Recently Focus released their Technology Marketing Handbook (no registration), a compendium of marketing tips, tricks and trends crowd-sourced from us technology marketers ourselves. It covers the hottest topics being discussed in technology marketing every day and provides some interesting points of view from some of the great minds in our industry.

I was honored to be included in the handbook and will provide an overview of the top 7 trends covered by me and my peers.

The first pleasant surprise in the handbook was to see my SAP colleague Sara Larsen included in the list of “Marketers to Watch in 2012.” Congratulations Sara! Well deserved.

The 7 Trends In Technology Marketing identified in the Technology Marketing Handbook:

• Positioning and Branding
• Social Media
• Content Marketing
• Demand Generation
• Sales and Marketing Alignment
• Research and Planning
• Marketing Technology

Positioning and Branding

“Now more important than ever” and I couldn’t agree more. Some tips included in the handbook: keep it simple, include the brand in the whole customer experience, unleash your brand ambassadors, let the brand create demand, and focus on delivering on your brand promise.

Social Media

While Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn dominate the majority of social traffic, Focus recommends we not forget the “best of the rest.” The Focus community itself and other sites like StumbleUpon, Google+, Tumblr and lately Pinterest all play an important role for various segments and content types.

The technology marketers in the handbook recommend the following tips to avoid a social media backlash where senior executives start to doubt the value of social media: form meaningful conversations, add value for your community, dedicate resources, don’t over-promote and make sure we start with clear sets of goals.

Content Marketing

Focus makes the great point that while many technology marketers are talking about content marketing, the definition of good content differs greatly between marketers and our audiences. Content Marketing tips include knowing your audience (amen!), be brief, use simple language, avoid techno-speak (bits and bytes, speeds and feeds), and use real examples as evidence of value.

Demand Generation

The guide calls this the lifeblood of technology marketing, the biggest priority for CMOs and I do not disagree. It starts with a well-defined process, an understanding of the buyer process, a well-defined content strategy to ensure your content meets buyer needs and a clear nurturing and automation process.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales alignment is one of the greatest challenges for technology marketers in companies of all sizes. Quality vs. quantity of leads, the conversion process and the marketing mix (how many events?) are all challenges that many technology marketers face every day.

Some solutions offered in the handbook include defining leads, “walking a mile” in sales people’s shoes, having regular meetings to brain storm, get senior leadership alignment and make sure that customer needs trump any dead locks.

Research and Planning

I was thrilled to see this listed as a technology marketing trend along with the “return of marketing strategy” and the “renaissance in research and planning.”  Some trends identified for research and planning include a focus on quality over quantity, lean research, DIY research and crowd-sourcing.

Marketing Technology

How could a technology marketing handbook not talk about marketing technology? There has been a rush to marketing automation and automated lead nurturing that has often focused on buying technology and not on defining the best processes and aligning marketing and sales lead definitions. Any technology process needs to include a 360 degree focus on people, process and technology aligned to strategic objectives.

You can download the full Technology Marketing handbook here and thanks to Focus for the opportunity to provide my thoughts.

We are in a battle for customer attention and focusing just on social media is a mistake too many businesses are making.

Only effective integrated marketing approaches can help us reach consumers when, where and how they want…

I spoke Wednesday night to an amazing crowd at the Philadelphia Business Marketing Association (@PhillyBMA).

I challenged the group of marketers and business people from companies both large and small to first determine their objectives before starting any social media plans.

I guided them on practical tips to help determine what metrics should be used to determine success and to have a content strategy to support the content needs of your audience in all the channels where they consume content.

I spoke briefly about organizational models, the importance of SEO and Search Engine Marketing techniques in determining how buyers search, what are their top challenges and how best to reach them and their influencers.

We also discussed the power of personal branding and the amplifier effect that can be achieved from employees being active and engaged in social media, no matter what their interests or skills are. We talked about the importance of blogging and how blogs are an important and effective tool in the social media arsenal.

