As marketers, finding yourself behind the competition is the last place you want to be. When it comes to social media, corporate marketers no longer have an excuse for being the last to know. Today, not being up to speed on the latest news or trends in your respective industry gives your competition an edge.

There’s a lot of great content written about our respective industries every day that’s worth passing along to readers, who may not follow the same resources (websites, bloggers or industry influencers) that you do. This creates an opportunity to leverage your corporate blog as a communication channel that others can turn to to get the latest buzz and educate themselves on important industry topics. Doing so helps build thought leadership for your organization, a key objective for any corporate blog.

But merely passing along information is not enough. To build credibility, your content needs to be topical, engaging, innovative and timely. Another critical part of all this is becoming part of the 24/7 social media mix, adding to the ongoing conversation by providing your perspective on the day’s top stories.

As bloggers, it can be difficult producing enough fresh marketing content every day. The best way to become part of the mix is to blog or comment on other news stories out there. Linking to other articles won’t increase your SEO, but attributing or linking to high-profiled stories can put you on the radar of the websites or blogs you link to, as well as help generate more traffic to your website. When you come across a relevant article, here are a few ideas you might consider that can get your blog in the social media mix:

• Provide unique experiences or cite examples that support the story’s content
• Publish internal stats, survey, etc. that support or challenge industry trends
• Tie your corporate message or recent announcements with timely stories
• Expand on specific points or ideas within the article

As marketers, we should always have our creative marketing caps on. The key to creating fresh content is keeping up with the latest buzz and industry trends, providing our perspective on how we can take ideas to the next level. Because, in the end, the last scenario you want is your CEO asking you about some article or industry trend that you’ve never even heard of. As marketers, being the last to know always makes for an awkward situation.

If this is indeed the case, what can we learn from publishers that will help us become better brand marketers? Well, here’s a few thoughts.

Write to your audience: Any niche magazine knows its audience. They know their interests (which is essential for attracting advertisers), they know industry trends and their readers’ problems and concerns. Instead of touting their products and services, publishers produce and deliver content that caters to the specific needs of their audience, not their own.

Provide meaningful content they can use: Part of the reason people subscribe to magazines or industry journals is to educate themselves and gain deeper knowledge from experts about a particular subject. The same applies to someone researching information online. In most instances, they want to keep up with industry trends and hear what credible experts have to say about the problems they’re dealing with and available solutions.

Think like an editor: My partner at Mindlink Marketing, Scott Olson, wrote an excellent article entitled, “Need sales leads, think like an editor,” that highlights key strategies for leveraging social media for lead nurturing. The bottom line is delivering interesting, relevant content not only establishes a connection with your readers who remember you when they are ready to purchase, but builds your brand in the eyes of consumers.

So, whether you’re blogging, tweeting, advertising, refreshing your corporate website, or pushing new, downloadable content in the form of webinars, whitepapers or case studies, brand marketing is becoming more and more about publishing. Heck, even the oldest marketing activity — word-of-mouth communications — has gone viral. As I wrote in a previous blog, “How social media enhances the customer experience,” social media allows marketers to establish their brand, build stronger relationships with their customers, and immediately fan out the flames when disgruntled customers express their opinions across Twitter, Facebook, or some other online social community.

This is why brands are getting serious about becoming media companies, which according to Pulizzi’s article, is the direction many leading marketing experts believe content marketing is headed in 2011.

The challenge for every content writer is to communicate in a way that is as natural as talking to someone in the same room. While the subject matter is important, the tone on how you deliver your message plays a critical role in connecting with your audience. For example, with email there’s no affirmation to emotionally support what you are trying to say. The wrong tone, or even lack of tone, can distance yourself from your readers. Here are a few things you should think about when drafting your next email.

