BtoB marketers – journalists love social media just as much as you do. Ninety-two percent are on LinkedIn, 85 percent have Facebook accounts, and 84 percent use Twitter. Check out the infographic below to see how today’s most popular social media sites stack up. For more information about BtoB journalists and how they use the web, download your free copy of the 2011 Arketi Web Watch Media Survey here.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

How to deliver a clear, strong call to action
from PR Daily
Good calls to action are framed in the context of the audience’s needs, fears, hopes, and desires—not yours. That call to action works better because it is specific, audience-focused, and user-friendly.

How to write a blog post people will read
from PRWeek US
For better or worse, catching people’s attention is probably the most crucial component to a successful blog post.

Google Analytics Adds Social Reports
from Social Media Examiner by Cindy King
These new social reports “help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on your goals and ecommerce activities.”

Editorial vs. Advertising: Blurring the Lines
from Tech Affect by Melissa Baratta
Over the last 10 years, the line between journalists and readers has grown significantly shorter. The line between editorial and advertising has also always been a sticky area, and as a PR professional I’m trained to view pay-for-play media opportunities with a bit of a wary eye.

Is Technology Exceeding Humanity?
from My Three Cents by Ken Makovsky
I would contend that as we increasingly become an extension of technology, the human connection becomes more — not less — important. We must not succumb to the lure of the PDA and mistakenly substitute that for the human-to-human relationship.

Addicted to Your Smartphone?
from March Communications by Erica Frank
According to eMarketer, the “smartphone class” is a new class of consumers, with 100 million members (growing daily) who are redefining cultural norms in our country.

Study: Facebook Timeline cover image replace wall posts in popularity
from Ragan.com
Cover images matter most. At least, that’s where the most eyeballs are drawn to on the new Facebook Timeline format, according to a webcam eye-tracking study conducted by EyeTrackShop for Mashable.

16 ways to use Pinterest for PR
from Ragan.com
Pinterest is not a strategy. These are fun ideas for using Pinterest at work, but they should be used as part of a larger marketing or communication strategy.

Brand journalism: everyone has a story
from PRWeek US
At first blush, the words “brand journalism” might seem like a contradiction of terms.

7 reasons corporate websites are so boring (and how to fix them)
from Ragan.com
There are many factors that can make Web content dry and stale—many of which have nothing to do with the subject matter. To help you evaluate your own site, here are seven reasons website content loses readers.

It may be a natural disaster, new legislation or other announcement affecting your industry. Whatever the breaking news may be, make sure your executives and company website is prepared to serve as a secondary source for journalists.

Are there any additional online resources journalists turn to? Let us know and we’d like to include your feedback in our next survey. For more results from the 2011 Arketi Web Watch Survey, check out our surveys here.

We know journalists are online, but where are they spending it? Findings from the 2011 Arketi Web Watch Survey: Inside BtoB Media Usage of Social Media reveals 64 percent of journalists say they spend more than 20 hours a week online, with 21 percent reporting more than 40 hours on online activity each week. Not surprising, top activities include: reading news, searching for news sources/story ideas and social networking.

The 2011 Arketi Web Watch Survey seeks to understand the use of technology by BtoB journalists covering multiple industries. A free copy of the report’s findings can be downloaded at www.arketi.com/surveys.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Is social media simply a bad choice for B2B?
from Ragan.com
When your brand’s name is synonymous with your product, just how useful is social media? That’s what Xerox is figuring out. At the Digitas NewFront conference in New York last week, the company’s chief marketing officer, Christa Carone, said of sponsored tweets, “I’m not sure it works for our campaigns and our messaging.”

Infographic: Presentations with 1-20 slides get read most
from Ragan.com
A new infographic from Sales Crunch zeroes in on just how many of your slides people read after the presentation. The takeaway? People read presentations with fewer slides more than long ones, and for longer periods of time.

Social media analytics: The basics for brands
from PR Daily
Measurement is a ceaseless debate in social media. One of the biggest problems organizations face is defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) they should look at when assessing their efforts. This infographic from Social Media Today lays out some of the analytic basics that almost every business can relate to and understand.