And yes, we covered the “Social Media ROI” and related questions. We also discussed the Altimeter Group’s Social Hierarchy of Needs and what steps SAP is taking to reach social enlightenment such as driving Community, Employee enablement and rapid response.

I hope you find the slides useful for your efforts in driving effective social media techniques. And if you have a question for me or our team, let me know in the comments below…

But now, the consumer marketplace is fragmented almost beyond recognition. We receive more marketing messages than we can handle and the battle for customer attention has moved from being mainly about the medium to technology to content.

If “content is king,” then customer attention is the “Holy Grail.”

That was how I kicked off my presentation to the International Advertisers Association in New York on January 20, 2012. Here is an overview of the presentation and the slides as well…

When I was young, the way to reach the typical American household was relatively simple: TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, mail and phone were the common tactics. 1974 was also the year when the first UPC was scanned at a U.S. supermarket ushering in a new era of marketing information. For the first time, marketers could track all 4 Ps systematically to understand the place where all their products were selling, at what price and on which promotion.

20 years later, the internet and the PC age ushered in the next step in this evolution, where software and technology allowed businesses to take even greater advantage of customer information in order to determine how best to reach consumers. At this point, the marketing playing field was leveled as any business could setup a website and market to their audience.

Today, we are all connected. Information flies around the world in real time. Consumers are participating on both ends of the spectrum as content producers and as content consumers. This process has in many ways “dis-intermediated” marketers, agencies and publishers and our ability to control the message. Now it’s the cost of content that has come down to close to zero.

And so, I think it makes sense to go back and consider the aim of marketing: “to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous” (~ Peter Drucker). But when businesses are not selling something as truly customer-focused as something like the iPad, they have to pay to acquire new customers with promotional messages and approaches.

This has caused the mess that many of us see today. Marketers have spent more and more time and effort chasing an audience that is increasingly rejecting marketing messages. This is causing a decrease in the ROI of outbound campaigns like direct mail, telemarketing, email and banner ads.

The answer to all this is Content! We have to stop pushing messages and start creating messages our audiences are interested in. We need to be more interesting and we need to distribute interesting content in multiple forms across all the channels where our customers are consuming it. To quote Ryan Seacrest from CNNMoney.com / Fortune Magazine:

We’re seeing platform, technology, and content all converging, and it’s happening quickly,“ It’s exciting to me. There’s an appetite for more original content than ever, and I have a company that creates content, whether it’s distributed in short form, reality form, live form, or game form.

The crux of the problem for marketers, agencies and publishers: marketers have budget but in many cases do not have the content our audiences are interested in. Publishers have great content, but cannot get consumers to pay for it. And agencies are at risk of being left out of the party as new models emerge combining paid, earned and owned media.

So how can marketers, agencies and publishers work better together? According to Susan Popper, SVP of Marketing Communication at my employer, SAP:

“We need strategic “big” ideas that blend paid/earned/owned. Our greatest challenge as marketers is staying fresh and relevant..in a fragmented environment so the right people can see you at the right time!”

I concluded the talk by urging marketers, agencies and publishers to understand that there is a whole new, real-time, hyper-connected world in media and marketing.  To make it all about their customers.  And to balance customer needs to be informed, educated and entertained. Now, I’m interested in your thoughts…?

The largest estimates came late Tuesday from InMobi who estimated smart phone advertising revenues have increased by almost 500% and tablet advertising was up nearly 800% from a year ago.

Then this week, BtoB Magazine released their “2012 Outlook survey” showing how online advertising is poised to see significant growth in 2012 as well.

With all this recent news, I believe it offers hope that marketers are beginning to catch up to consumer media habits that are shifting away fr0m traditional marketing channels like print to more engaging forms of content on social, mobile and digital channels.

BtoB magazine’s “2012 Outlook” survey reported that 41% of B2B Marketers will increase spending in 2012 while 48% will see their marketing budgets remain flat.

