There has been a lot of discussion lately about best practices on how to use RSS.
Recent research shows RSS adoption is the underlying technology for many consumer-focused sites.
What about B to B sites?
RSS has the potential to be very powerful in both consumer and B to B sites.
A recent report, The Business Case for RSS has some great tips on how your company can benefit from RSS.
What has your experience been with RSS?

Earlier this week, I was perusing the web looking for some current trends in email marketing. I found some experts claiming that email marketing is dead. Others say that it has just changed format (i.e. RSS feeds). In my opinion, I really don’t think we can stop email marketing or even change it drastically. Why? Our society is addicted to email. Marketing VOX reported that a recent study by eROI showed 61% of respondents check email while on vacation and 90% read their email six days a week. With so many people handcuffed to their email, how can we not afford to continue to market via email? Do we just have to get more creative in how we do it?

In order to prove success, marketers often need to recognize different buckets and show levels of values for each bucket of leads.

MarketingSherpa published a report interviewing B to B Marketers on how they handle leads on the back end.

The first question they ask, Do you recommend that the sales team be able to see all leads marketing gets in.. or do you think you should only allow them to access the best, most sales ready leads?  How do you handle your leads?

In my last post, I discussed the movement toward a more contextual/focused approach versus a broad-based “lazy” marketing approach online. In my opinion, this movement will include more and more widespread adoption and usage of RSS for publishers and marketers (and bloggers) alike. To learn more about RSS, check out this post from The Opinionated Marketers which has a great description of what RSS is. This blog started a series explaining the considerations for RSS today.

Direct Marketing Association recently quoted that by 2008, online marketing will be the dominant media for business-to business.

It’s more important than ever to understand how to launch a successful online marketing campaign.

Omniture recently published a report, B2B Online Marketing Guide:  5 Critical Steps that outlines successful tips to help better your online lead generation program.  One of the first steps outlined is to define the key performance indicators (KPIs).  Surprisingly, we often find that many companies do not clearly define the KPIs before the campaign begins. And, Sales and Marketing often have very different metrics of success.

To have a successful online campaign, it is imperative to understand what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are at the onset of the program.

How do you establish key performance indicators with your online programs?

Later today I’m giving a presentation on the impact of Web 2.0 on internet marketing. When researching this subject I found it was mind-boggling as to the amount of literature that exists explaining the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and everything that encompasses. But, there are a few key trends that stand out.

The biggest is the degree to which users will participate in content creation and syndication. Sites like Wikipedia actually encourage users to edit definitions and even provide online tutorials to guide this process. Other sites encourage users to create their own tagging files and organization of same (referred to as folkonomies) so that they are SEO-recognizable and organized in ways that other users can relate to when searching.

The ramifications of this are profound for marketers because it transforms the web to communities made up of user/publishers and no longer mandates that internet publishers be the sole providers and editors of content or rules on how it gets distributed.

Does anyone have any insights or examples for us on other examples of changes to internet marketing as a result of Web 2.0?

Recently Karen linked to a survey that showcased the effectiveness of blogs on the purchase decisions.  Now that you know blogs can be an effective part of the media mix, how do you drive traffic and promote your blog?  Biz Stone, formerly of Google’s Eblogger, created an extensive list of blogging best practices.  In addition to the promotional support that you may get from your blogger application, the most important best practices are to write quality content and publish new content on a regular basis.  The continuous growth of quality content will subsequently grow your influence in the blogosphere.  The author of the blog Logic + Motion highlights this best practice with his visual of “Influence Ripples“.  The expert bloggers with high quality links creates a large ripple effect and and subsequently increases the authors influence in the blogosphere.  Do you have any additional ways to grow the influence of blogs?

I read a very interesting article this week on ClickZ entitled “The End of Lazy Marketing.” The author, Mark Kingdon, makes the following observations:

* The Internet is quickly becoming the “can’t live without” choice over TV.
* Creation and connection rule as the social Web becomes the big story of 2006. There are more people on MySpace today than were Internet users in the US in 1998.
* People are walking Tivos as they unconsciously and consciously filter out the 3,000+ messages we blitz them with every day.
* The Internet accounts for only 6 percent of marketing spend and 24 percent of consumers’ media consumption. Very quickly, those figures will equalize at the expense of TV and print.

The underlying theme here is that you cannot rely on being able to reach your audience through broad or “lazy” means anymore. In order to increase effectiveness of your marketing, it must be contextual/environment-specific marketing and it must have an eye towards increased engagement. This is not just about spending more money online and less on TV, but about making sure your message is being heard loud and clear. Less eyeballs does not necessarily equate to lower traction. At TechTarget, we have moved towards a topically-based approach to communicating to our user base and have seen the response and engagement increase dramatically. Along these lines, RSS feeds, while still in relative infancy, are also gaining traction - the idea being “show me only what I am looking for.”

Are you currently integrating this approach into your marketing efforts?

Last week I attended the CMO Council’s North American Summit in San Francisco.  The keynotes shared experiences involved with re-branding, brand realignment and customer retention.  Lenovo’s SVP and CMO, Deepak Advani, explained marketing challenges that Lenovo faced before and after they acquired IBM’s Personal Computing Division.  The marketing team was not only challenged with re-branding their products as ThinkPad, but they also had to develop programs that fostered this Chinese company’s growth in the worldwide marketplace.  Subsequently, they launched the largest partnership with the International Olympic Committee.  At the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games, they supplied 5,000 desktop PCs, 350 servers and 1,000 notebook computers, supported internet lounges as well as the the technology needs of many media partners.  Their flawless sponsorship led to extensive press coverage and they have since signed on for the 2008 Olympics.

Do you have any experiences with rebranding or growing a brand internationally?

After running thousands of papers on our sites, we have seen over and over again that educational papers always outperform product focused papers. However, many vendors still feel compelled to write exclusively on their product or solution.

I just read a very strong book on this topic by, Michael Stelzner, “Writing White Papers:  How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged” about how to write a successful write paper. This book carefully explains how important it is not to be self serving or focused exclusively on a product, service or solution.  Instead, a white paper should focus on the pain points experienced by the reader and talk about the problems caused by those pains.  No matter, how experienced you are in writing white papers, this book could help everyone gain some useful knowledge.  What has been your experience with product vs. educational white papers?