• Bring energy to your written voice. If your copy lacks energy or is too stern, you’ll turn off your readers. To avoid sounding indifferent, keep your voice active and choose your words carefully. Remember that every positive and negative word impacts your audience one way or another. The tone you set for yourself is directly expressed through the words you select.
• Understand your audience. While you may know all the right buzz words that attract your audience, knowing what tone motivates them is equally as important when communicating online. Because we are often too busy crafting the perfect message, it’s always a good idea to step back to make sure you’ve included the right adjectives to support what you are trying to communicate. Collective pronouns such as “we” or “us” also connect you with your audience, creating a tone that you both share the same experiences.
• A positive tone is always the best motivator. People are motivated by positive reinforcement. For example, thanking someone for their time or expressing your appreciation for them keeps the conversation insightful, upbeat, and adds more personality to your writing voice. Pay attention to your non-verbal communications such as punctuation, capitalization, and font size.
• Keep the content and tone consistent. Staying on message is critical to any communication. Keeping the right tone that is consistent with the message should also be treated with the same consideration. The wrong phrase or comment can quickly spoil a well written email. Without a consistent tone, there is too much potential for miscommunication.

Social media is all about initiating conversations and building relationships. Because many writing platforms lack one of the most basic elements of communication in body language, the challenge for copywriters is to balance the right words with the right tone that is most effective with your audience.

Catchy headline: With the average screen time just a few seconds, you have to connect with the customer fast. That means the headline alone can make or break an opportunity. Keeping your headline or subject line simple and catchy is critical to getting your reader to take the next step.

Break it down: Remember that drop-dead gorgeous guy or girl you once saw across the room and when you started talking to them you couldn’t get away fast enough? Listen, as marketers we’re always tempted to tell the world everything we do and how we solve all of their problems. But for customers, it’s simply too much to digest in one sitting. Stick with a few strong key points or messages that can lead them in the direction you want them to go.

Appropriate length: As I mentioned earlier, while you might catch their attention with a clever headline, keeping their interest all the way through is another challenge. There is no set rule for how long blogs, LinkedIn or Facebook posts need to be, but keeping it concise is always something to keep in mind. Highlighting your key points using bullets or simple illustrations can also help deliver your message quickly, so they can take the next step you ask them to (see Call to Action).

Using the right tools: While I can spend another blog discussing this one, the tools you use to connect with your customers are critical. You don’t want to walk into a Red Sox Nation convention wearing a Yankee cap, right? Understanding where your target audience is, where they are doing their research, the online social communities they’re in, these are all critical pieces of information you need to find out to make sure you’re investing your valuable time with the right social media tools.

Always have a Call to Action: This simple marketing rule has been around forever, and for good reason. Customers won’t take action unless you tell them what to do. Make sure your call to action is seamless, such as a single click directly to the webpage you want them to go to. That only takes a few seconds, which is never out of the question when you’ve got your reader engaged.

As an online B2B marketer, social media is merely the tool you’re using to connect with customers and keep them engaged. The goal is to move them along to bigger and better places such as your website, or even better, your office. Figuring out the most effective tools to reach out to your customers and market to them is essential to achieving your social media objectives. I’d love to hear any tips you have for developing quick and effective messaging in your social media campaigns.

Guiltily holding your hand up? You’re not alone, but it is pretty well established that this approach no longer work. Playing the numbers game of less than 1% response on marketing outreach to unknown contacts doesn’t have a future.

Social media and the decline of traditional media have changed the marketing discipline forever. Broadcasting marketing messages to a vast population who may or may not care is a marketing formula for failure. It is more important than ever to tailor your outreach and messages to connect to people who care.

Tailoring your marketing to be interesting and relevant to the people who receive it will both increase its effectiveness and build relationships with your company’s customers, prospects, and contacts. This often difficult task can be made easier by utilizing social media to identify, listen to, and connect with the true fans of your company, your peers or competitors, and your industry as a whole.

Seth Godin, one of today’s most recognizable marketing visionaries, wrote about this on his blog titled “The circles (no more strangers).” In this blog he states “one true fan is worth perhaps 10,000 times as much as a stranger.”

If this is true, how do you know who your true fans are? How do you effectively market to them? What do they care about? Following are some suggestions of how you can use social media to guide a true fan marketing strategy.

Identify the right fans – The first step is simply understanding and knowing who your true fans are. True fans aren’t necessarily people who are evangelists of your company. They could be proponents of the broader category of technology that you sell or could even be fans of your competitors. Use social media to identify people online who have something to say about you, your competitors or your industry and follow them. Twitter is an ideal medium for identifying fans, but you can also identify relevant blogs, Facebook fans and LinkedIn group participants who will add to your list. If you could create a list of the 1,000 people who cared most about your industry and who influenced others, what would it be worth to you?

