Like many of you I’m enamored with Pinterest, but I can’t help but ask, “Can Pinterest benefit B2B Marketers?”

Pinterest is a social media site that allows members to create boards for images that they like. You can name the boards whatever you like, and assign them to a category from a list of pre-determined by Pinterest. Over time as you find images that you like, you pin the images to the appropriate board. Popular board categories are used for recipes, fashion, books, wedding planning and home decor.

I’m excited about the possibilities of Pinterest on a personal level. I have folders at home that I organize my ideas into, including books to read, places to go, recipes to try (that’s a large recipe box), home improvements, gardening, and things to buy (including fashions I like). The folders happened because I would tear out images of things and places I liked. Over time these accumulated and I wanted a place to put them.

The popular uses for Pinterest mentioned above are all consumer categories. So what uses might those of us who work in B2B Marketing have for Pinterest?

1. Use Pinterest for Collaborative Branding Exercises

hen we work with clients at New Incite, we sometimes go through a branding exercise to identify what images and concepts work for their industry, their customers, their employees. The client clips relevant images and pastes them on a board. Colors, concepts and styles bubble up from these boards – why not do them on Pinterest? When you create a board you have the option to invite other individuals to contribute to it; this is a great way to get virtual teams involved.

2. Market Research on Pinterest

Crowdsourcing is on the minds of marketing research experts. Pinterest would seem to lend itself to market research, especially since the adoption rate of Pinterest has been pretty fast. Pinterest was founded in December 2010 and was named as a top ten social media site by October 2011 with over ten million visits per week.

3. Pin Favorite Designs or Campaigns

Marketing experts could use Pinterest to display favorite campaigns and designs. These could illustrate your or your firm’s style, which could help a prospective client choose the right marketing partner. But, to comply with Pinterest’s etiquette criteria of not being self-promotional, you should not create boards that only display your designs. That might be tough for marketers, who are by nature self-promotional.

4. Event Image Collages on Pinterest

I like what Karlie Justus suggests in the Social Media B2B blog post 4 Reasons For B2B Marketers To Explore Pinterest – that you could use Pinterest for trade shows. Karlie recommended a board for best tips for trade shows. But what about taking it a step further and creating a board for each show or conference you’re involved in and making that collaborative? You could invite people to pin photos and “best images” to represent their memories of the show. This could be a great way to engage people you meet at a conference or trade show after the event and at the same time “crowdsource” the look and feel of the event for future marketing.

These are just a few ideas about how B2B Marketers can use and benefit from Pinterest. Feel free to comment below with more ideas!

It’s clear to me that users are in charge when it comes to technology.

It wasn’t always that way. When programmers ruled, we had acronyms. Confusing, unintelligble acronyms. Acronyms so obtuse the technologists often didn’t know what they mean. Acronyms so  bewildering that even the strongest in the user community were cowed and didn’t dare ask what they meant.

We had MIPS and ANSI, GUI and ODBC, LAN and ASCII, BIOS and DOS.

Now we have Twitter and Facebook, Google and YouTube, Skype and Yahoo, PhotoShop and iTunes.

Now it’s all fun. Now the applications and languages all seem so usable and approachable.

The users are in charge.

When I first read Geoffery Moore’s  Crossing the Chasm in the early 1990s, I was amazed at how well the author, then a partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., nailed what worked and what didn’t work in technology marketing. What is even more amazing to me is that the book is still highly relevant for high tech marketing today; in fact, I believe it was a harbinger of today’s “new” buying paradigm that is made possible through social networking.

At the time I read the book, I was Director of Marketing at a B2B application software company, and the concepts of early technology adopters versus “majority” buyers, the importance of choosing the right set of customers upon whose testimonials you can “cross the chasm” to the mass market, the pain of attaching your technology to the wrong distribution channel to cross over, and the fact that technology buyers weighed peer recommendations most heavily in their decisions were all things I had been experiencing.