How to Generate More Opportunity From Existing Customers
from Social Media Examiner by Michael Stelzner
In this video I interview Becky Carroll, who is the author of the great new book, The Hidden Power of Your Customers. Becky shares the story and meaning behind her “ROCK” strategy and why it is so important to focus on your existing customers.

Create your own infographics at Visual.ly
from The Publicity Hound’s Blog
Create your own infographic at Visual.ly, a start-up that allows anyone to quickly and easily create professional quality designs with their own data. When you’re ready to show your work to the world, publish it on your Visual.ly profile, your own personal showcase.

A marketer’s guide to the social media landscape: UPDATED
from PR Daily
Companies that jump into social media ventures often wonder which social tools are right for them. Good thing CMO.com updated its highly informative social media primer to help match your goals to the right social media outlets.

If You are Going to Help a Reporter, Remember to be helpful
from PR Breakfast Club
Help a Reporter is great resource for PR pros to have and it presents opportunities not found elsewhere. Stay focused and don’t get sloppy just because you’re emailing a reporter you don’t know. Remember, it is easy to spot a quality PR pro in the batch of query responses by the time that was taken to craft the answer.

Some Small Businesses Are Making One BIG Mistake, And Other Hot Topics
from Constant Contact blogs: Fresh Insights
A new study from BIA/Kelsey found that 80.5% of small businesses are breaking a major best practice by not linking their website to their Facebook, Twitter, or other social media networks. The study also found that almost 75% are missing an email link on their homepage and more than 90% of business sites are not mobile-compatible.

Tech companies lag in corporate blog activity
from BtoB Magazine
Despite the rise of social media and content marketing as key marketing elements, only 20.5% of technology companies have corporate blogs, according to a study by content management company Percussion Software Research.

Dissecting Today’s Top Social Media Tools [Infographic]
from March Communications
With so many different social media tools, it’s often difficult to determine which are best to use for specific campaigns or outreach strategies. Luckily, Zintro compiled a useful infographic detailing the demographics and benefits of four of today’s major social networks.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Why Great Design Is the Future of Content Marketing
from Mashable Tech
Although it’s still early in 2012, the importance of visual storytelling is clearly one of the year’s breakout trends. Facebook Timeline, Pinterest, and Instagram are forcing brands to think and act more visually. Couple that with the impact of mobile browsing, and these emerging trends give new meaning to the phrase “show, don’t tell.”

10 ways to use Pinterest for your business
from PR Daily
Your boards should support your strategy. Pinterest users will pin and organize your content as they see fit, but you should use your boards to help define your brand and company culture.

How to Make the Best Business Impression in 8 seconds or Less
from Forbes
The average adult attention span is 8 seconds. In reality, most people will stop listening after 5 seconds. Unless they have become hooked, they are lost or on to their next thought.  Telling someone what your business does in this amount of time is a talent and needs to be practiced word for word.

For marketing and PR, the future isn’t interactive—it’s unified
from PR Daily
“Unified marketing is about tailoring the right message to the right person at the right time,” explained Rachel Conforti, director of marketing at Definition 6. “It’s also about building genuine relationships—trying to evoke an emotional response between brands and people.”

Forrester says b-to-b marketers will increase budgets 6.8% this year
from BtoB Magazine
B-to-b marketers will increase their marketing budgets by an average of 6.8% this year, according to a report from Forrester Research.

How Fortune 500 companies use social media
from PR Daily
Want to benchmark your brand’s use of social media against that of the Fortune 500? Here’s your chance, thanks to a Go-Gulf.com infographic, which offers a host of statistics and facts about the Fortune 500’s use of social media.

Becoming a “Corporate Executive Tweeter”
from Social Media Today
In this digital age CEO’s are expected to tweet. An article by e-marketer on research done by social branding firm BRANDFog tells us that 78% of people surveyed on topics related to businesses using social media felt that CEO participation leads to better communication

5 ways to create irresistible content with limited resources
from PR Daily
A recent business study showed that 75 percent of buyers are likely to use social media in the purchase process, and 55 percent of business-to-business survey respondents search for information using social sites.

