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Mobile search volume is growing exponentially.  In 2009, there were around a billion monthly searches being made from mobile devices.  

Today, that number has more than doubled to 2.3 billion, and analysts predict there will nearly 3.5 billion mobile searches per month by 2012.

Already, 80% of mobile searchers research their purchasing decisions within a 10 to 20 mile radius of their location.

And if you think the future of the mobile web is going to be all about apps, think again.  

The #1 access method for local information is the mobile web browser, with nearly 21 million users per month. But with the use of maps and apps on rise for mobile search, and growing importance of mobile as a channel, where will tomorrow’s mobile search war be fought, who will be the winners and where are the opportunities for disruption?    

In this episode, Rich Devine (@richdevine) of ZAAZ, a design, optimization and analytics agency discusses:

How is mobile search different from web search.Mobile site search and social optimizationThe difference between mobile local and hyperlocal searchHow universal search impacts SEO strategyOptimizing for Yelp filtering criteriaFord’s mobile search strategy

In the second part in our two part series on Mobile Search, we’ll talk about how to optimize different pages on the same site for different locations, the benefits and drawbacks of mobile sites vs. custom apps and how to monetize more than just e-commerce transactions.

Mobile search volume is growing exponentially. In 2009, there were around a billion monthly searches being made from mobile devices. Today, that number has more than doubled to 2.3 billion, and analysts predict there will nearly 3.5 billion mobile searches per month by 2012.

Already, 80% of mobile searchers research their purchasing decisions within a 10 to 20 mile radius of their location.

And if you think the future of the mobile web is going to be all about apps, think again. The #1 access method for local information is the mobile web browser, with nearly 21 million users per month.

But with the use of maps and apps on rise for mobile search, and growing importance of mobile as a channel, where will tomorrow’s mobile search war be fought, who will be the winners and where are the opportunities for disruption?

In this episode, Rich Devine (@richdevine) of ZAAZ, a design, optimization and analytics agency discusses:

How is mobile search different from web search.

Mobile site search and social optimization

The difference between mobile local and hyperlocal search

How universal search impacts SEO strategy

Optimizing for Yelp filtering criteria

Ford’s mobile search strategy

In the second part in our two part series on Mobile Search, we’ll talk about how to optimize different pages on the same site for different locations, the benefits and drawbacks of mobile sites vs. custom apps and how to monetize more than just e-commerce transactions.

Upcoming Epsiodes:

Mobile Search Strategy with Rich Devine of ZAAZ

When to Facebook, Tweet, Email Market and Blog with Dan Zarrella of HubSpot

Community Management Deep Dive with Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable

Subscribe:

iTunes

Twitter

Facebook

Other Recommended Episodes:

Private Social Networking for Business

B2B SEO Strategies and Tactics

SEO Tools and Tips with Danny Sullivan

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About the Podcaster:

Eric Schwartzman (@EricSchwartzman) provides social marketing services, social marketing research and social media training to businesses, government agencies and nonprofits. He over 15 years experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs. He has served Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, Toyota, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, US Embassy to Rome, United States Marine Corps and many other small to medium-sized companies and agencies. Eric is also the instructor behind top-rated social media training seminars and the Social Media Boot Camp which are offered monthly in the US and abroad. Visit the social media training calendar for upcoming dates.

Social marketing research and social media analytics have become essential tools for companies seeking to identify issues and correct misperceptions in real time and globally. Reputation management on global scale requires a combination of social media monitoring software (complex Boolean search strings) and well-trained humans to catch nuances in each local community. Online issues management and sentiment analysis may depend on instant analysis of Twitter conversations around keywords, but human common sense is needed to gauge gradations of, for example, sarcasm as companies fashion their responses and engagements.