Back then, we didn’t have CTOs (Chief Technology Officers) – we had DP (Data Processing) Managers, then IS (Information System) Managers. When their company needed a mission-critical application, they turned to their IS buddy across town or in their industry, to find out what worked and what didn’t.

We made some mistakes, one of which was choosing to tie our coattails to Informix over ORACLE for our database technology, because we believed the technology was superior. Choosing the better technology would make our product superior, right? Wrong! When we hit the streets to cross the chasm/sell our software, IT Managers had one thing on their mind: ORACLE. The reasons? ORACLE’s superior marketing and positioning of its portability across platforms.

We also did some things right, including creating peer-review marketing campaigns with ads that included industry leader testimonials, and (gasp! – pre-YouTube!) videos of  customer testimonials. We were very successful with these campaigns, and Moore validated the reason in his book:

“Numerous studies have shown that in the high-tech buying process, word of mouth is the number one source of information buyers reference, both at the beginning of the sales cycle, to establish their ‘long lists,’ and at the end, when they are paring down their short ones.”

Page 69, “The D-Day Analogy,” Crossing the Chasm

Now that technology has permeated every business and almost every individual’s life, social networking allows us to quite easily follow, and take our buying cues from, our peers and industry thought leaders. I believe this is a sign of disruptive technology (Internet, Web 2.0) catching up with and allowing the high tech buying paradigm from over 20 years ago to be adopted by the mass market.

Image by cambodia4kidsorg on Flickr,  CC BY 2.0

One marketing tool to use in determining which marketing strategies and inbound marketing tactics will be most effective in B2B marketing planning is your product or service lifecycle stage. Over the lifetime of a product or service, you go through different stages of introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Here are some examples of marketing strategies and inbound marketing tactics that are best suited to each stage.

Introduction Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

When a product category is introduced, it’s time to educate potential customers and build awareness. Marketing strategies at this stage include identifying a “beachhead” or niche market in which the needs for your product or service are high and the audience is made up of pioneers who are likely to adopt something new. This is especially true for technology marketing.

Choosing your first customers at this stage can be critical, especially if your development investment was large and development time was long. This is often the case in software development and other technologies that need to be proven at the first customer installation before more can be sold.

Some of the B2B inbound marketing tactics that fit this stage include quality content online in a variety of media (blogs, video, podcasts, eBooks, whitepapers), webinars, eLetters and newsletters, press coverage in trade publications and blogs, speaking at industry conferences and social network testimonials from beta and early customers. The marketing budget can be minimized by leveraging word of mouth marketing with inbound marketing.

Growth Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

The growth stage of the marketing product lifecycle offers great opportunity for sales, but it is a stage of increasing threat as more competitors come into the market. Marketing strategies here might be to differentiate (flank) the competition with innovation or niche markets or to find ways to reduce cost of production or control distribution (direct attack).

B2B marketing tactics during the growth stage involve increasing volume of marketing in terms of number of target markets and amount of outreach. Failure to maintain your brand and increase awareness at this stage can be fatal. The marketing spend may increase during this stage, but the sales volume should increase as well.

Your competitors will be educating your target audiences in this stage, so the key tactic here is lead generation and engagement to develop early adopters into customers. Increased amounts of quality, branded content online can attract prospective customers, and then outreach tactics such as email marketing, telemarketing and webinars will engage them and move them through the buy cycle.

Maturity Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

In the mature stage of a product lifecycle, sales begin to plateau and some competitors may exit the marketplace. B2B marketing strategies at this stage include leveraging customer loyalty, identifying or creating new, untapped niche markets or distribution channels and innovating product variations to fit new uses. These strategies could lead to another product lifecycle.

B2B marketing tactics in the mature stage include customer loyalty programs, promotions and incentives, finding new distribution channels, continuing marketing via social networks and email. In this stage measurement of marketing ROI is critical, because businesses must be aware of when their mature-stage “cash cow” product or service (milk it for all it’s worth) becomes a “dog” with declining ROI.

