Biz2Biz

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the popular social media platforms among small business leaders, according to a survey conducted by Business.com.  Business.com surveyed 1,700 leaders to see how social media influences thee.

In the course of a day all of the leaders surveyed use at least one of these platforms for business related information. It was also documented that B2B decision makers are using more social media resources than their fellow B2C decision makers.

Sarasota may seem like the land of milk and honey, and to snowbound northerners it is. But when it comes to economic development, this city and county on Florida’s central Gulf Coast face the same problems of attracting and retaining industry that other regions face.

For years our agency represented an economic development corporation here in the Lehigh Valley. We saw firsthand the difficulty in diversifying an economy that had become too reliant on a single industry or business—in our case, Bethlehem Steel. While we found success in testimonials from business owners and other initiatives, the task of marketing to industrial thought-leaders remained a challenge.

Sarasota County faces a similar problem. With miles of pristine beaches and buckets of sunshine, it completes nicely with other resort areas for northerners who want to vacation or retire in a milder climate. More than 372,000 people live in the county; nearly 50 percent of them are over the age of 55, according to the Economic Development Corporation of Sarasota County. As of 2008, about half of those residents (159,000) were employed. Workforce and land-use issues could hamper the county’s efforts.

As for industrial sectors, more than 52 percent of the county’s workers were employed in “services,” including resorts, restaurants and other business that serve, among others, the tourism industry. Other tourism-related sectors—retail, construction and finance—were the next-largest employers. On the other hand, manufacturing jobs clocked in at 4.3 percent of the workforce—a slim number if you’re trying to diversify a recreation-based economy.

The situation calls for people who think big and take risks.

Enter some creative marketing in the form of Kathy Baylis, president and chief executive officer of the EDC of Sarasota County. Writing last week in the local newspaper, the Herald Tribune, Baylis urged residents to be kind to tourists because one of them might be a CEO who’d consider relocating his or her mid-sized company to Sarasota.

“Among the thousands of vacationers who flock to Sarasota County every year, this special group of visitors literally holds the keys in a new initiative to diversify our economy,” she wrote. “Some buy condominiums, collect family vacation memories and build relationships in the community. Eventually, they move their companies to Sarasota County, bringing jobs, capital investment and entrepreneurial energy to our local economy.”

That observation is not new. What’s different is Baylis’s solution to the challenge: “If you discover an out-of-state CEO behind you in a restaurant line, give them your spot. Better yet, buy them dinner. Send me the bill and their business card.”

Baylis knows her small staff can’t reach all of the site selectors, CEOs and other influentials she’d like, so she’s harnessing a naturally occurring force in her community, creating a grassroots movement that can amplify the EDC’s efforts a hundredfold.

That’s the power of a big idea.

Seven tips for building and maintaining healthy community relationships.

1) Commit to what the community expects – offer public meetings and provide extra information.

2) Base decisions on realistic assumptions – beliefs and values outweigh the economic benefit.

3) Ease up on certain aspects of PR – address the problems directly and focus on face-to-face strategies.

4) Be open with the community – act pre-emptively

5) Listen carefully – this may encompass making adjustments to plans of concepts to encompass what the community said or is saying.

6) Engagement – assign workers to projects who care about the people and the neighborhood.

7) Independent local oversight – allow community to look over your shoulder. Establish a process for their access. This will lessen opposition from the community.

These tips were put together by James E. Lukaszewski, Fellow PRSA.

Google Buzz is creating the wrong kind of buzz.

The search giant’s social networking complement to Gmail is netting the company the wrong kind of attention–from regulators. According to a post at mashable.com, “The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada – the same office that prompted major changes at Facebook – is taking a closer look at the privacy implications of Google Buzz.” Buzz pulls feeds from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube into Gmail. That more comprehensive look at a person’s contacts can potentially expose members of that social network to Google and others, a situation that worries privacy advocates.

“With Buzz, the investigation presumably focuses on the service’s more controversial aspects – namely, the way in which it automatically finds users to follow based on your email correspondence – a practice that has drawn criticism (and quick feature adjustments by Google. . . .”

“Google took a lot of heat for these pre-made networks because [they] were made public by default so every Buzz user could see everyone else’s closest contacts,” Katherine Boehret writes in today’s Wall Street Journal. Since initial concerns were raised, Google has changed the settings to suggest a network, not create it by default.

Perhaps the most damaging comments don’t concern privacy at all. With Buzz, Google is late to the party, and many see the service as yet another place networkers have to check every day–a duty rather than a pleasure. Not the killer buzz Google was expecting to hear.

Didn’t pick anything up for your valentine yet? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. According to this chart published by Billshrink.com, 50% of all Valentine’s Day cards are sold in the six days prior to Valentine’s Day. (Apparently there are a lot of last minute shoppers out there!)

But no matter what you plan on picking up the chances are it will cost you a decent chunk of change. Over the years Valentine’s Day has grown from a special day for lovers to a multi-billion dollar business. These days people don’t just buy gifts for their significant others. They buy them for their kids, co-workers, friends and, sadly, even their pets. (Sadly there is no data on how many of the “pet” buyers have human valentines as well. I’m guessing not many!)

So don’t fret when you look in your wallet this Sunday and see nothing but pocket lint. It happens to all of us!

Over the past few years consumers have largely ignored saving for retirement. Choosing to invest their money in real estate instead. We don’t need to tell you how that’s worked out.

