If webinars are not part of your BtoB marketing mix, they should be. More than half of BtoB journalists found company-sponsored webinars helpful. Check out the infographic below to see what type of webinar they find most helpful. For the full report on BtoB journalists and how they use the web, download your free copy of the 2011 Arketi Web Watch Media Survey here.

Well this one had me SMH (shaking my head)…

A metro Atlanta elementary school is catching some heat for a recent edict barring students from writing abbreviations in each other’s yearbooks.

H8Rs!

While I can’t imagine my classmates not being able to say in a few letters how much they hoped I would HAGS (have a great summer), or tell fellow female classmates that they adored them not only as friends, but that they LYLAS (love you like a sister), is it so bad to actually have to use words? Has the need-it-now, shorten-for-text world made us lose touch with how to write to others?

Will these same children go ROTF (rolling on the floor) for their right to say it all by saying next to nothing look back at these yearbooks and have any clue what their friends said, or why what was said was so important?

For PR and marketing professionals, the closest we’ll get to the madness of yearbook day is the blank canvas that is the email template. We send and receive what feels like thousands of emails daily – each with varying tones, messages and desired response. And much like the teachers at the aforementioned school likely aiming for (though maybe not delivered as well as possible), it is important to be as clear, concise and flexible as possible to ensure your message resonates with whomever you send it to without confusion.

As Ragan.com’s Jacqueline Whitmore recently spelled out, the text blitz has left some of us in need of a refresher on the elements of a good old-fashioned email. While you certainly won’t tell a client you’ll TTYL (talk to you later), it is still just as important today as it was when you were signing yearbooks to avoid misusing email from its role as an essential business tool and ensure seamless communication.

Much as you thought long and hard about the words to put on your classmate’s inside cover, consider a few of Whitmore’s tips next time you sit at the keyboard, and prevent your readers from going “OMG!”:

• Sell with a Strong Subject: In a busy workday, it can be hard to decipher what emails are most relevant to read and respond to. That’s why it is essential to keep your subject line brief, specific and relevant. The vaguer your subject line is, the more likely it is that it won’t get read, or may be accidentally deleted – especially if you are writing to a new colleague, journalist or third-party who may not know who you are from the email address alone.Consider asking a question in the subject line, and use dates and times when possible – if your coworker for instance sees “Meeting with Acme Inc. on Tuesday?” or even “Lunch today?” up front, it is easy to pick up the essentials of the email without having to stop and read several graphs.Additionally, for urgent matters, adding the red “Urgent” exclamation point to your message may not resonate as well as typing “Urgent”, or something more specific such as “Feedback Needed Today,” in your subject.
• Keep it Short and Sweet: We all remember that one yearbook signer who could take up an entire page recapping every day of every class you had together in a given year. Much as you tired of reading this essay back then, remember that your peers do not have time today to read an endless email.Try to keep the body of your email to a few lines and put the most critical details up front. It is important to remember that many of your recipients will likely first view your email on a mobile device – as a result, make sure that the essence of your email is what is visible on a smart phone screen without the reader needing to scroll down.While emails to more formal audiences may require more background information and, as a result, length, that does not mean your word choice has to stretch. We’re all guilty of trying to sound smart by breaking out big words and adding extra lines in client and executive emails. Ultimately, “Can we schedule a call for Tuesday” is just as efficient as and less exhausting than “We would like to ask for your presence to discuss our upcoming venture during a phone conversation this Tuesday.”
• Reply to Some, Not All: Sending one email to multiple relevant parties is effective to update as many people with as little work as possible. However, most of these emails are only crucial to a few of those copied. When replying to a group email, only select those recipients who require a response – in many cases, this is only the original sender. This will cut back on the amount of irrelevant email you receive, as well as the amount of irrelevant email you tack on others.Being strategic with “reply all” can also prevent potentially uncomfortable damage control. We’ve all heard horror stories of colleagues who have crafted emails outlining how bad a client’s idea is or how difficult a client is to work with – only to copy that client on a “reply all.” Taking a few seconds to double-check who you are sending to can save you from a lengthier headache.
• Don’t be a Pest: We like to think that every email we send is the most important thing the person on the other end will read on a given day, and with that, we expect a swift response. While it can become frustrating waiting for a reply, especially on time-sensitive matters, overloading with follow-up and reminder emails will only portray you as pushy and impatient. It may be that the person on the other end is out of the office and not checking emails at the moment, is catching up on emails after a meeting or that your email is caught in a spam filter.Regardless of the situation, there are more tactful approaches than asking “Where are You?” in times of silence. Craft your response to highlight why you need them to get back to you quickly – for instance, on a creative matter, you can mention that you have the art director reserved to work on your project tomorrow and want to make sure that everything stays on schedule.
  If the quiet is killing you that much, perhaps a phone call is a better route than watching your inbox.

