’s memory card, a wireless capability such as this will most likely proliferate along with more WiFi networks, growing memory, and increasing battery life.

Filed Under: B2C Marketing, Demand Generation, Mobile Marketing, Social Networking Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Happy Birthday, CAN-SPAM

December 22, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

CAN-SPAM

Last week the 5th Anniversary of the CAN-SPAM Act passed by with little fanfare.  To date, there been a handful of notorius spammers brought to court and successfully prosecuted under the act.  This year there was an interesting service of justice when Sanford Wallace, the self-dubbed “Spam King” was fined along with a partner for $230 million to MySpace for using malware and promoting gambling and pornography to MySpace users.

Network-Centric Marketers who are naturally above these bottom feeders have generally known to respect the email boxes of consumers.  No major brand or corporation has been successfully sued for violation of the act; for the most part, the corporate marketers know they can still send an initial unsolicited email to a prospect as long as there is a mechanism in the email for the prospect to opt-out. Campaign management has not been hindered by CAN-SPAM and neither has lead generation – SEO/SEM and other tools have allowed marketers to keep the potential deals flowing in.

But has CAN-SPAM really been effective?  The Marketing Consigliere gets relatively little spam compared to other people he knows, but the topics are generally familiar to most of us – porn, pills, degrees, and somewhat peculiar to the mix are watches.  The sidewalk hawkers of yesterday trying to dump knockoffs on pedestrians now seem to be sending daily reminders on getting Rolex and TAG/Heuer watches at a discount.

Do you think CAN-SPAM has worked or should the Feds come down even harder?

Filed Under: Campaign Management, Demand Generation, Email Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing, Search/SEO/SEM Tagged With: , , , ,
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