Ever wanted to see the words “Industry Expert” in front of your name? In the quest for thought leadership, the speaker circuit can, if executed strategically, drive both brand awareness and lead generation.

Speaking on timely, industry-relevant topics will help establish you as an industry expert, and your company as an industry leader. The key is to make sure you get behind the right podium, and generate results from the appearance. Here are some tips to help you do both.

Know Your Targets On the speaker circuit, similar to any public relations or marketing activity, you should identify primary target audiences – the event attendees – and ensure they correspond to your company’s target prospects. Having identified the audience, typically by title, company or industry, you can determine the right speaking opportunities with media outlets, analyst firms and/or trade associations.

When researching the speaking opportunities, don’t write off virtual tradeshows and webinars. In fact, BtoB magazine says virtual events are one of the five technologies to watch, and they are becoming increasingly important, whether the event is online-only or a supplement to a real-world event, both in light of the economy and the need to provide better metrics on attendee engagement.

Timing Is Key Start pitching your speaker to the event director as much as 6 or even 12 months before the conference date. This may seem extremely proactive, but event planners need to secure their agenda well in advance, to allow them enough time to promote the educational sessions and drive attendees to the event. When pitching, persistence is everything. Depending on the conference size, an event director may receive hundreds – even thousands – of speaking proposals, and may have only ten or twenty speaking slots to fill.

Make Your Speaker Pitch Sing “The Sexiest Jeans for Your Body” or “Nine Ways to Never Feel Tired” – although these headlines have little to do with business-to-business, when writing a speaking proposal headline, it pays to think of the Cosmopolitan front cover. Even the smartest, most solid BtoB content can benefit from an attention-grabbing, drama-driven headline! As we discussed in our March 2010 issue on business writing, captivating content is key for companies looking to gain market share and accelerate growth. Here are a few surefire ways to write a speaking proposal that sings:

• Refer to larger trends and analyst research
• Add a relevant case study
• Outline key take-aways from the presentation
• Identify your target audiences, or “who will benefit”
• Suggest a co-presenter and/or moderator – if you’re a vendor, suggest one of your customers as co-presenter

Preparation Is Never Overrated Congratulations! You’ve secured a spot behind the right podium… now what? First, work with the event director to confirm the presentation format, such as a panel discussion, co-presentation or webinar. If multiple presenters are involved, schedule a planning call to discuss logistics and who does what. For example, how long does each presenter have, are slides needed and how many minutes should be left for a Q&A session?

Once the agenda is ironed out, if a PowerPoint is needed to complement your presentation, make it short and visual. Remember, less is more – high-level stats and facts, case studies and real-life examples, and anecdotes all capture attention. And don’t forget to include contact options on the last slide, such as your website, email, phone and Twitter handle.

Leave Them Wanting More In an in-person event, a “leave-behind” document is always useful. Case studies, white papers, fast facts or at least your business card can be encourage a post-event dialogue. In an online event, a leave-behind can be provided virtually as a web page. But don’t stop there. Follow-up with attendees afterward by email, and add them to your lead nurturing program and newsletter mailing list. If someone selected to attend an event you spoke at, treat them as a high-quality lead until you know otherwise. Continuing the conversation and moving it forward is equally important to generating true results from your speaker bureau effort.

Annette Davis, senior account executive at Arketi Group (http://www.arketi.com), a high-tech B2B PR and digital marketing firm, understands the importance of content and effective business writing.

Here are 3 tips to enhace your business writing skills:
1) Where is your writing roadmap?
2) Writing better does not mean writing more (use short precise sentences)
3) Avoid technical or business jargon

For more tips in business writing, visit: http://arketi.com/newsletter/newsletter0310.html.

While you’re here, leave us a line and share your favorite business writing tips!

Annette Davis, senior account executive at Arketi Group (http://www.arketi.com), a high-tech B2B PR and digital marketing firm, shares four tips to drive both brand awareness and lead generation through a successful speakers bureau.

1) Know your targets
2) Timing is key
3) Make your speaker pitch sing
4) Leave them wanting more

After reading an entertaining article in Lexus magazine on the top mobile apps for Lexus owners, it got me thinking, “What are the top apps for BtoB technology marketers?”