Listen to your fans – Once you have identified and followed the fans of your company and your industry, listen to them. Establish a process for regularly watching the trending topics of the people who care about your space.

Fish your pond, not the ocean – If all you are fishing for is fresh water trout, why are you looking for them in the ocean? Search is an extremely important component of your marketing strategy, but it isn’t precise. Google and other search engines require you to be highly specific in your search terms otherwise you are flooded with irrelevant data. Wouldn’t it be nice to refine search to the output from your true fans? Create a data feed from your fans outputs and then use search more effectively on broader terms. As someone who has worked in the security industry, looking at a Twitter feed of anyone who mentions “security” isn’t that useful. There is simply too much data. If I could search on that same term from the 1,000 people who care about my space, everything changes.

Engage with your fans – Once you know who your fans are and what they are talking about, you can more effectively interact with them. Reply to their tweets, comment on their blogs, or generate your own content that addresses an emerging topic that your fan base is talking about. All of this will serve to strengthen the connections to your closer community.

Market to your fans – Your true fan marketing list should be one of your most valuable marketing assets. As you establish these contacts your marketing promotions can become that much more effective and viral. Your fans should be at the top of mind when you do any of the following things:

• Solicit product feedback
• Launch a product
• Promote an event
• Publish a whitepaper
• Host a webinar or online forum

Give your fans the tools to market for you – The whole point of marketing to your fans is that they have reach and influence that you simply won’t be able to achieve. Generate promotional items and marketing content that your fan list can get behind, promote to their own network and evangelize on your behalf. Your pipeline growth from these efforts will be of a much higher quality and allow your sales team to be much more productive with their interactions.

Many companies spend an enormous amount of time and energy focusing on how to grow their contact database and marketing to that list. You need to spend time understanding who your fans are and using them to increase the quality of that list and the effective use of your limited resources.

In the 24/7 communications age we live in, everybody’s receiving too much information, too fast. As a B2B marketer, if you think you’re busy pushing information out there, imagine how little time a CEO or senior manager spends reading emails each day, particularly marketing emails. Their demanding schedules pretty much dictate how they communicate with others.

To successfully get on somebody’s radar, you first need to understand how they prefer to communicate and receive information. Whether you’re reaching out to your customers via email, IM, Twitter, a monthly newsletter, a webinar invite, or a simple old-fashion phone call (imagine that!), understanding the most effective way to reach your target audience is a critical step to building a closer relationship with your prospects and customers, and sets the stage for delivering great marketing content that actually gets read.

Understanding the differences in how your targeted CXOs, senior management, and IT managers communicate and receive information can help make your marketing efforts more efficient, and ultimately, generate better results. Once you’ve successfully figured that out, and the attention is on you, that’s when your awesome marketing content can shine.

1. New rules of thought leadership marketing.
2. Careful planning key to keeping sales lead’s attention over time.
3. 5 hints for maximizing drip marketing results.
4. Don’t just produce web content; think it.
5. 5 common content marketing challenges – and simple solutions.

1. Treat leads like customers to build lasting relationships.

2. Lead generation is not lead nurturing.

3. Staying in front of customers requires a drip marketing plan.

4. For marketing success, ignore the many and focus on the few.

5. Use social media to develop quality connections.

My first thought was to use my iPhone. I figured that there had to be an easy way to do it. After much searching, I came across the Recorder app by Retronyms. I bought it and tested it out and the quality seemed good. Unfortunately, when it came time to do the interview, the quality was so poor that my interviewee couldn’t understand me and I had to do the interview the old fashion way, just taking notes. I’m not sure if it was a bad connection through the Recorder app or the iPhone, but my suspicion was that it was the app because the call before and after on my iPhone was fine.

Following that experience I looked further and came across what I am using today RecordiaPro. This is an application that allows you to place a call from any phone, including a land line, and it gives you a dial tone to place a now recorded call. The quality is excellent and the output is available in an MP3 immediately. Simply connect to the site download the MP3 and get to editing the output. I have used this three times now with great success.

For the resulting MP3 file I am currently using iTunes as a rudimentary tool for cropping and exporting the output. When you select the resulting file in iTunes you can use “Get info” to set the beginning and end times for the file to eliminate the call setup conversation and limit it to the interview itself. Once you have done this, you can go to the Advanced menu to “Create an AAC” version that is cropped as you specified. Of course you can also use more sophisticated audio editing tools, but this worked fine for me.