Whether you are a PR and marketing professional cleaning out your inbox, or a middle-schooler wishing friends well at the end of the school year, the goal remains the same – to convey a clear, impactful message in as few words as possible that the person on the other end understands and responds favorably to. The recent abbreviations battle only reflects how keeping a few basic principles in mind – in the “adult yearbook” that is the email box – can ensure that both you and your most vital audiences get the message without confusion.

Or should I say, make sure your audiences wish to CUL8R.

Here are our top picks for this week:

10 basic tech skills every PR pro should know for a crisis
from PR Daily
There are so many technical aspects of your social media crisis plan that need to be executed quickly and efficiently in a crisis. If you’re equipped with a webmaster, IT professional, or in-house Web developer that’s great. However, one thing we know for sure about social media crises is that they tend to happen at the worst possible moments. So what happens if your Web-savvy employee isn’t there that day?

Reversing the Times Square effect
from PRWeek US
Increasingly, we hear clients talk about “engagement.” They want to connect consumers but find it difficult to elevate the brand-consumer relationship to a higher plane. This hit home for me the other night as I walked through Times Square after a Broadway show. Although it was 11:15 p.m., the square was lit up like midday. We were bombarded by lights and flashing signs and giant brand names — all competing for our attention.

As 2011 drew to a close, Arketi Group hosted the fifth annual Atlanta High-Tech CMO Roundtable, as well as the first such Roundtable for High-Tech CMOs in the Raleigh-Durham area.

In all, some 60 marketing executives from leading technology companies across the Southeast gathered to discuss the current and future state of marketing within the business-to-business, technology sector.

The roundtables were divided into two sessions. In the first, participants discussed the outlook for their industries in general, and their organizations in particular; how they saw their marketing budgets, goals and priorities for 2012; and what they viewed as the challenges facing us the rest of this year.

While opinions varied, occasionally quite widely, some consistent themes emerged:

• Doing more with less – For those whose budgets were staying largely flat, doing more with less was a necessity, but even for those who anticipated a budget increase, there was a desire to squeeze every penny of value out of the money available. For some, this meant using technology to improve the productivity of the PR and marketing teams, or the effectiveness of the programs – or indeed both. For others, it meant taking a critical look at the effectiveness of different communication channels.

• Putting the buyer’s needs first – After years of focusing exclusively on “leads, leads, leads,” many participants felt it was time to achieve a better balance between branding and lead generation. Customers and prospects are now bombarded with email, whether in the form of special offers or lower-key lead nurturing. Marketers need to stop selling and start listening to customers, thereby putting the buyer’s needs first.

• Balancing the marketing mix – Most Roundtable participants had taken time and money in 2011 to experiment with new ideas and planned to continue experimenting in 2012. One surprise among the lessons learned was the positive return that many had experienced from conferences and tradeshows. A number of the CMOs present were also actively fostering user groups online, establishing customer advisory boards, and conducting customer satisfaction surveys.

• Making metrics matter – All participants agreed that tracking performance of PR and marketing programs is vital not just to understanding the ROI of the programs, but also to the success of the communication function within the organization. Many activities, however, remain hard to track. For such activities, marketers must make the extra effort to find meaningful metrics as a way to prove the success of their programs.

• Content marketing and social marketing – As the conversation on measurability continued, some Roundtable participants cited social media as something easy to measure, while others felt its true value could not be gauged by merely counting “likes” and retweets. This disagreement aside, all agreed that social media is now as mainstream a marketing channel as email was five years ago – even in a BtoB environment.

All in all, the outlook for business-to-business, technology marketing this year is rosier than has been the case in recent years. The Roundtable participants were generally upbeat about their budgets, the array of channels and tactics at their disposal, and the measurable contribution the marketing function can make to their organizations.

BtoB communications professionals must work to develop and disseminate messages that will resonate within their markets and help Sales sell more. It is clear these five trends will play a part in ensuring their PR and marketing efforts generate revenue through the rest of 2012 and beyond. Anyone serious about BtoB technology digital marketing or PR can download a free copy of The Outlook for Business-to-Business Technology Marketing in 2012.

This post first appeared as a featured digital marketing post on CommPRO.biz and can be viewed here. 