Social networking research tools represent the latest evolution in the offering of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, a descendant of the historically impactful Factiva media monitoring service, according to Martin Murtland, vice president and managing director of Solutions for Communications Professionals at Dow Jones Enterprise Media. Dow Jones today offers a suite of high-tech, customizable analysis function, including social media monitoring

Issues management is also nothing new for Cindy Droog (@cindydroog), APR, senior public relations specialist in Corporate Communications at Amway, a Dow Jones client using its services to field an ongoing reputation study in 19 markets per quarter. Amway, along with other direct sales giants like Avon and Mary Kay, have long battled against misperceptions, including that they are akin to illegal pyramid schemes. What has changed is that Amway now instantly learns of negative conversations in the fifty countries it does business in, and engages with factual arguments in hopes of changing minds in a public forum. They also have learned the value of going beyond reaching out to “influencers” with 1,000 followers in Twitter to engaging those with ten followers, if they think they can win that person over.

Cindy and Martin sat down with “On the Record…Online” in DC at the PRSA International Conference.

Show Notes:

2:41 Media monitoring is just the first of four product elements built by Dow Jones for marketing and PR customers that fall under the acronym MADE (for communications success). M is for media monitoring (Factiva tradition), A for analysis (Dow Jones Insight, listening platform covers social media research and analysis), d for discover (research-on-demand services for issue discovery) and E for engagement via internal communications (a newsletter publishing platform called Editorial Workbench) and external communications (Dow Jones Media Relations Manager, a news-enabled media contact database).

4:39 Reputation management forms the core of Dow Jones’ value to its client Amway, which uses the Dow Jones product suite to run a reputation study based on real-time conversations in Russia, China, Japan and Germany. Social media strategy for the company is then shaped by observation of the human-technology mix and culture in each market.

5:54 Web 2.0 research now represents a main method by which Amway achieves opinion mining in the search for brand misperceptions. As the “grandfather” of direct selling, Amway and its PR function are continually grappling with the traditional misperception that the company represents a “pyramid scheme.” The later phrase continues to represent a central keyword in Amway/Dow Jones complex searches along with strategic qualifiers.

7:23 Sentiment analysis efforts must be efficient to be valuable, a fact that has required Dow Jones technologies to become ever better judges of relevancy. Without combining the technology with real people in each country, especially as a company seeks to listen to conversations in several languages, true relevancy cannot be measured. Google Translate and Tweetdeck’s translation tools have value for a topline read, but nuances will be caught by native speakers, Droog says. Social media engagement at Amway is shaped by its decision to empower affiliate PR staff within each market. In Russia, for instance, this approach has helped the company to temper its response to posts with negative, attention-grabbing headlines, but that then go on to praise the company.

8:54 Social medial monitoring achieves relevancy incorporating human intelligence, even within the tech-driven Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. The company tailors each analysis program based on in-depth client conversations, analyst review of a clients’ business objectives, key issues, competitors and markets to determine what they want to measure and why. Text mining technology is then brought to bear as analysts create complex Boolean search strings in the native languages to catch local nuances. Media monitoring packages are then put through a quality assurance processes in Dow Jones labs, and finally, field tested by the client. Even then, quarterly updates often swap out search ideas, and situations call for on-the-fly searches.

10:46 Rich text analytics, when automated, can achieve no greater than 60 percent accuracy in terms of determining sentiment, according to some industry sources (see January 29, 2010, podcast featuring Converseon CEO Rob Key). Murtland agrees, but argues that automated analysis is good for is determining broad themes within sentiment and for identifying the highly positive or negative. Dow Jones helps clients improve on those results with services that let clients take and score their own random sample sets, or that enlist Dow Jones to do so when precision is a must.

14:25 Social media influence measurement is an emerging field, and Dow Jones is tinkering with how to help it mature, says Murtland. Influence measurement tools like Klout.com represent a good first step for the industry, but Dow Jones hopes to soon offer tools that navigate tricky questions like whether or the most chatty social media users are the most influential (mentions data from “E-labs.” Could not find). Under way in Dow Jones labs are efforts to incorporate context into measurement of a blogger’s influence, and to arrive at better measures of an outlet’s combined online and offline influence.

16:00 Social marketing research helps Amway make the most of its human capital, says Droog. The company began its social media analysis effort with the goal of unearthing global trends, but found it was more important to identify local trends. Social media communities form locally, and most effective conversations are held by real people sharing their passion in each market. Amway was able to steer some local reps away from one-way, declarative marketing messages (we are the best in the world) toward statements more likely to start conversations.

