FIR Podcast Network

Glassdoor.com is the second most-used social network among Fortune 500 companies, according to the latest University of Massachusetts annual study of this elite group. Number one is LinkedIn, which is used by 93 percent of the companies analyzed. Following Glassdoor.com are Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Blogging is down year-over-year, probably reflecting the greater number of platforms – including LinkedIn – that can now be used for that purpose. Given that Glassdoor is used by employees to rate their bosses and employers – as well as to exchange salary information – this is a decidedly mixed bag for big companies.

The desktop still reigns supreme as the most important touch point for customer experience, according to a survey by Econsultancy and Adobe. PCs are followed closely by mobile devices in their importance to the customer experience, however, dramatizing the speed with which mobility has gone mainstream for marketers. Overall, the survey shows strong performance by digital platforms and weakening interest in traditional customer relationship vehicles like trade shows and direct marketing.

Special guest Chris Dalton believes B2B companies should be investing big in e-commerce – even if most of their current sales come over the phone or face-to-face. Amazon is placing some big bets on B2B markets, and failure to understand changes in audience buying patterns could be fatal, he says.

Chris has a natural bias in this area since he’s CEO of Salesforce.com partner CloudCraze, which sells an e-commerce platform for B2B companies. But he also has extensive experience in digital marketing, having previously started and later sold a big agency in Chicago. Hear his forecast of the coming B2B e-commerce wave in our interview.

Follow Chris on Twitter @cjdalton.

Forrester Research’s newly published report, “Valuable Message Development for B2B Marketing in the Context of Sales Enablement,” doesn’t have much good news for B2B marketers. Among its findings are that 65 percent of business decision makers agree that much of the information provided to them by B2B companies is useless, and 63 percent of IT decision-makers say they typically scan documents and throw them in the trash.

Report author Peter O’Neill, who is Forrester’s research director for B2B marketing, says the results aren’t surprising. The buying landscape has changed completely, with buyers doing much more of their primary research online before they ever talked with vendor. In fact, the job of the B2B sales and marketing professional is increasingly to help the buyer make a decision rather than to sell a product.

The transformed buying process is making long-held concepts like the sales funnel and the lead obsolete, O’Neill says in our interview. Forrester is proposing a new nine-part messaging framework that B2B buyers can use to help focus on buyer’s needs. Content needs to be aligned much more closely to stages in the buying cycle, and sales and marketing professionals need to put aside past rivalries and partner on a consistent approach to the customer.

Follow Peter O’Neill on Twitter.

News & Trends

A former hedge fund manager-turned-pharmaceutical executive buys the rights to a prescription drug, hikes the price 55-fold and then publicly mocks on Twitter people who call him out for his actions. What lessons does this teach about executive behavior in social media?

Search engine optimization and customer relationship management dive in projected importance among B2B marketers, while marketing automation and predictive analytics surge. Is search really losing its mojo, or is this just a case of the latest buzzwords catching on? Our hosts debate the issue of whether social networks are diminishing the value of search and check in on what predictive analytics really is.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau just held its first-ever Podcast Upfront, which Fortune called “an advertising extravaganza for the emerging podcast industry.” The success of Serial, along with spot sensations like President Obama’s appearance on Mark Maron’s podcast has got some people wondering if podcasting is about to break into the big time. Our hosts think the motivations, and revenue models, of podcasters will keep the medium intimate.

News & Trends

LinkedIn is launching a new series showcasing the best young thought leaders on its site. LinknedIn says the authors will include 150 professionals – all under 35 years of age – who are creating innovative ways to tackle problems and establishing themselves as future leaders. In effect, it’s a crowdsourced digital magazine, the content of which costs LinkedIn nothing. They pay the writers in recognition, social capital and potential business. It’s a brilliant example of how the value of a strong professional community can be extended in new ways.

EMarketer now predicts that mobile ad spending will comprise a majority of digital ad spending this year and will own 70% of the digital ad market by 2019. Do you need any further evidence of the importance of this channel to marketers? Even if you don’t see mobile being a major component of your programs anytime soon, you need to follow your customers around to see how they’re using mobile devices professionally so that you can find where opportunities may lie.

Virtual reality (VR) is close to becoming a mainstream sales tool, writes David Kirkpatrick on MarketingDive, and B2Bs should take note. There are many ways VR can be used in the buying cycle, everything from showing meeting planners potential conference space to co-designing factories in three dimensions with manufacturing engineers. The cost of equipment is reaching the tipping point, which means first movers could get a significant edge.

Special Guest: Jim Cahill, Emerson Process Experts

Jim Cahill launched the Emerson Process Experts blog in 2006, when there were barely one million people blogging and most of them were writing about entertainment, politics and food. The Emerson blog was something different: it featured tightly focused, no-nonsense content from process control engineers about issues that mattered to them. Customers and prospects loved it.

Nine years and thousands of updates later, Emerson Process Experts draws more than 25,000 visitors per month and yields a steady stream of leads. Subject-matter experts are so tuned into its value that Cahill says he no longer has to recruit contributors. Emerson is active on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare and other places thanks to the success of its social media efforts. And Jim Cahill remains a modest and grateful former engineer who just likes to share good material.

Follow Jim Cahill on Twitter.

Is your content marketing strategy actually undermining your ability to present a consistent message to your customer? A recent post on the Content Standard suggests it does. Author Ted Karczewski says too many B2B organizations take a siloed approach to content marketing, failing to communicate between different business units and thus presenting a fragmented image to the outside world. They’d be better off simply buying ads, he says. We think he has a point.

General Electric continues to experiment with new media. We applaud the company for its new #DroneWeek campaign, which not only tests Periscope, but also shows the potential of drones to change our perspective on the way businesses operate.

It’s time for B2B marketers to get serious about mobile. Marketers may have so far dismissed Snapchat and WhatsApp as being the domain of teenagers, but these platforms have unique value that can’t be overlooked. They are the fastest-growing apps on the Internet; can B2B marketers afford to ignore them? Viber is one mobile platform that’s specifically targeting B2B. With half of all Web traffic now coming from mobile devices, we think more are in the wings.

MarketingProfs has a great infographic that draws comparisons between the way Netflix presents content and the way B2B marketers probably ought to. Our hosts don’t fully agree that the analogy holds, but they do concur that giving customers a way to consume information any way they want and at any time is a desirable goal. Are you tagging your content to make it easy to organize? That’s table stakes.