My next problem was transcription. The first interview I did was about 15 minutes long, but it took me over an hour and a half to transcribe it with my modest typing skills. I did some searching and came across an excellent post on audio transcriptions using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Andy Baio does a fantastic job of walking you through a step by step posting of an audio transcription job. I used iTunes again for splitting the MP3 into 5 minute blocks using the start time and end time technique I mentioned above. I have used this twice now and I am hooked. I was able to transcribe a 12 minute interview for less than $10 total and got the results in less than two hours.

Interviews are great content additions to your website or blog and using the right tools makes it even easier.

The question was also directed at whether it was better to try to promote and build a following for company representatives as thought leaders, or whether it was more important to publish regular rich content that supported sales objectives. The answer to the question isn’t the same for every company.

Developing a following for your blog with significant link-backs, tweets, and comments can be valuable but is also a challenge. It requires that you invest in a full time person who’s primary responsibility is evangelizing your company, market and approaches to solving the problems in the industry you serve. I have rarely seen this done effectively by someone who holds a full time role in the company. The reason for this is that building a significant following requires full time attention, significant content, and ideally is complimented by speaking engagements and other public facing communication.

A famous example of someone who filled this role is Robert Scoble when he became the poster child of corporate blogging at Microsoft. The keys to his success aren’t easily duplicated.

• First, he worked for the industry giant Microsoft. His initial influence was significantly bolstered by writing for one of the largest companies in the world about their products and addressing users questions directly. He invited feedback and even published his mobile phone number at one point.
• Second, he was free to criticize Microsoft and be fully independent. At Microsoft this served to humanize the company and connect users to a company that could be seen as technical and aloof. This level of freedom doesn’t always work to a smaller company’s advantage when they don’t have the market clout of Microsoft.
• Third, this was his main responsibility. Scoble’s title was technical evangelist and he made it a point to indicate his freedom and independence when it came to posting on his blog. The following is quoted from his old blog:

“Robert Scoble works at Microsoft (title: technical evangelist). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.”

At smaller companies, this role can often be filled by a founder who is the visionary and chief evangelist for the company naturally, but they don’t always have the time or talents to fill this role, or they are occupied with another executive position. At the end of the day, because of the independence required to be successful at this, the blog can often become more valuable to the blogger than the company as evidenced when they ultimately leave as Scoble did after less than two years at Microsoft. If you start down this path, ensure that the blog supports the thought leadership at your company and team in general, not just the individual.

Because of these and other considerations, for most companies a blog is best used to develop rich and regular content in support of your sales objectives. In this case you don’t measure your success by comments or link backs, but rather by web traffic, search results and sales support.

Today’s individual typically doesn’t read an individual blog or news publication religiously. This is why so many papers and other periodicals are failing. Search, email and social media drives users to the content the ultimately consume through links to a specific article of interest. The key is ensuring that your company will be found when a prospect is looking for a solution to a problem you address.

If your company engages in blogging at a minimum of 1-2 times per week about topics relevant to the industry you serve, you will quickly find that the top search results for your key web terms will often point to blog entries. If you want to get the best results for your business keep the following items in mind:

• Publish regularly – You need to publish a blog entry at least once or twice per week in order to get the most impact. If your blog posting frequency starts to approach one blog every two months or so, your blog can begin to have negative returns as it will appear to be inactive and may not reflect well on your business.
• Keep SEO in mind – Blogs should cover topics that your prospects will be searching for. Clever topics are nice, but blog titles that match a prospects frequent search terms are even better.
• Take the time for a quality post – This should go without saying, but your posts need to reflect well on your company. Take the time to share a unique insight or your perspective on a recent news item that will be of interest once your visitor is reading your post. Low quality repurposing of data sheets or other blatant marketing materials won’t have full impact.
• Publicize your blog – Search is great, but you should also give your blog airtime through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, on your website, and in any drip marketing like a newsletter. Blogs are fantastic tool for advancing a point of view that supports your sales team and lays traps for the competition.

Blogs are a tremendous tool for corporations to develop and deliver regular content to their ideal prospects. Whether you have the right makeup to support a blog with