17:46 Social media policy and related training are among the biggest opportunities, and challenges for the companies. When effective, both elements can empower a local sales force, but policies crafted at corporate headquarters often do not translate perfectly for 50 local operations. As a result, Amway has moved toward “trans-creation” of training and policy, working with local offices to shape local versions.

18:50 Social media listening is the future of customer service, according a recent blog post by Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst at blog called Web Strategist. Companies will find clients with the problems and solve them long before they call customer service. Amway now fields joint PR/customer service teams that huddle to deal with problems in each market. What has changed is that the teams must solve within minutes customer service problems that they used to have days to think about.

20:23 Social media analysis tools enable Dow Jones’ clients to reduce signal-to-noise ratios in client monitoring efforts. This helps them to spot potential risks and opportunities more quickly, with algorithms that catch, not just keywords, but also temporal spikes in their use, and in context.

23:58 Social media monitoring and analytics are only useful in real time, which makes latency of information a serious challenge for companies like Dow Jones. Murtland’s team speeds things up by using algorithms that decide on which information should be processed at what speed. A...

Social marketing research, social media monitoring social media analytics have become essential tools for companies seeking to identify issues and correct misperceptions in real time. 

Reputation management on global scale requires a combination of social media monitoring software and human intelligence.

Online issues management and sentiment analysis may depend on instant analysis of Twitter conversations around keywords, but human common sense is needed to interpret emotion, sarcasm and slang.  

Social networking research tools represent the latest evolution in the offering of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group (@DowJonesInsight), a descendant of Factiva media monitoring service, according to Martin Murtland, vice president and managing director of Solutions for Communications Professionals at Dow Jones Enterprise Media. 

Dow Jones today offers a suite of high-tech, customizable analysis function, including social media monitoring   Issues management is also nothing new for Cindy Droog (@cindydroog), APR, senior public relations specialist in Corporate Communications at Amway (@Amway) a Dow Jones client using its services to field an ongoing reputation study in 19 markets per quarter. Amway, along with other direct sales giants like Avon and Mary Kay, have long battled against misperceptions, including that they are akin to illegal pyramid schemes.

What has changed is that Amway now instantly learns of negative conversations in the fifty countries it does business in, and engages with factual arguments in hopes of changing minds in a public forum. They also have learned the value of going beyond reaching out to “influencers” with 1,000 followers in Twitter to engaging those with ten followers, if they think they can win that person over. Cindy and Martin sat down with us in DC at the PRSA International Conference.    

Show Notes:  

2:41 Media monitoring is just the first of four product elements built by Dow Jones for marketing and PR customers that fall under the acronym MADE (for communications success).  M is for media monitoring (Factiva tradition), A for analysis (Dow Jones Insight, listening platform covers social media research and analysis), d for discover (research-on-demand services for issue discovery) and E for engagement via internal communications (a newsletter publishing platform called Editorial Workbench) and external communications (Dow Jones Media Relations Manager, a news-enabled media contact database).  

4:39 Reputation management forms the core of Dow Jones’ value to its client Amway, which uses the Dow Jones product suite to run a reputation study based on real-time conversations in Russia, China, Japan and Germany. Social media strategy for the company is then shaped by observation of the human-technology mix and culture in each market.  

5:54 Web 2.0 research now represents a main method by which Amway achieves opinion mining in the search for brand misperceptions. As the “grandfather” of direct selling, Amway and its PR function are continually grappling with the traditional misperception that the company represents a “pyramid scheme.” The later phrase continues to represent a central keyword in Amway/Dow Jones complex searches along with strategic qualifiers.   

7:23 Sentiment analysis efforts must be efficient to be valuable, a fact that has required Dow Jones technologies to become ever better judges of relevancy.  Without combining the technology with real people in each country, especially as a company seeks to listen to conversations in several languages, true relevancy cannot be measured. Google Translate and Tweetdeck’s translation tools have value for a topline read, but nuances will be caught by native speakers,...