However, the National Penn family of banks (which includes KNBT, Nittany Bank and Christiana Bank & Trust) have just released a new IRA Savings account that makes saving for retirement easy for everyone. Consumers can walk into any National Penn affiliated branch and open a new IRA Savings account for as low $25! You don’t need thousands of dollars to start saving…just $25 smackers! The idea is to get everyday people to start thinking about retirement and saving for the future.

Under the theme “It’s the even I can afford an IRA” IRA, we’re helping National Penn promote their product through web banners, radio, print ads and billboards. Check them out! And don’t forget to open a National Penn IRA Savings account today!

IRA Savings Billboard

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will introduce a module that will allow Gmail users to view a stream of status updates from their connections.

The Journal source says the new feature is designed to make it easier and faster for users to share media and status updates with friends. It’s likely Gmail users will be able to monitor activity on other Google properties such as YouTube and photo sharing site Picasa. No word on whether the module will compete with TweetDeck and allow users to monitor live feeds from Twitter and Facebook.

Ordinarily, a minor move, until you consider the facility with which Google organizes and captures information. Marketers might want to keep an eye on this one.

As a B2B ad agency we deal with people from nearly every walk of life. Doctors, contractors, truck drivers, nurses, packaging professionals and a whole slew of other professions you probably haven’t even heard of.

When working with clients such as GGB (a leading manufacturer of plain bearings) and Garlock Sealing Technology (a leading manufacturer of sealing products), we work very closely with a lot of engineers. It always amazes us when we’re told we have to be very direct with this audience. No humor or creative thinking allowed!

This video for the fictitious Rockwell Retro Encabulator clearly contradicts that thinking. Made by electrical engineers, this video mocks the technobabble that’s so prevalent in B2B marketing. As you can see, engineers do, in fact have great senses of humor. They’re also a heck of a lot of fun to work with!

Enjoy.

Measuring buzz is getting all of the buzz.

First we had social media. Then we tried to quantify the conversation by counting Facebook posts and Tweets. We refined that metric by using algorithms that try to gauge the sentiment of the comments. Now we have Trendrr, a tool that, according to its website, “allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social network to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time.”

Trendrr lets you to compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating this comparison across a variety of sources. You can use Trendrr to track the brands of your company and the competition and view web-based metrics in chart form. The service comes in a stripped-down free version and several pay-per-month tiers.

Trendspotting isn’t new. Technorati has listed the top 100 blogs for ages. There have been articles about trendspotting (”The Trendspotting Trend“) and books, including 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade and cyberpunk novelist William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, a fascinating romp with a woman who is allergic to brands. But Trendrr goes beyond narrative. It distinguishes itself by gathering data that can be displaying and manipulated to provide a benchmark for future studies of a brand’s social media ROI.

While Trendrr attracted attention during the H1N1 virus scare last year, one of the most popular and clever uses to date came this week with the tracking of the popularity of various artists who performed at the Grammy award ceremony.

The charts show that on Twitter, the phrase “Lady Gaga” has averaged more than 10,000 mentions per day over the past three months. That, and other interest, has translated into song plays on MySpace, where her daily totals have hit the million mark three times since last November.

Other than the fact that the world is gaga over Lady Gaga, the charts show she’s trending well against female competitors Beyonce and Rihanna.

Want to know the buzz about your organization? There’s a chart for that.

One of the more intriguing trends in the digital word is use of the social graph. The phrase, coined in 2007 by Facebook, describes the network of contacts people have online.

“The social graph is the representation of our relationships,” Jeremiah Owyang writes in “Explaining what the ‘social graph’ is to your executives.” “Today, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social websites.”

Social graphs are charts that map the links among a person’s online networks. Ben Ullman, senior visual designer at Bank of America in Charlotte, NC, uses circles and lines to organize the links. My social graph uses icons representing various social networking sites to display the relationships: it’s available at my website and on Flickr. People use social graphs to chart their entire online presence or their relationships on a single site, such as Facebook. You can find more examples at Social Graph Central or by using the “image” tab on major search engines. Loic Le Meur has created a video that outlines the process.

“Everyone has a social graph,” Ken Mallon and Duncan Southgate write in Advertising Age. “In fact, the point of social networking has been to build one. We will now see services like Facebook and Google start to use social graph data more aggressively as we move away from the ‘destination web’ towards a ‘social web’ whereby people get information through their networks rather than a specific site. Facebook’s new ‘reconnect with’ feature is one implementation of social graph data.”

As a way to identify influential people, the social graph isn’t new. Malcolm Gladwell wrote convincingly about influentials who use a traditional form of social networking, word of mouth, in his first book, The Tipping Point. “Word of mouth is something created by three very rare and special psychological types, whom I call connectors, mavens and salesmen.” What’s new is the ability of others to track down and quantify the networks of those thought-leaders and deliver them to the sales staff.

That’s significant, because while we (and our clients) may not be aware of social graphs, online data aggregators are, and they can use that data to target customers. Google recently released a new application programming interface called Social Graph API that allows its users to find the “public connections” (friends, coworkers, etc.) of a URL (blog, social networking profile, etc.). An API is a program that enables interaction among other software programs, such as an application that sends posts from Twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. You can view the Google Social Graph API video here.

Mallon and Southgate see this as a call to arms for the industry. “In 2010 there will be a heightened need for brands to understand how to be more social in order to access these more segmented networks.” For marketers who want to reach their most influential customers, the social graph could become the next holy grail.