B2B Social Media

So your boss thinks social media for business is hokum?

By Bhaskar Sarma 3 Comments

To be fair to your boss, she might be right 2 times out of 10. But it’s more likely that social media is going to benefit your marketing goals if you have a well thought out strategy.

So how do you convince your boss that social media can get more leads, drive sales, cut costs and build relationships with your customers?

First, some data.

63.7% of US Internet users are regulars on some sort of a social network (Emarketer, February 2011)
Worldwide, on an average, users spent the highest amount of time online (4.6 hours/week) on social networks. (TNS October 2010)
Social media grabbed the highest percentage of leads (74%) when pitted against other emerging lead generation channels like virtual events (Unisfair, May 2010)
57% of SMBs say that social media has been beneficial for their business (Ad-ology Research, November 2010)
LinkedIn generates the highest conversions (61%) for B2B marketers (Hubspot State of Inbound Marketing 2011)

Filed Under: B2B Social Media Tagged With: content marketing, corporate blogging, social media

5 corporate blogs that are not doing it right

By Bhaskar Sarma 9 Comments

[Updated on 22nd Aug 2014]

Corporate blogs are powerful weapons in the marketing arsenal. There is one caveat, however.

You need to do them correctly.

Mess up your blogging and you would be wanting to rewind and get back to the days when all communications with outside were routed through the PR department . A website with a sucky corporate blog is worse than a website with no blog.

So what are the pre-requisites for a corporate blog?

Corporate blogging 101

The basic aim of a blog is to connect, mainly using text, with your core audience at a different level than the rest of the website content. You get to write in a lighter, more informal tone. You get to make jokes. You get to introspect, to muse and to predict how things are going to change.

In short, a corporate blog transforms your company from a faceless, remote and monolithic enterprise to a bunch of people with emotions and feelings.

So when you are setting up a corporate blog you need to make sure that certain rules about conventional marketing copy are ditched. To make your job easier here is a checklist of some best practices concerning corporate blogging [Read more…] about 5 corporate blogs that are not doing it right

Filed Under: B2B Social Media Tagged With: B2B, B2C, best blogging practices, corporate blogging

Customer service and social media-the Vodafone way

By Bhaskar Sarma 4 Comments

The phone buzzed violently. Yet another SMS, and probably sent by my carrier hawking some useless “value added” service. I was right; the message was from Vodafone and it read

Wear seat belts while driving.

Perfectly fine advice, except it was unsolicited. I have enough people in my life giving me free advice of this sort and I didn’t want to pay my carrier for it-in my long experience with mobile carriers nothing comes for free. But this message was one time and maybe there was a goof up. Still I was a bit apprehensive and thought out loud on Twitter

Surprisingly I got a prompt response

Filed Under: B2B Social Media Tagged With: Customer service, social media, Twitter, Vodafone