I know what you’re thinking. Private social networking is a stupid idea. Be open. Right? But there are plenty of situations where private social networking actually makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Think about it. Today, we use activity streams on social networks for marketing, sales and customer service. But there’s nothing private about Facebook. How can businesses social network privately?

In his keynote at Dell’s B2B Social Media Huddle in London last month, Brian Solis said that he never shares information that gives him a competitive edge.

So what do you do if you want to use activity streams for collaborating with your coworkers and share proprietary information? Email is great for person to person communications, but it’s a lousy collaboration tool. Is there a safe way to build your own, private social network? Google Wave was an early attempt at private social networking, but it was before its time.

Salesforce.com introduced Chatter, its exclusive social networking service as an extension of its SaaS CRM platform 2010. And in February 201, it made its private social networking service free.

To listeners of this podcast, it will come as no surprise that access to a safe activity stream in a private social network behind a firewall can bring new efficiencies and added productivity to the workplace. In this epsiode Robin Daniels, (@robin_daniels) VP of Product Marketing, Chatter talks to us about:

The results of their latest customer survey

28% fewer meetings

32% less email

50% said they could find information faster

Why Google aborted Wave

The Salesforce Chatter Community Etiquette Guide

Overcoming internal adoption challenges

How Chatter protects customers against hackers

How Chatter compares to SharePoint

Seesmic integration for easier engagement and an open question to Loic LeMuer

Chatter’s biggest weakness

This episode on private social networking advances a previous conversation we had with Chris Messina of Google on activity streams. If you’re interested in this topic, the epsiode with Chris is a must listen.

Upcoming:

Mobile Search Strategy with Rich Devine of ZAAZ

When to Facebook, Tweet, Email Market and Blog with Dan Zarrella of HubSpot

Community Management Deep Dive with Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable

Subscribe Now:

iTunes

Twitter

Facebook

Recommended Episodes:

B2B Social Media Podcast - Epsiode 8

Activity Streams Will Change Your Business

The Coca-Cola Company is Tweeting Smiles

About the Podcaster:

Eric Schwartzman @EricSchwartzman provides social marketing services, social marketing research and social media training to businesses, government agencies and nonprofits. He over 15 years experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs. He has served Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, Toyota, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, US Embassy to Rome, United States Marine Corps and many other small to medium-sized companies and agencies. Eric is also the instructor behind top-rated social media training seminars and the Social Media Boot Camp which are offered monthly in the US and abroad. Visit the social media training calendar for upcoming dates.

I know what you’re thinking.  Private social networks for internal communications are stupid.  

Be open.  Right?

But there are plenty of situations where internal social networks actually makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Think about it.  

Today, we use activity streams on social networks for marketing, sales and customer service.  

But there’s nothing private about Facebook, and if you could social network with your coworkers and business partners privately, you could do more with less.

But how do businesses social network privately?

How do you get your own private Facebook?

In his keynote at Dell’s B2B Social Media Huddle in London last month, Brian Solis said that he never shares information that gives him a competitive edge.  

So what do you do if you want to use activity streams for collaborating with your coworkers and share proprietary information?  Email is great for person to person communications, but it’s a lousy collaboration tool.  

Is there a safe way to build your own, private social network?  

Google Wave was an early (now defunct) attempt at private social networking, but it was before its time.

Salesforce.com introduced Chatter, its exclusive social networking service as an extension of its SaaS CRM platform.  It made its private social networking service free.

To listeners of this podcast, it will come as no surprise that access to a safe activity stream in a private social network behind a firewall can bring new efficiencies and added productivity to the workplace.

In this epsiode Robin Daniels, (@robin_daniels) VP of Product Marketing, Chatter talks about...

The results of their latest customer survey 28% fewer meetings32% less email50% said they could find information faster Why Google aborted WaveThe Salesforce Chatter Community Etiquette GuideOvercoming internal adoption challengesHow Chatter protects customers against hackersHow Chatter compares to SharePointSeesmic integration for easier engagement and an open question to Loic LeMeurChatter’s biggest weakness

This episode on private social networking advances a previous conversation we had with Chris Messina of Google on activity streams. If you’re interested in this topic, the episode with Chris is a must listen.

Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

B2B social media items discussed: Are social Q&A services worth your time, searching tweets by Linkedin profile data and how SXSW used social sync to make registration data useful.

Our guest panelists are Jim Cahill (@JimCahill), Chief Blogger and Head of Social Media for the Process Group of Emerson (@EmersonProcess) and Vidya Shivkumar (@thelenticular) Director, Product Management @Janrain, a user management platform for the social web.

We welcome your comments, criticism and feedback. Please send email with attachments of 5MB or less to [email protected]

Post a comment to our show page at iTunes.

In this Episode:

Facebook Questions relaunched in limited public beta Will this service be LinkedIn or Yahoo Answers? Is it a threat/alternative to LinkedIn, which as made Q&A a strong point?

Blog Post by Monique Neely (@inspiredmomma) on using Linkedin Signals for finding and analyzing tweets by industry, company and time frame.

The Future of the Web is Data by Ben Parr: http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/reid-hoffman-data/

B2B Social Media Lead Generation Explained

What’s new at Emerson? What’s new at Janrain?

B2B Social Media Keynote at the Digital Impact, May 5-6 in NYC

Upcoming B2B Social Media Boot Camp on May 16th in Chicago

Previous B2B Social Media Podcast Episodes:

B2B Social Media Podcast #6

B2B Social Media Podcast #5

B2B Social Media Podcast #4

About the Podcast

You’ve been listening to the B2B Social Media Podcast by Eric Schwartzman and Paul Gillin, co-authors of Social Marketing to the Business Customer -- the first book devoted entirely to B2B social media marketing -- discuss developments in and best practices for marketing to business customers online.

Post a comment to our show page at iTunes.

Join our community at www.b2bsocialmediabook.com and send comments to [email protected].

About our Guests

Jim Cahill is the Chief Blogger and Head of Social Media for Emerson’s Process Management business. His blog, Emerson Process Experts, now 5 years old, connects the experts of Emerson with process automation professionals around the globe. His blog was honored by being named BtoB magazine's Best Corporate Blog for 2010.

His 20+ year Emerson career spans sales support, product application specialist, alliance manager, product manager, marketing communications manager, and now social media leader. He has a University of Texas at Austin BSEE and University of New Orleans MBA and began his career as a Systems Engineer for Conoco responsible for their offshore oil & gas platforms.

Vidya Shivkumar runs product management and product marketing for Janrain. She has launched SaaS based products such as email encryption and device reputation based fraud management to the B2B segment. Prior to that, she spent 7+ years at AOL working on AOL's web search based offerings as well as launching Safety & Security Products to the online consumer.

About the Podcasters

Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman are coauthors of the book "Social Marketing to the Business Customer" about B2B social media marketing is available atAmazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Eric Schwartzman @EricSchwartzman provides online social media training, social media strategy and social media policy governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.

His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.

Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media and emerging treads training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.

Paul Gillin (@pgillin) of Paul Gillin Communications. Paul was founding editor-in-chief of TechTarget, one of the most successful technology media entities to emerge on the Internet. Before that, he was editor-in-chief and executive editor of the technology weekly Computerworld for 15 years.

He wrote The New Influencers, Secrets of Social Media Marketing and the Joy of Geocaching.

Paul writes a regular column for BtoB magazine and contributes to various blogs and online publications. He’s also a Research Fellow and a member of the advisory board of the Society for New Communications Research.

B2B social media items discussed:  Are social Q&A services worth your time, searching tweets by Linkedin profile data and how SXSW used social sync to make registration data useful.  

Our guest panelists are Jim Cahill (@JimCahill), Chief Blogger and Head of Social Media for the Process Group of Emerson (@EmersonProcess) and Vidya Shivkumar (@thelenticular) Director, Product Management @Janrain, a user management platform for the social web. We welcome your comments, criticism and feedback. Post a comment to our show page at iTunes.

