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?

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.
  

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 past year, I have noticed that a lot of marketing scientists appreciate to openly discuss their field of research with marketing practicioners -- many of them even mention they want a more intense collaboration with the business arena for the sake of their own research. Vice versa, discussing marketing topics with scientists is often an eye-opening and knowledge deepening experience to me, and I hear similar voices from many colleagues. So far for the good news.

Welcome to the third edition of B2B Marketing Carnival. New submissions remain welcome and I’ll post a new digest once in a while (approximately monthly). As long as contributions are related to business marketing, meet a minimum standard (language, novelty) and do not use abrasive language, they’re likely to be included. A few fringe topics may be listed in the ‘other topics’ section. Use at your own discretion.

This month, the carnival received 39 submissions, but management practice, productivity, network marketing, franchises, SEO, home business, personal relationships or graphic design are not business marketing subjects. 75% off-topic submissions is a bit much. So again, only contributions related to industrial or business marketing please. For definitions, see b2bridge.

Also, I'd be interested for candidates to host the 4th edition of the carnival early November. Please contact me.

We all appreciate the power of social media, i.e. the use of collective intelligence to come up with a good approximation of 'the truth'.

And the successes are there. Wikipedia, a flagship of the social media, has the experts running out of their ivory towers or else become irrelevant. Certainly, information is becoming more open and democratic, which is not a bad thing.

But sometimes social media fail spectacularly. For example, take digg. I've entered the term for my field (electricity), and organised the search for the most popular articles (i.e. the most dugg), only to be amazed by the result:

"There are 93.8 million blogs worldwide," says SEO-PR president and co-founder Greg Jarboe. "Getting excited about getting a blog is like getting excited when the phone book arrives."

Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR

Above priceless quote comes from Jason Miller's post in WebProNews on 10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog. While I've grown a bit weary on top 10 posts, this one can be interesting if you're ready to make the step from 'accomplished blogger' to 'advanced blogger'.

Welcome to the second edition of B2B Marketing Carnival. New submissions remain welcome and I’ll post a new digest once in a while. As long as contributions are related to business marketing, meet a minimum standard (language, novelty) and do not use abrasive language, they’re likely to be included. A few fringe topics are listed in the ‘other topics’ section. Use at your own discretion.

The second edition was planned for mid September, but since submissions are coming in quite fast, I moved it forward. Again, the second edition is likely to introduce a few blogs that would otherwise not easily come on your radar.

An attention area is the number of off-topic submissions. This time, I could only post 16 out of 30 contributions, and even 6 of these are borderline relevant. So bloggers, only contributions related to industrial or business marketing please. For definitions, see the b2bridge topic 'Business or consumer marketing'.