Decline Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

In this stage, effective marketing strategies include reducing costs, eliminating ineffective distribution channels, unbundling or simplifying the product offering, reducing price and promotion budget. With inbound marketing, content can remain online indefinitely to attract the long tail of demand even with declining demand, with little effort by B2B marketers.

At what stage is your product or service? Do you agree with the inbound marketing tactics that I identified for each stage? Did I leave out tactics or strategies? Please comment below!

Dave Logan, Co-Founder/Senior Partner of Culture Sync, Professor at the Marshall School of Business at USC, and C0-Author of the book Tribal Leadership, presented the opening keynote at the Association for Strategic Planning annual conference in Pasadena, California. In a little over an hour, Dave gave the audience of strategic planners a new model for jump-starting strategic plan implementation with his keynote speech. Here’s a summary of the talk:

Dave started by discussing an important disconnect in strategic planning. While the broadband industry has a “last mile problem” (the last mile of cable or wiring is the most expensive), strategic planning has a “first mile problem.” Businesses that have a strategic plan often don’t know how to move the plan into action. The inability to act on the strategic plan is compounded by the fact that most strategic plans have many initiatives, and executives have to decide which initiatives to implement first.

One solution is the micro-strategy. Micro-strategies create a burst of implementation in a 100-day term that allows strategic planners to show results quickly. The process includes five steps.

1. Identify an outcome that the business wants.
2. Identify the assets that the business has to support achieving the outcome. Dave pointed out that a critical aspect of this step is focusing on what a business has, not what they don’t have. He commented that if you are working with a group that is completely demoralized, start by making a list of the assets the business has – not what they don’t have – a great tip for these economic times.
3. Ask the test question, “Do we have the right assets?” If you don’t have the right assets, create a new outcome to achieve them, which is a nested strategy. An example is a business that doesn’t have a platform from which to communicate its marketing message for a product launch. A new outcome might be to “Get X number of followers on Twitter.”
4. List actions that can be done to achieve the outcome.
5. Ask the test question, “Will the actions achieve the outcome?”

A Micro-Strategy Example

The example Dave showed was that of a health organization that needed to improve compliance with health standards to reduce patient infections. A micro-strategy outcome they identified was to increase hand washing compliance from 42% to 85%. Some of the assets that were identified included knowledge of the financial impact of the problem, knowledge of the compliance percentage, knowledge of the role that families and culture play in hand-washing. Some of the actions they identified were to increase communications about the need for compliance and to engage families of patients to create compliance.

Dave pointed out that often one asset will emerge as a key factor in achieving the outcome. In his example, the key was engaging families and culture to increase hand-washing compliance. Once families of patients understood the importance of hand-washing by medical personnel, they would ask the doctors and nurses if they washed their hands before treating the patient, their family member. He equated the key asset to a usual object that action heroes often have and use to achieve extraordinary results  – Indiana Jones’ whip is one example. What was the actual outcome in the example? 93% compliance!

Dave had the audience break into small groups to create and discuss our individual micro-strategies, giving everyone a chance to experience the model first-hand. After we identified what we outcome wanted, Dave suggested that we triple it(!) He also pointed out that identifying core values that drive planning is a booster of the micro-strategy process, allowing businesses to increase success by as much as 300%. Because the health organization valued quality service, 42% hand-washing compliance was unacceptable and increased the organization’s motivation to achieve the outcome.

This is one of the many take-aways from ASP’s annual conference on strategic planning. I hoped to live-blog at the conference, but the facility wasn’t set up for it. I’ll be sharing more in the next week. If you find this information helpful, please comment about it below.

What is Inbound Marketing and why is it important to B2B marketers? A couple of years ago, my answer to this question would have been, “I have no idea.” Today I’m certified in this specialty. Why did I do it? Why should you  consider Inbound Marketing in your 2010 marketing programs?