Despite the almost-half that are keeping budgets flat, online ad spending will see a significant increase over last year. 74% of marketers reported that they will increase online ad spend, the largest increase compared to events, print and direct mail.

The areas included in the survey’s definition of “online” includes websites, email, social media, search, video content and webcasts/virtual events. Additionally, the survey revealed that 70% of B2B Marketers are using social media and 24% mobile marketing in their 2012 marketing plans.

In a bow to this growing trend, The “Digital Marketing edition” of BtoB Magazine was released on a platform created by digital magazine publisher NxtBook. This may be a further sign of things to come for traditional print media as some publishers consider the costs of print and declining ad sales and subscriptions for all-print media.

A separate article in the magazine provided some guidance on actual growth estimates.

• Global ad spending will grow 5% while Online will grow 11.2% according to media investment firm MagnaGlobal
• ZenithOptimedia reported global ad revenue to grow 4.7% while online advertising is projected to grow 12.7% with decreases in TV, newspaper and magazines.
• Both project online ad revenue to approach a 20% share of all ad spending.
• And in an editorial, the magazine also listed social media, mobile marketing and content marketing as the top 3  B2B Marketing trends in 2012.

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Well it didn’t take long for reports to surface that both were taking off – maybe even faster than mobility experts predicted.

In the last week, 2 reports surfaced: bid management firm IgnitionOne reported that mobile search advertising was up 269% in the fourth quarter vs. the same period last year.

Then, mobile analytics firm Flurry updated it’s report from last summer that showed that time spent on mobile apps has been higher than time spent on the web since June of last year!

Mobile Ad Revenue

In addition to the 269% increase in spending on mobile search ads, IgnitionOne also reported that mobile impressions were up even higher at 317%. Suggesting that the increases in mobile search usage continue to outpace spend despite these triple-digit growth rates.

Meanwhile, an article in Digiday covering the IgnitionOne study also reported that another search ad company, Marin  software was reporting that mobile search as a percentage of all search has doubled since the third quarter of 2010. Marin reported that mobile search (smart phones) comprised 6% of all searches while tablets garnered an additional 4% share of total search.

But are mobile search ads more effective? Marin reported that smart phone and tablet ads generated 31% and 37% higher click through rates than traditional search.

Digiday reports that users are “migrating” their search patterns to mobile devices but I’m not sure I agree. I do agree that advertisers should consider mobile search as an important part of the advertising mix and should allocate funding to mobile projects immediately. Additionally, marketers need to consider mobile-optimized content and mobile-optimized landing pages and websites to meet the needs of their audience. So it is not just about ad dollars but ensuring the right content strategy and platforms exist to support these efforts.

(Late Day Update: TechCrunch just reported the latest numbers from InMobi and they are even more impressive. Smartphone ad impressions are up 488% while tablets experienced 771% growth from prior year on their platform.)

Mobile App Usage

And to support my contention that mobile search may not be coming at the expense of traditional web consumption, the Flurry report shows that time spent on mobile apps is simply increasing, to 94 minutes per day as of December:

TechCrunch reports that we should consider this data cautiously since it uses Alex and ComScore data using differing methodologies and is not necessarily the best way to determine web browsing patterns. But regardless, the trends pass the sniff test.

Flurry reported that over 40 Billion apps have been downloaded since the launch of the iTunes and Android mobile app marketplaces and it doesn’t appear that the increases in use are slowing down. They also reported that the decreases in time spent on the web was due to less time spent on Facebook. They reported that time spent on the web minus Facebook was up 2% from June to December.

The most important categories of mobile apps are Games (at almost half of all downloads), followed by Social Networking, Entertainment and News apps.

The Bottom Line

Get mobile and get it done fast.

In 4 Steps To Mobile Success, I outlined these actions:

1. Create a mobile-optimized website
2. Develop mobile-optimized content
3. Allocate funds to mobile advertising
4. Consider games, apps and tablet ads relative to your audience

In closing, I like to point to this chart from Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 presentation so you can look to your own spend and ask if you are keeping up with the media consumption patterns of your audience?