I posed this question to the Arketi team, and here is our list of recommended apps for BtoB tech marketers:

1. AP Mobile: Receive breaking international, national and local news, especially with push notifications on your phone. (http://www.ap.org/mobile/)

2. IEEE Standards Wireless Dictionary: New to the wireless industry? Or lost in a sea of tech acronyms? This app contains more than 3,200 wireless technology terms and definitions with an emphasis on commercial systems. With this app, you’ll know the difference between WMANs and WRANs! (https://standards.ieee.org/)

3. HootSuite: Stay connected on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare while on-the-go. This wise Owl helps you send and schedule social media updates 24×7 through your smartphone. (http://hootsuite.com/iphone)

4. WordPress: Update your blog while on the road. This app comes in very handy if posting blog entries from a tradeshow or conference. (http://wordpress.org/news/2010/02/wordpress-on-the-go/)

5. TiVo: Have a broadcast story running in the evening news, but you’re still in the office or stuck in traffic? Schedule and record this segment from your iPad. (Sorry iPhone and Android users: TiVo just launched its mobile app for iPad, but other apps like DVR Remote or i.TV manage TiVo remotely via smartphones.)(http://m.tivo.com/)

6. OpenTable: You never know when you will need to book a solid restaurant for a client lunch. With OpenTable, you can make free reservations at more than 15,000 restaurants in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Another great restaurant-related app is Urbanspoon. We like the Urbanspoon slot machine to discover good eats nearby. (http://www.opentable.com/mobile/)

7. WorldMate: TechCrunch described WorldMate as “the Swiss Army Knife of Apps.” We agree. This app helps you find flights, check flight departure times, book hotel rooms, convert currencies and see weather forecasts worldwide. (http://www.worldmate.com/)

8. Meebo: Keep up with your office through instant messenger while on-the-go. Meebo supports all major IM networks, including AOL/AIM, Yahoo!, Windows Live Messenger, Gmail/Google Talk and Facebook. (http://www.meebo.com/meebomobile/)

9. Vlingo: Dictate to your phone and text or search while away from the office. This app is ideal if you are in state with laws against texting while driving! (http://www.vlingo.com/)

10. Quickoffice: Read Microsoft Office documents from your smartphone. This award-winning app comes highly recommended from CTIA, Macworld and countless others. (http://www.quickoffice.com/quickoffice_connect_suite_iphone/)

Do you have a favorite business- or marketing-related app that is not listed above? If so, please feel free to post a comment and share your suggestions. We’d love to hear from you.

Most companies have a presence in social media, but is this presence having an impact on the company’s target audience(s)? According to a new report by Forrester Research, entitled “Defeating Social Clutter,” it often does not. Most social media users are inundated with messages from their Facebook friends, Twitter feeds and LinkedIn networks, and it’s challenging for BtoB marketers to cut through the clutter.

As Forrester reports, overall adoption of social technologies has reached saturation. More than 80 percent of U.S. online users engage with social media. With an average of hundreds of friend connections on various social networks per user, there is a massive amount of social content flowing toward audiences today.

So how can you cut through the social clutter? It’s all about the content. As Forrester Analyst Nate Elliott explains, there are two broad strategies for defeating social clutter:

1. Go through the clutter. As a marketer, there’s only one way to cut through this tidal wave of social content: Make sure your messages are coming from a trusted source. And sadly, that source probably isn’t you. As social clutter continues to grow, so will the importance of peer influence.
2. Go around the clutter. Easier than cutting straight through clutter is finding a way around it—by tapping into what I call “open spaces” in social media. That could mean focusing on audiences for whom clutter is less of a problem, even if they’re a secondary audience for your brand; it could mean looking harder for genuinely new content and experiences to offer, rather than spinning off of existing ideas; it could mean focusing on less-popular social networks where you’ll find fewer users but have more of their attention—or even starting your own private niche social network to guarantee unfettered access to your audience. Put simply, make sure you’re not just following the pack in terms of audiences, ideas or execution—because the pack is exactly the type of social clutter you’re trying to avoid.

Read Forrester’s “Defeating Social Clutter” report.

More than 1 billion people are linked into social networks, but business-to-business (BtoB) marketers have struggled to prove the ROI from social technologies until recently. According to a recent survey by Regus, marketers are now seeing an influx of new customer acquisition through Web 2.0 efforts.

