Tuesday, November 30, 2010

BDI’s Financial Services Social Communications Event

As one of the sponsors of BDI’s Financial Services Social Communications Event in November, DBE was able to talk with many financial industry insiders to gauge the interest in social media and what marketers feel the risks and opportunities are in the channel. Here are just some of the insights we heard:

“It’s too early – clients don’t get it.”
“It’s risking leaking the wrong information to clients.”
“We’re being regulated and validated – you are who you say you are.”
“Social media is where the eyeballs are.”
“It’s an opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership and expertise.”
“We can engage with customers and get ideas from them.”
“We have an opportunity to enhance customer touchpoints and engagement.”
“Social media lets our customers know us better and have more access to us.”
“It’s risky when there’s no clear defined social strategy.”
“We’ll need to respond to criticism.”
“Data leakage is a huge risk.”

Marc Engelsman, VP of Client Programs & Services, led two roundtable discussions on social strategy for financial services brands at the event. According to Marc, the biggest obstacles these brands are facing with social media adoption are “less about the regulatory environment and more about getting buy-in from C-Suite and Senior Management who don’t yet see the value in the channel.”

At the event, case studies presented by marketers at Citibank, the Wall Street Journal, HSBC and others, described different approaches to social media strategy for financial services brands. While live-tweeting during the case-study presentations, Marc used the term “mocial” to describe the presenters’ theme of social-mobile convergence within the strategies they shared, which other Tweeters agreed is the direction things look to be going.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

BtoB Magazine Best of 2010 Awards

Yesterday I attended BtoB Magazine’s “Best of 2010” awards luncheon in NYC, honoring the top creative talent in business to business marketing this year. The awards highlighted some of 2010’s top creative in print, video and online, as well as twelve of the top marketers who forged ahead in a particularly challenging economy. The list of marketers recognized at the event included Marcy Schinder of American Express OPEN, Tom Haas of Siemens, Ted Gilvar of Monster Worldwide, Cynthia Green of DuPont, and John Kennedy of IBM Corp who won top honors as Marketer of the Year.

As part of the awards ceremony, BtoB Magazine assembled all of the top marketers into a panel for some Q&A, asking them what worked in 2010, what strategies would carry over into 2011 and what budgeting changes might be in store for the coming year.

The common thread among the panelists’ answers was that these marketers had shifted resources into the digital space and would continue to do so. This shift is consistent with a report released by SEMPO earlier this year showing respondents planning to spend 43% more on search engine optimization, 50% expecting to spend more on paid search, and 59% increasing budgets for social media.

The rationale behind this shift seemed to be a mix of actionable metrics, lower out-of-pocket costs, ease of integration, and overall ongoing, measurable successes. This is also what we’ve been hearing from our clients as they’ve come to rely more on search and social media marketing as a cost-effective way to continue growing in a down economy.

DBE congratulates all of the winners of BtoB Magazine’s Best of 2010 Awards.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Interview with a Link Building Expert: Getting Results

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Nicole Valentine, one of the architects of DBE’s highly successful link-building program. Here are some highlights:

Q: What is link building and why is it important for marketers to understand?

A: Link-building is a component of search engine optimization (SEO) designed to obtain links to a website from third-party authority sites. It’s important for marketers to understand that link building is a critical part of a real SEO program – if it’s not being done in-house or it’s not something their SEO agency is doing, that will severely impact how successful their SEO efforts will be.

Q: How does link building impact a client’s SEO program?

A: Real SEO encompasses a mixture of on-site technical optimization, content optimization and cultivation of the kind of inbound links search engines evaluate within their algorithms to determine how high up in the search results a website should appear for various search terms. An expert link-building program works to obtain links from authority sites, resulting in top search engine positions for business-driving search terms.

Q: What are the major components of a successful link building program?

A: It starts with extensive research to identify what the opportunities are for obtaining inbound links that will impact SEO. From there it’s all about building relationships with webmasters and providing them with something valuable, whether that’s the link itself or stellar web content written to include the links we’re trying to place.

Q: So, how do you approach such an intensive research process?

A: We’ve developed a mind map that we use to guide our research. It provides a general framework, but each client requires customized research methodologies, so we’re continually tweaking the process and going in different directions based on the specific needs of each of our clients.

Read more from my interview with Nicole here...

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Get Ready for Facebook Riot #297

Judging by the lack of outrage and backlash that normally accompanies a major Facebook feature launch, I’m guessing that most of my friends haven’t noticed the new “relationship analysis” feature that showed up this morning. Notice the new link that appears under my friend Debbie’s Facebook profile photo, inviting me to “View You and Debbie”:


Clicking this link shows me a full page of information on who our mutual friends are, the Pages we both “Like,” anything we’ve posted on each other’s Walls, any photos in which we’ve both been tagged (Facebook will even display one of these photos prominently in the top-left corner, like a profile photo), comments we’ve made on each other’s status updates, and more. It’s basically a clickable summary of all my Facebook interactions with Debbie Sem.

And it goes further. There’s a “Browse Friendships” link in the top-right corner that allows me to view this relational summary between two other people – Debbie and her mom, for example. In fact, we now have access to a set of search boxes that lets people search for and see all of the interactions between any two people they're friends with on Facebook.

Clearly, this new feature doesn’t override Facebook’s privacy features, meaning that whatever content is posted utilizing any sort of privacy setting, will still only be viewable according to those settings. And it’s important to remember that anyone you’re not connected to (friends with) on Facebook does not have the ability to view your Facebook interactions with another person.

So, while I don’t think it’s necessarily a hot new stalking tool, it does provide an easy way to analyze relationships between the people you know. For business people utilizing Facebook as a more social version of LinkedIn, having that sort of relational information at-a-glance could prove extremely useful.

My guess is that we’ll see a solid week or two of protest, and then there will be a collective resignment to this new level of transparency.