Annenberg’s PR study: Good news for the industry
from Ragan.com
The seventh biennial Generally Accepted Practices report finds public relations budgets on the rise (if only slightly), social media use on the upswing, and perhaps most surprising of all, a majority of executives on board with what their PR and communications staffs are doing.

Engagement ain’t nothing but a number – why 1% isn’t good enough
from Brian Solis
A recent study published by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that less than 1-percent of Facebook “Fans” actually engage with brands.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Is technology PR broken?
from PR Daily
Here’s an unsexy truth: the majority of PR pros I meet are hard workers with a scary amount of knowledge about enterprise technology.

Upping the ante for b-to-b
from PRWeek US
After having spent hours upon hours over the last few years working with pure b-to-b brands on their marketing efforts, it’s become abundantly clear that the applications for social media aren’t always as immediately obvious as they are in the b-to-c sphere.

6 tips for effective Web copywriting
from PR Daily
Web writing can be difficult, but once you have mastered these six steps, you will be way ahead of the competition.

IBM study identifies four types of ‘digital personalities’
from BtoB Magazine
A new survey from IBM Corp. identified four “digital personalities” emerging among users of the desktop and mobile Web.

Tech PR: The Post-Product World of Ad Revenue
from Crawford
I tend to have a certain amount of faith in the high tech economy, but my opinion took a slight knock this morning when the WSJ quoted ad network Millennial Media’s IPO paperwork. Apparently, the folks at Millennial don’t know “when or if we will ever achieve profitability.”

How to hook readers with killer headlines and grabby leads
from Ragan.com
Headlines and leads ought to be examples of what Ragan called “refrigerator journalism,” writing that says something so valuable so concisely that someone would be compelled to cut it out and stick it on his or her refrigerator.

Pitching Notes, the Yelp of the PR Industry
from PR Daily
Pitching Notes is a new website devoted to aggregating important information about journalists in an effort to create in-depth pitching profiles accessible by anyone, free of charge.

The new definition of PR: ‘personal recommendation’
from PRWeek US
We need to start explaining to our clients that customer service is as important as PR, and that an army of half a million people screaming about how good your service is can be just as beneficial as a front-page article placement.

Study: For corporate news, journalists prefer press releases
from PR Daily
A recent survey of 72 journalists in the U.K. found that the press release is the most preferred method for receiving news about a company.

Result: The Only PR Metric That Counts
from Crawford
The only measure that counts is whether you achieve what you set out to do, a point so obvious that it’s odd how often some PR pros obscure their results behind a numeric facade rather say point blank whether they succeeded or failed.

The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) released the sixth annual State of the Industry: Technology in Georgia Report on March 28, 2012. As one of the nation’s leading technology states, during 2011, Georgia’s technology community had an economic impact of $113.1 billion in sales. Technology now accounts for more than one-third of Georgia’s total exports, and the state gained 6,000 technology jobs in 2011.

The technology industry is a major part of Georgia’s economy and vital to the state’s future. TAG’s annual report provides stakeholders with the information needed to support legislative, economic development and promotional efforts for the information technology sector. To learn more about the top 10 findings of 2012 State of the Industry: Technology in Georgia report, visit www.tagstateoftheindustry.com.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Marketers ‘get’ social
from BtoB Magazine
For those who still believe b-to-b companies don’t get social media or don’t care, last year should have been a wake-up call.

Leaders See Positive Role and Growth for PR
from Culpwrit
Conducted by the USC Annenberg Strategic Communications and Public Relations Center in conjunction (SCPRC) with the Institute for Public Relations (IPR), the GAP VII study summarizes industry perspective from 620 senior communicators.

Facebook buys Instagram: What does it mean for your brand?
from PR Daily
Facebook announced on Monday that it acquired the popular photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion, marking the social network’s biggest acquisition to date. What does this mean for brands? Here’s London-based PR professional Adam Vincenzini’s take.

The Perfect Length Of A Presentation Is….
from Mr. Media Training
Twenty minutes. At least that’s what new research from Maureen Murphy at the University of North Texas (UNT) suggests. Author Susan Weinschenk, writer of the forthcoming book 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, agrees. She points out that the terrific TED talks are usually 20 minutes long.