In this Episode:

Facebook Questions relaunched in limited public beta Will this service be LinkedIn or Yahoo Answers? Is it a threat/alternative to LinkedIn, which as made Q&A a strong point?Blog Post by Monique Neely (@inspiredmomma) on using Linkedin Signals for finding and analyzing tweets by industry, company and time frame.The Future of the Web is Data by Ben Parr B2B Social Media Lead Generation ExplainedWhat’s new at Emerson? What’s new at Janrain? B2B Social Media Keynote at the Digital Impact, May 5-6 in NYCUpcoming B2B Social Media Boot Camp on May 16th in Chicago

Linkedin launches news crowdsourced aggregation service, Forrester predicts B2B spending to rise nearly 6.7% in 2011 and Chrysler’s reaction to a mistaken tweet with guest panelists Jeff Cohen (@jeffreylcohen) of SocialMediaB2B.com and Rick Short (@rickshort21) of Indium Corp. and its constellation of bloggers.

Discussion Items:

* Linkedin Launches a Social Aggregated News Service using its strength in professional profiling of its members. Are the opinions of other professionals more valuable than those of your immediate social circle? We don’t think so, but we’re nevertheless impressed with the longtail targeting of LinkedIn Today’s subtopics.

* B2B Marketing Budgets will Increase 6.7% in 2011 according to research by Forrester principal analyst Jeff Ernst (@jeffernst). Really? No one on the panel can quite believe this number based on their experience. Rick notes that industry averages are almost meaningless these days, since marketing budgets are so focused on micro-categories.

* Chrysler fired its social media agency over a misdirected, tweet with the “f” word in it by an employee at the carmaker’s agency New Media Strategies. Our panel discusses the company’s reaction and New Media Strategies public affairs person Lyndsey Medsker’s (@lmedsker) response

Previous B2B Social Media Podcast Episodes:

* B2B Social Media Podcast #5

* B2B Social Media Podcast #4

* B2B Social Media Podcast #3

About the Podcast

You’ve been listening to the B2B Social Media Podcast by Eric Schwartzman and Paul Gillin, co-authors of Social Marketing to the Business Customer -- the first book devoted entirely to B2B social media marketing -- discuss developments in and best practices for marketing to business customers online.

Join our community at www.b2bsocialmediabook.com and send comments to [email protected].

About the Podcasters

Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman are coauthors of the book "Social Marketing to the Business Customer" about B2B social media marketing is available atAmazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Eric Schwartzman @EricSchwartzman provides online social media training, social media strategy and social media policy governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.

His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.

Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media and emerging treads training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.

Paul Gillin (@pgillin) of Paul Gillin Communications. Paul was founding editor-in-chief of TechTarget, one of the most successful technology media entities to emerge on the Internet. Before that, he was editor-in-chief and executive editor of the technology weekly Computerworld for 15 years.

He wrote The New Influencers, Secrets of Social Media Marketing and the Joy of Geocaching.

Paul writes a regular column for BtoB magazine and contributes to various blogs and online publications. He’s also a Research Fellow and a member of the advisory board of the Society for New Communications Research.

Linkedin launches crowdsourced news aggregation service, Forrester predicts B2B spending to rise 6.7% in 2011 and Chrysler’s reaction to a mistaken tweet with guest panelists Jeff Cohen (@jeffreylcohen) of Social Media B2B and Rick Short (@rickshort21) of Indium Corp. and its constellation of bloggers.  

B2B Discussion Items:

Linkedin Launches a Social Aggregated News Service using its strength in professional profiling of its members. Are the opinions of other professionals more valuable than those of your immediate social circle? We don’t think so, but we’re nevertheless impressed with the longtail targeting of LinkedIn Today’s subtopics. B2B Marketing Budgets will Increase 6.7% in 2011 according to research by Forrester principal analyst Jeff Ernst (@jeffernst). Really? No one on the panel can quite believe this number based on their experience. Rick notes that industry averages are almost meaningless these days, since marketing budgets are so focused on micro-categories. Chrysler fired its social media agency over a misdirected, tweet with the “f” word in it by an employee at the carmaker’s agency New Media Strategies. Our panel discusses the company’s reaction and New Media Strategies public affairs person Lyndsey Medsker’s (@lmedsker) response