Links for 2009-12-10

Increasingly, you and your company/firm are in the business of selling ideas. Customers want to know how you think – and how your thinking translates into action steps and recommendations. This makes the development and promotion of thought leadership (e.g., books, blog posts, articles,MW Bloga white papers) critical.

All of the eye balls coming to your blog make all of the space in posts and sidebars very valuable. How do we convert those eye balls into leads? Here are five ideas:

Using the Listorious search feature for B2B, here are the top 10 B2B Lists to follow:

With this announcement Google has forced B2B companies to care about Twitter and other forms of user-generated content that are published in real-time. In recent years B2B companies have relied heavily on search engine results for sources of lead generation and Web site traffic. Google has now changed the game when it comes to search engine marketing with this transition to real-time search.

The major points of synthesis are that B2B buyers:

> Are increasingly turning to online sources, earlier in their process, to research purchases before ever calling a 'live' sales rep

> Are increasingly leveraging social media — especially peer communication, such as Twitter, blogs, etc. — in the information collection phase of the buying process

> Are pursuing their buying process more 'massively multi-channel' than ever before; however, channel weightings and their sequence vary by the phase of the buying process

> Manifest themselves more than ever as a complex, savvy 'buying unit,' rather than simply as a single decision-maker

Summary: marketing has shifted steadily over time from passive to active consumer engagement. Social media is the latest stage in this evolution. Marketers need to master new skills at each stage; as they do, advertising budgets will shift to take advantage of the new medium's increased effectiveness.

Summary: Here are links to about twenty studies with statistics on online media consumption and advertising spend. Many are contradictory, but it's clear that marketers need to invest in social media, which might eventually replace search as the primary way that customers find them.