Mediaboss Marketing

AUSTIN, TX--(Marketwire -06/04/12)- Harte-Hanks, Inc. (HHS), a worldwide multichannel, direct and targeted marketing company, announced today that its Mason Zimbler digital agency business has garnered three advertising awards for technology clients: two Business Marketing Association ACE Awards for social media on behalf of clients IBM and Sage HRMS, and one Killer Content Award, presented by DemandGen Report, for client Sage Fixed Assets.

The ACE Awards, which honor the best in business-to-business marketing creative, and the Killer Content Awards, which recognize business-to-business efforts that rely on content marketing strategies and tactics, were both announced recently in New York City.

"Using content and social media strategies in business-to-business marketing -- as well as lead generation and nurturing efforts -- truly defines and drives relevant, insight-driven conversations today," said Kevin Kerner, managing director, Mason Zimbler USA, a Harte-Hanks company. "Both IBM and Sage recognize how these drivers translate to new business and satisfied customers. Our ability to help them achieve business-to-business marketing and sales objectives is what has made these efforts so compelling in these two award competitions."

A description of the respective entries follows:

IBM, 2012 ACE Award for Social Media Lead Generation Campaign, presented by the Business Marketing Association (Winner): Mason Zimbler helped IBM implement a social selling program that included personalized Web, Twitter and LinkedIn pages for seven Public Cloud inside sales representatives. In six months, the program increased aggregated LinkedIn direct network size from 535 to 3,500, and increased potential impressions and reach of social-selling messaging from 54,000 to 1.3 million. It also triggered 10 orders on the first day of a 60-day free trial. As a result of the agency's initial program with the client, all 1,700 IBM North America inside reps have been trained in social selling. Within the target audience, the team collectively has made 50,000 LinkedIn connections and posted more than 20,000 tweets, and digital representative pages have received 100,000 visits in the past six months.

Sage HRMS, 2012 ACE Award for Social Media Lead Generation Campaign, presented by the Business Marketing Association (Honorable Mention): Mason Zimbler helped Sage HRMS build an integrated social media strategy that aligned social media marketing efforts with demand generation campaigns and leveraged specific social media channels, such as Slideshare, that were more relevant for business-to-business lead capture. The strategy triggered nearly 7,000 total Slideshare page views and more than 140 downloads in six months for Sage HRMS and its lead generation content; it drove top-of-funnel traffic from Sage HRMS social media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to its website; and resulted in higher form submission rates from click-throughs that come from social promotions.

Sage Fixed Assets, 2012 Killer Content Award, presented by DemandGen Report: Mason Zimbler created content for Sage Fixed Assets that was leveraged on the company's blog and re-purposed for its lead nurture program. Mason Zimbler developed and used an infographic on fixed assets for the company's blog, a supporting traffic strategy, and influencer contact to produce extraordinary results: 444,151 potential impressions via the infographic, including mentions by top influencers, among them Daily Infographic, Guy Kawasaki and Alltop; more than 100 "social sharing" activities on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; and, upon infographic release, a 2,500 percent increase in new visitors to the Sage Fixed Assets blog and a 600 percent increase in average daily visitors over the pre-posting average.

"These campaigns and their results tell us how marketing dynamics are changing, with social and content leading the way to relevance and sales in business markets," said Gary Skidmore, president, Harte-Hanks Direct Marketing. "Our clients' commitment to success and the innovation of our Mason Zimbler team combine to show how insights and passion translate to results."

A full listing of 2012 ACE Award winners is available here: http://64.90.161.29/bmanyc/AceAwards2012/winners.html. A listing of 2012 Killer Content Award winners is available here: http://www.demandgenreport.com/archives/feature-articles/1157-demandgen-report-announces-killer-content-award-winners.html.

[Editor's Note: For campaign visuals from Sage HRMS, Sage Fixed Assets and IBM, contact Drew Hansen at andrew_hansen@harte-hanks.com.]

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Harte-Hanks: Mason Zimbler Wins Business-to-Business Content and Social Media Marketing Awards

Buddy Media sells social marketing services to large U.S. brands.

Salesforce.com, whose software helps corporate sales teams track customers and prospects, announced today that it is buying Buddy Media, which sells social marketing services. Salesforce will pay $689 million in cash and equity for the company, and it expects the deal to close in the third quarter.

Buddy Media, founded in 2007, helps such brands as Ford, Hewlett-Packard, LOreal and Mattel reach consumers on social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The deal will enable Saleforce to combine its Radian6 social platform, which monitors conversations on social networks, with Buddy Medias technology, Salesforce says. Salesforce.com will deliver the first comprehensive marketing cloud that will allow customers to listen, engage, gain insight, publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs, the company says in a statement. Client companies connect to Salesforce.coms software via the web, hence the reference to its marketing cloud.