Inbound Marketing Is… …the art of creating inbound marketing interest from your prospects when they have a need or interest in your product or service.

Inbound Marketing Is Not… …about creating outbound marketing messages that you push onto prospects when you want to, whether or not they are looking.

There are several parts to the Inbound Marketing process.

Part 1: Identify where and in what format(s) your prospects like to get information, then build outstanding and valuable content in those places and formats to attract your prospects.

Part 2: Engage prospects as they follow your conversation and gather buying data, all the while measuring their activity and interest.

Part 3: Recognize prospects’ buying signals and have the right resources and additional information to close the buying process.

Why is this important for B2B marketers? Inbound Marketing is in touch with today’s reality. It recognizes that the Internet is a disruptive technology that changed the way people purchase goods and services. Instead of the sales cycle, Inbound Marketing recognizes the buy cycle. It acknowledges that the buyer, not the seller, is in control.

Inbound Marketing is cost-effective and time-efficient. It doesn’t waste time and money trying to reach people and companies that are not interested in buying.  It combines online and offline marketing that attracts qualified buyers with interesting and valuable content. Maybe most importantly, it doesn’t completely annoy your prospects the way traditional, push-marketing ads, mail pieces and emails do.

Do you think I’ve been drinking more than Kool-Aid? Have you already adopted the Inbound Marketing approach? Please comment below.

Flickr Photo by foxypar4 CC BY 2.0

I attend programs on technology innovation, marketing and financing for entrepreneurs whenever possible. Yesterday I attended the CalTech/MIT Forum to hear Dr. Nathan Lewis speak on the need for clean technology and participate in a panel discussion on clean technology.  He talked about global energy demand, the problems of CO2, sources of renewable energy, and solutions for storing energy.

Some of the highlights include:

• We will need to produce at least double our current supply of energy by 2050
• The best renewable source of energy is solar, but it’s expensive
• Caltech is working on making inexpensive solar cells from rust and fool’s gold
• To store the renewable energy we need we’d have to build one solar thermal system every second for 50 years
• Historically energy innovations take 40 years before they are generate energy

Much of Dr. Lewis’ keynote presentation and related materials are available on his web site.

The panel was moderated by Patricia Glaza, CEO of Clean Technology and Sustainable Industries Organization, a cross industry community based in Michigan that promotes clean technology development. She asked the panelists where they saw opportunities for growth in Clean Tech now.

Dr. Jeffrey Reed, Director of Marketing Development and Emerging Technologies at Sempra Energy, said renewable energy and storage of electricity with smart grid distribution are major opportunities.

Clean tech entrepreneur Diana Schultz, CEO of Cyber-Rain, said the biggest opportunity will come from conservation and efficiencies, because we can implement programs immediately and get results in 5-10 years. Cyber-Rain manufactures smart sprinkler and irrigation systems that sense weather and temperature to automatically control landscape irrigation.

Sean Arian, Director of Economic Development Strategy from the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, agreed with Diana Schultz and added transportation technologies to the list of opportunities. He talked about the City of L.A.’s pledge to go coal-free and generate 40% of its energy from renewable sources and 10% from solar by 2020. The city plans to replicate the Clean Trucks program at the Ports of Long Beach and L.A. in a similar clean technology program with L.A. Department of Water and Power.

My major take-aways from the program are that:

1. The fastest and most cost-effective way to effect a solution to global-warming and increased demand for energy is conservation by all of us.
2. The risks for the venture capitalists and regulated energy companies are too high to support needed levels of innovation. We need to find ways to reduce the risk so that everyone has the incentive and money to create renewable sources of energy.
3. In our risk-averse investment environment, the going is tough for entrepreneurs. The panelists recommend having a compelling and bulletproof marketing messages and sales offers so that it is close to impossible for prospective customers to say, “No.”
4. Don’t give up. The word that most of the panelists used when advising entrepreneurs how to break through is “tenacity.”

Photo credit: imagonovus on Flickr