When people aren’t hard at work or spending time with their families, what exactly are they doing? According to a recent infographic from GO-Gulf.com, 30 percent of the world’s population is spending their spare time online.

Thirty percent of the world’s population doesn’t seem like a huge number…but it is. Thirty percent actually represents 2,095,006,005 people who are spending 35 billion (yes, billion) hours online each month. To put things in perspective, 35 billion hours per month is equivalent to 3,995,444 years. How are these hours spent online? The breakdown is below:

• 22% of time is spent on social networking sites
• 21% of time is spent conducting online searches
• 20% of time is spent reading content
• 19% of time is spent on email and communication
• 13% of time is spent on multi-media sites
• 5% of time is spent doing online shopping

Although the study shows that most online users visit Google more than any other site, most of their time online is spent on the social media giant Facebook. Facebook receives nearly 138,000,000 unique visitors per month. These visitors are spending almost 8 hours a month on the site. Imagine spending an entire workday on Facebook?!? Although that idea might not sound so farfetched for some!

Facebook isn’t the only site bringing in the online visitors; YouTube videos receive a total of 4 billion videos a day and more than 60 hours of video content gets uploaded every minute. With more than 250 million tweets sent per day, Twitter is keeping online users engaged as well.

So what’s next?

According to GO-Gulf.com’s study, the future of online engagement will be found in location based services, timeshift TV (think DVRing) and Internet banking.

How do you spend your time online?

Follow Meredith on Twitter at @MeredithMobley. Follow Arketi on Twitter @Arketi.

Know your buyers and their true needs? If so this gives you the upper hand in moving individuals though your sales cycle and ultimately converting them from prospect to customer. Today the right strategy combined with technology makes this happen and even accelerates the buying cycle.

The first webinar in Arketi’s Stop Selling. Start Listening. series, led by Vice President Micky Long, will focus on marketing automation. Titled Drive Buyer Intimacy and Deliver More Revenue, the free webinar will be Wednesday, May 23, from 2 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. EDT.

This 30-minute webinar covers five ways implementing a marketing automation solution can help you build better intimacy with prospects. In the short timeframe, you will learn:

• How to distinguish what prospects say vs. what they do
• How to identify prospects most likely to buy now
• What to measure to ensure you’re moving closer to key prospects
• How to use marketing automation tools to make sense out of Big Data
• How to make your marketing automation platform more than an email engine

To register, visit http://www.arketi.com/buyerintimacywebinar. We hope you join us!

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Study: B-to-b companies lag b-to-c in social media tracking
from BtoB Magazine
B-to-b companies trail b-to-c companies in tracking social media and responding to social media customer feedback, according to a new study by customer experience software company Satmetrix Systems.

6 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business
from Social Media Examiner by Mitt Ray
Pinterest was the fastest stand-alone site ever to reach 10 million monthly unique visitors. One study shows how Pinterest has been bringing in more traffic to websites than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube put together. Brands are benefiting with Pinterest in generating traffic and sales. So if you’d like to attract a lot of traffic to your website using Pinterest, check out these 6 tips.

25 Link-Building Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website
from Computerworld
Relevant inbound links from authoritative, trusted and/or quality websites are every search marketer’s dream. To help your site develop a quality inbound link profile, we’ve collected 25 top link-building strategies and tips from three experts.

Is Social Media Killing the News Industry?
from March Communications by Meredith L. Eaton
Schools.com has created an infographic that aims to show how “social media is replacing traditional journalism as a news source.” The research depicted in the infographic shows that 59.5% of people get their news from TV, 28.8% from newspapers, 27.8% from social media and 18.8% from radio. Of the 27.8% using social media as their news source, 59.5% use Facebook, 19.9% use Twitter, 12.7% use YouTube and 11.6% use Google+.

How to create a Facebook page your fans visit frequently
from Ragan.com
For social media managers, Facebook brand pages are a relatively simple way to connect with fans in real time. We rely on fans seeing our posts in the news feed to drive “likes” and inspire people to leave comments. Making your Facebook page a destination isn’t easy, but some brands are doing it with aplomb.

Bringing humanity back in a technology-driven world
from  PRWeek US
Last month, I sat on a panel with several other practitioners to discuss how the role of PR has evolved in recent years.

Taming PR’s latest trend: Big Data
from PR Daily
Big Data is the practice of collecting the information scattered across the Web to better target consumers, and it has a promising future for the public relations industry—from predictive analytics to mining data from social media interactions.