Buddy Media employs about 1,000 workers, writes Michael Lazerow, Buddy Media CEO and co-founder, in a blog posting. Salesforce.com is welcoming all current Buddy Media employees, and the company is committed to continuing to invest in the Buddy Media business, he writes. Buddy Media plans to continue to innovate and build new product. We plan to build our sales team like crazy. And we plan to continue our global rollout, which is just starting.

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Salesforce.com to buy social marketing specialist Buddy Media

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Cydney O'Sullivan Social Marketing Superstars - Video

If you can remember the days before Facebook and Twitter, you probably recall a time when social media marketing meant using MySpace, Delicious, commenting on the posts of bloggers dedicated to your niche, making yourself known in forums, and so forth. Nowadays, just trying to keep up with the different categories can make a marketer frantic.

Social media optimization and social media marketing really got their start in 2006, with a blog post by Rohit Bhargava. To some extent, it existed before that post, of course; it's worth noting that Facebook had been founded only two years before. Rohit codified rules, which others expanded on. He updated those rules several years later.

As you'd expect, since we're dealing with the online world, a lot has happened in the six years since Rohit wrote that post. And if you're trying to understand it all, it's downright scary. Business Insider posted an insane but painfully accurate infographic to get that point across. Even the graphic's creator missed something; Pinterest wasn't included, and really should have been.

The graphic separates services and websites important to social media marketing into no fewer than 28 different categories. Twenty-eight! And they're all legitimate, as near as I can tell. All of a sudden, I feel a certain sympathy with General Motors for removing its advertising from Facebook. Perhaps it was simply a matter of not being able to keep everything straight, and giving up on trying.

In this article (and the ones that follow) I'm going to explain these different social media categories. Hopefully, rather than contributing to the confusion, I'll help you get a handle on each of these areas. We'll take a look at what they are, what they do, some of the major players, and their marketing potential.

Facebook and Twitter are practically in a class by themselves; they've certainly spawned several separate categories. Twitter has its own third-party apps, while Facebook features Facebook apps, and Facebook gaming, which Business Insider's infographic treats as a separate category.

Twitter applications include such items as TwitPic, StockTwits, wefollow, tweetmeme, twitvid, Listorious, and more. These services vary in their specific goals, but in general, they try to enable their users to get more personalization, functionality, or efficiency out of the microblogging site. Or in other words, they make it easier for users to pursue their personal interests through Twitter.

For example, TwitPic helps users post pictures and videos on Twitter. StockTwits dubs itself a financial communications platform and tries to organize Twitter streams focused on that kind of information. It also seems to have its own, separate functionality, with members and bloggers and more; it offers a pro service, which is in beta. Twitvid bills itself as a social network that connects you with the latest and greatest videos on topics and people you find interesting, presumably collecting them from Twitter. Listorious lets you find people on Twitter by topic, region or profession, and interview them by asking questions through their interface. You can add yourself to Listorious.

You can take a couple of different approaches with Twitter apps if you want to promote your company. You can do a search for Twitter apps and find some to use that work with your marketing plan. For instance, wefollow offers a list of Twitter users organized by interest, which should be pretty valuable to just about any marketer.

Or, if you're ambitious, you can think of Twitter as a fire hose of information and work with someone to create a specific Twitter app that would fit the theme of your company or your goals. For example no surprise StockTwits was founded in 2008 by long-time investor Howard Lindzon. Maybe you can come up with a Twitter app that would appeal to your potential customers or target audience, and then promote it; every time a user consults it, they'll be reminded of your company. If you choose this approach, you should still do a search for Twitter apps that are similar. You don't want to reinvent the wheel; at the very least, you want to make it better.

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Social Media Marketing: It`s Complicated

Social marketing develops buzz, creates loyalty, and engages customers. What's not to love? A winery with an upcoming wine-tasting, for example, might create a page about the event on its site and then link to it on social media sites, along with links to articles about the wines, recipes for foods that go well with the wines, and other related content.

Engaging the customer has always been fundamental to doing good business. It's just that now that engagement often starts in digital, social media realms.

The trick is to figure out how to make one's content as interesting as all the other content that shows up in the newsfeed, and this is where social media marketing companies come in.

Social Campaigns

As with other marketing, social media marketing works best when it's part of an overall campaign. This is the service provided by VerticalResponse and its recently acquired social media campaign platform, Roost.

(click image to enlarge)

With Roost, business owners can create an integrated social media campaign complete with Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), Twitter, and LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) updates and tracking. It also offers a continuously updated library of content related to a business or product, so owners can post links to interesting articles for their social media friends and fans.

"We built Roost to help busy owners and operators be effective," Alex Chang, VerticalResponse's VP of social platforms, told the E-Commerce Times. "[They can take] 20 minutes on a Sunday night and start a great social media campaign."

Using Roost, a business can create a campaign of a variety of types of posts that go out to social media sites over time, and it can then measure how well those posts do in terms of engaging fans by tracking comments, shares, click-throughs and retweets.

It can also tie the social media campaign to an email campaign, with links to specially created Web pages and other content.

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Seamless, Smart, Successful Social Marketing