Nearly half of small businesses worldwide have acquired a customer through social networks. Interestingly enough, large companies were less successful in obtaining new customers through social media channels—despite most likely investing more time and money into social media marketing.

In January 2010, Hubspot found that more than 40 percent of companies had acquired a customer through social media marketing. Clearly, social media efforts are starting to pay off.

 As evidence of these survey findings, one of Arketi’s clients has seen a quick return for its Web 2.0 efforts through LinkedIn and Twitter. This BtoB technology company began testing the social media waters in early 2009, integrating traditional and online marketing tactics as the groundswell of social activity grew.

 In the past few months, this client secured an analyst briefing from an industry analyst who started following the company’s Twitter page and landed a new client from a LinkedIn InMail request sent by the company’s sales executive.

 To read more of the Regus survey findings on eMarketer, visit www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007815.

One of the most effective new-media platforms to emerge in the past decade has been online video, and the stats prove it. According to ComScore, a source of digital marketing intelligence, U.S. internet users watched 178 million videos in the month of April alone.

As both production and delivery technologies have advanced to make the medium a low-cost and high-quality platform for marketers, most b-to-b marketers are now regularly using online video on their websites to provide interviews with executives, customer testimonials and product demos, and some are using video in display ads and e-newsletters.

Since web video has become a vital part of the marketing world today, it is imperative to optimize web videos for search. Currently, less than 20 percent of marketers told Forrester, a technology and market research company, that they insert keywords into the filenames or videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics, such as writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries. After a search engine experiment, Forrester reported that by using keywords and videos, sites stand a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index. For successful marketing in today’s world, use web video!

For more information on both articles, visit

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/6/comScore_Releases_April_2010_U.S._Online_Video_Rankings

And

http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way.html

The PRSA Georgia Technology SIG recently invited Renu Kulkarni, executive director of FutureMedia at Georgia Tech, to explain how Georgia Tech is helping businesses prepare for the future explosion of digital media and communications with its FutureMedia initiative. FutureMedia partners with universities, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry to create a robust “open innovation ecosystem” that builds upon the existing the efforts at Georgia Tech and the state of Georgia.

In her presentation, Renu explored new paradigms of how content is created, distributed and consumed. We all know that social and digital media is revolutionizing the media landscape. This surge of user-generated content in a Web 3.0 world (yes, 3.0) is changing the way companies reach target audiences.

For the time in history, Pepsi did not run television spots during this year’s Super Bowl. Instead, Pepsi diverted millions of advertising dollars to social media. Companies like Pepsi are moving from exposure to engagement. Granted, Pepsi also has the brand recognition worldwide to evolve past marketing exposure. This evolution requires changing one’s mindset and success metrics from a traditional audience exposure model—demographics, impressions and segmentations—to an emerging consumer insight focused model—behaviors, interests and actions.

FutureMedia predicts that the evolution of content will involve immersive consumption—distributed through the cloud and created by collaborators. Today, we are in a state of mobility, but the future involves analytics, location and video. At present, more than 1 billion videos are uploaded to YouTube per day.

Following the FutureMedia presentation, PRSA Georgia Technology SIG participants were invited to go “behind the scenes” at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and view demonstrations of university research on digital, social and mobile technologies. This was fascinating to view the research in action.

At GTRI, I viewed the “Foundations for the Future” demonstration of how Georgia Tech researchers and working with government to improve K-12 technology in our school systems. Foundations for the Future uses the latest telecommunications technology to interconnect K-12 schools for collaborative learning; educational facilities (zoos, museums, libraries, etc.); and Internet-based resources.

In our demonstration, we saw how Georgia students could remotely access the Philadelphia Philharmonic to get French horn lessons or converse with an underwater research diver to complete their biology requirement. Foundations for the Future also explores virtual worlds (think: Second Life) for K-12 educational applications, and I witnessed how the presenter’s avatar could explore a virtual plant cell—a training game to captivate a classroom that was raised on the Wii.

I was joined by Kirk Englehardt (GTRI), Lois Rossi (Manheim), Jillian Depuma (Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta) and Steve Burns (CNN iReporter), among others.

For more information on GTRI, visit http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/, and for more information on PRSA Georgia, visit http://www.prsageorgia.org/.