Using content marketing for leads-to-sales optimization
from BtoB Magazine
The growing importance of content in online marketing is nearly matched by the increasing competition for prospects’ time and attention. According to Intel Corp., every minute there are 3,000 photos uploaded, 100,000 tweets, 1.3 million YouTube video views, 2 million Google search queries, 6 million Facebook views and more than 200 million emails sent.

4 ways to make your logo effective
from Ragan.com
When businesses, new or old, take it upon themselves to hone their identities and tell their brands’ stories through their logos, they embark on a huge endeavor. Since brands are living things with personified characteristics, it is important they stay current and relevant.

The power of CSR in building consumer relationships
from PRWeek US
Understanding the need for human connection is critical for any company that wants to create deeper relationships with its consumers and to elevate them to brand supporters and advocates.

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.

Listen up, marketing and branding pros: Don’t assume the customer programs you’ve developed are the ones that will hit home and keep your customers brand loyal!

ROI. It’s the only reason most marketing departments justify budget growth. So here we are well into Q2, and you’re either preparing a new budget (if your calendar year starts in July), or you’re starting to tweak your 2012 budget to more clearly align with desired results. So it’s time to take a look at what’s working and what’s not, and begin some re-considerations.

Do you have a Brand Loyalty program in place? Yes? Well, how’s that working for you?

According to a new study by SAS, a leader in business analytics and integrated marketing management, and Loyalty 360, The Loyalty Marketer’s Association, these programs aren’t working well.

What’s going on? Well, let’s start with the survey snapshot. More than 150 BtoB and BtoC marketing execs were surveyed. Results? Survey says:

• Two-thirds have a department or functional area dedicated to customer loyalty and retention

-       13 percent plan to add one

• Less than one in four consider their loyalty and retention efforts “very effective”

-       Approximately 44 percent think their programs are “somewhat effective”

OK, so we’re investing all this time and money, and the efforts are not returning much in the way of loyalty. If you take findings from a CMO Council survey into consideration, you’ll find that what’s really happening as a result is defection! Bulldog Reporter points out that research from the CMO Council suggests loyalty programs are actually alienating our customers, especially when we repeatedly send information that is not tailored to individual needs or interests.

Stop Spamming Your Customers!
As a group, marketers have gone deaf on our customers. Instead of listening to what they need, we tell them what we want. We tell them and tell them and tell them. What are we saying? “We want you to buy more!”

And what our seemingly desperate actions say is that “We don’t care what you buy, just buy something! And we will keep emailing you with irrelevant offers until you DO buy something!”

Or, more likely, until they bow out – gracefully, or not so gracefully.

Let’s consider a few personal examples. Think of that wine club you joined online recently, or that makeup you purchased using a store credit card (whose bill you pay online), or the new store downtown that offered you 10 percent off in exchange for your email address. Every one of them wants to make you a loyal customer, and every one of them has your email address.

Now, how many emails have you received from them lately? One a month? A week? Or is it closer to one a day? Are those emails tailored to you, to what you want or need? How do you feel as a result – do they instill a desire to tell all your friends about how great this is, or would you talk about how obnoxious they are?

Stop Pushing. Listen More.
We’ve been blessed to be marketers in a time when we have a plethora of tools at our disposal. It’s time to use those tools, and use them to refocus on the customer. It’s time to look at the long term value of that customer – and retrain your efforts in converting them into not just ‘loyal customers’ but the Full Monte: A Brand Evangelist!

So be serious. If you think the primary goal of your loyalty program is to get customers to spend more now (as it was with 47 percent of those unsatisfied marketers in the survey), I encourage you to think again.

Likely, your ultimate goal is a hyper-committed customer – someone who recruits new customers for you, who is proud to use your product or service. The best way to drive the long term financial success of your product and your company, thus meeting your objectives, is to create what Loyalty 360 CEO Mark Johnson calls “sustainable behavioral change.”

At Arketi we call this Stop Selling. Start Listening. It’s a way of thinking that re-orientates BtoB marketing to place buyers and their needs at the center of all marketing priorities. Understanding what buyers care about, how they make decisions, and how they want to receive information, makes marketing about them, not us.

That’s not done by beating your customers over the head. Instead, develop a formal customer lifecycle program. Start early in the program – maybe even before the first purchase – and integrate loyalty data into the research and purchase process. Recognize that your customer’s voice is easier to hear now, thanks to social media. Start listening for it. That’s where you’ll get value from your loyalty program.

The SAS/Loyalty360 online survey, entitled Facing the Challenges of Building Loyalty and Retention: The New Strategic Imperative, was conducted from November to December 2011 from a cross section of industries.

This blog post was featured on CommPRO.biz on May 8, 2012 and can be found 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.