B2Bridge

Thanks to Jon and Joe, we now have 2 'ultimate lists' of business marketing blogs, which complement each other very nicely.

Many of you will already know Jon Miller (Marketo)'s big list of b2b marketing blogs. With its recent addition of 50, it lists 138 b2b blogs. But best of all, Jon also offers an up-to-date OPML file allowing you to subscribe to this list in your reader with a few clicks.

Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs | Modern B2B Marketing Blog | Marketo
50 New B2B Marketing Blogs | Modern B2B Marketing Blog | Marketo

Another year’s gone, and the time-sheets are processed. Hereby a few benchmarks for the blogs we run at Leonardo ENERGY.

The length of our posts varies between 100 and 500 words, and takes us between 0.5 and 6 hours, depending on the amount of fact checking needed (as well as insight checking) and how straightforward it is to structure the story. Taking a median of 2 hours per post and 2 weekly posts consumes half a day per week for content.

As a general rule I believe that an external blog that is bound by a "corporate message" and a "corporate tone-of-voice" is a dead blog. The nature of a blog is close to that of a real life conversation. Professional people want to talk with professional people, real people of flesh and blood that radiate competence, not ready-made messages. Real people are less one-dimensional, more subtle, less easy to see through, less easy to laugh at.

The blogger is the message

So a blogger should not be told to express a corporate message, he should be your corporate message. Instead of picking out some assistant that happens to have some time and moulding her/him to the wishes of Corporate Communications, a better idea would be to choose a blogger that you can give free play in all confidence. And if you can’t find people like that in your organisation, my advice would be to forget about starting an external blog. But if that is the case, who do you send to your clients?

About one year has passed since Jan Lagast sketched the first lines of B2bridge. I will not call it a real first anniversary yet, because B2bridge wasn’t online until December 2006. But I think it’s already a good occasion for a little reflection. Our website is beginning to fill up: new topics, an image gallery, a directory with publications, associations, web sites, and so on (which reminds me that I urgently have to continue adding content to these lists). An increasing number of users are finding their way to B2bridge too.
But this doesn’t mean we are there. Not at all...

B2Bridge aims to connect business marketeers. Which other web communities do you use to ask questions and have online discussions?

• MarketingProfs.com has a forum. It targets USA, and focusses on B2C, and is active on a daily basis.
• An internet search yields the link b2bhub.org, which appears promising. Unfortunately, activity level appears very low.
• Facebook, Orkut and Xing all have marketing discussion groups. But most do not cover business marketing, or target professionals.
• The closest I can find to match the needs for the business marketing professional is LinkedIn Answers.
  

Suppose you are looking for the sales arguments for a new technological innovation. Maybe you want to organize a brainstorm session with a couple of commercial people from within your company, and let creativity boost. Even without having a customer attend the brainstorm, you can find a lot of arguments that trigger the attention of customers. On condition, that is, you ask the right question to begin with.

Welcome to the November edition of this carnival. This month, we've received 56 contributions demonstrating the breadth and depth of our topic. Fourty of these are presented below in 6 themes:

• Market intelligence, knowledge management, surveys, networking, ... All business marketing starts from what you know, and who you know. (2 contributions)
• Production, i.e. converting intelligence in collateral materials to support marketing and sales campaigns. (1 contribution)
• Marketing & Communications (including media relations and public relations) (13 contributions)
• Sales & after-sales support (18 contributions)
• Impact appraisal, usual return on investment, but not always (1 contribution)
• Other topics (5 contributions)

This time round, I would appreciate some feedback on this carnival. What expectations do you have? What themes would you like to see covered more? What other themes need to be included?

Issue #5 of the carnival is planned for early December. Contributions welcome from now.

The 3C pricing model suggests that defining the right price is a difficult balancing exercice that uses three main references.

• Cost - cost shows the minimal price, i.e. if you want to be profitable. Cost can be a tough one to calculate though, since cost can depend on scale of production, effiiciency of production, etc.
• Customer - the value perceived in the eyes of the customer. The more value one adds to the customer, the higher one could price its offering. Value-based pricing aims at this reference, and is seen as both difficult to calculate and difficult to sell/obtain.
• Competition - the price the customer could obtain from the competitor sets a reference framework in the industry. This reference framework obliges a higher price to correspond to a higher value. Lower price is always easier to sell, but then there is value given away.