What you need to know about the state of social media
from Ragan.com
Social Media Examiner recently released its 4^th annual survey of social media marketing; 3,800 marketers answered the survey. Eighteen percent of B2B marketers, as opposed to 14 percent of B2C marketers, say they’ve used social media for three or more years.

LinkedIn introduces business targeting tools
from BtoB Magazine
LinkedIn Corp. will launch two new tools to enable businesses to better target followers and report on their brand engagement.

PR pros, 10 ways to woo journalists on Twitter
from Ragan.com
Twitter isn’t just for building your loyal fan base. It’s also an excellent place to start building your network of journalists. Here are 10 tips to help you begin making valuable connections with journalists.

6 tips for becoming more persuasive on social media
from The Publicity Hound’s Blog
Social media provides many tools that help marketers, businesses, and bloggers persuade readers to become repeat visitors and eventually customers. Here are six tips for effectively persuading visitors with social media.

How to create a Facebook page that’s irresistible to fans
from PR Daily
For social media managers, Facebook brand pages are a relatively simple way to connect with fans in real time. Making your Facebook page a destination isn’t easy, but some brands are doing it with aplomb. Here’s how.

Targeted media to grow 8.1% this year
from BtoB Magazine
The targeted media category, which includes b-to-b media, branded entertainment, direct marketing, outsourced custom content and pure-play consumer Internet & mobile services, is expected to grow 8.1% this year.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Study: ‘Big Data’ poses opportunities, challenges
from BtoB Magazine
According to “Marketing in the Digital Age,” 75% of respondents said understanding “Big Data” can dramatically improve their marketing efforts, and 90% said digital marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs. However, 58% said they lacked the skills and technology to perform data analytics, and more than 70% said they aren’t able to leverage the value of customer data.

12 incredibly useful digital tools for PR
from PR Daily
What are the key social media tools that PR professionals need to go from bumbling amateur to results-driven superstar? Here are 12 of them.

Facebook Explores Search
from March Communications
Though Mark Zuckerberg tends to deny direct competition with Google, Facebook is rumored to be entering the search market. Though search has not been a priority for the social networking powerhouse, this Businessweek article reports that more than 20 Facebook engineers are busy working on an improved search engine within the site.

10 Ways to Humanize Your Brand On Social Media
from Mashable Business
Marketers are suckers for a catch phrase, from “join the conversation” to “think like a publisher.” Now, thanks largely to Facebook Timeline for brand pages, the new marketing slogan has quickly become, “humanize the brand.”

15 ways to boost your tweets’ click-through rate
from Ragan.com
How do you get someone to click on your links on Twitter? It’s one of the most pressing questions I see day in, day out—and rightly so. Attracting more people who like what you are posting is essential to success on Twitter. Here are 15 top techniques for improving your click rate.

Report: No. 1 social media question: ‘How do I measure?’
from Ragan.com
SocialMediaExaminer.com released its fourth annual social media report and, based on the responses of more than 3,800 surveyed, it reveals how businesses are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. In reading the report, there were several conclusions that I found interesting for anyone grappling with how to effectively integrate social media into their communications plans.

Custom Content Conference: New technologies enable, complicate content marketing
from BtoB Magazine
The major theme dominating the three-day Custom Content Conference, last month in Washington, D.C., was how technology has both enabled and complicated “engagement,” that elusive goal of all content marketing.

8 simple, yet powerful types of headlines
from PR Daily
The first thing most readers notice in print or online is a headline. Here are eight categories appropriate for selling something, whether it’s a product or an idea, along with a sample headline of that type:

The Objective News Story: Dead or Alive?
from Crawford by James Crawford
The New York Times story excoriating China for engaging in pay-for-play media, much of it placed by U.S. PR firms, might have horrified us all but for two things. First, the Times is a century late breaking the story — paying for coverage has long been common practice in other lands, and not just in emerging nations. Second, U.S. media are in no position to point fingers.

Top Five Reasons To Work With Startups On The PR Front
from Storytelling Techniques For Effective Business Communications
I decided to draft my own top five list on the benefits of working with start-up ventures.