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And now, after playing in the traditional marketing margins for years and chasing smaller and smaller response rates, many marketers are realizing that we have quite literally reached the point of no return with much of our outbound marketing.

The future of marketing is inbound. And one of the biggest challenges with inbound marketing, or pull-based marketing across businesses of all sizes is establishing the mindset for pull. Pull puts customers first. Pull seeks to deliver value. And so, inbound marketing is quite simply defined by this simple phrase from Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan (@bhalligan): Get found!

And once we paint this picture, most marketers say : “Great. Now tell me how to get it done!” So here are 7 steps to getting found with inbound marketing.

1. Name Your Customers

The first step in inbound marketing is an old-school marketing technique but is so often forgotten: research your customers. It starts by defining and understanding the buyer “personas” who are already interested in your solution category. Name them. Define the common buyer-journey back-stories and narratives about them. Get to know who these people are in as real a way as you can.

2. SEO. SEO. SEO.

So do you think SEO is important? It is maybe the most important part because nothing can happen without solid keyword research and a keyword strategy. A real understanding of the customer should take a deeper-dive into the actual keywords your audience uses when searching for solutions. Everyone uses a search engine and researches the big-ticket products they buy. SEO can also help you to understand how they think about the solution and the words they use when they talk about it.

3. Media Consumption

This is a step many people skip but it is really important. What you should define as best as you can is the percentage of time your audience spends in various media channels such as print, online, TV, mobile, social, etc. Then you can model the appropriate mix for your audience. Mary Meeker has already told us that we are way under-spent in online media and mobile.

4. Create Content

Once you know who your audience personas are,  what keywords they use, what buyer journey they take and what media channels they use, you should look at the content you have and see if it meets each of those scenarios. Then develop an editorial calendar to fill the gaps. I have spent a lot of time on Content Strategy lately as this topic is becoming more widely discussed by marketing folks across every industry and size of business. I personally believe marketers should seriously look at blogging because this allows you to test all the elements of inbound marketing. And you can see the results in real time and adjust your strategy.

5. Identify Influencers and Get Social

Everyone uses a search engine and everyone is on a social platform. But don’t make the mistake of so many marketers and setup your social accounts and just start sending out traditional promotional messages. Social requires a different form of engagement. My advice is to find the top influencers in your space. This might include customers, bloggers, media outlets. Then simply ask them how you can best reach your audience or ask them to help you. Worst case scenario is to just emulate what they do.

6. Share With Care

Inbound marketing doesn’t mean you stop promoting anything. It just means you take a more customer-focused and value-based approach. And every channel has certain unwritten rules of etiquette to ensure you are not considered a self-centered blow-hard. For example, on Twitter, some people follow the Twitter 4-1-1 rule. This means that for every 6 tweets, you share other people’s original content 4 times, you RT someone else’s content 1 time for every 1 promotional tweet. And by promotional, again, I mean simply sharing valuable content, not overly promotional crap no one wants. Now this only talks about Twitter but you should determine your own rules for all channels.

7. Response Management

I have always believed that the most important step in the social maturity of any organization is to identify their social response management resources and processes. The ultimate end state will produce a social business where every employee is helping to tell your brand story in some small way. And sales people become more social (and less direct) sales people with strong personal brands. The bottom line is that when someone asks your company a question, that someone at your company is setup to respond quickly to meet the near-real-time expectations we all have.

These are the 7 steps I recommend as you get started on your inbound marketing plan. What do you think? Have I missed anything?

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There are some prognosticators that would have you believe that 2012 is going to be a bleak year for business. The Euro zone will continue to implode, Iran will develop a nuke, The U.S. government will become insolvent and the world, as we know it, is going to end.

Well, I am an optimist and plan to present an alternative view! I believe 2012 offers tremendous opportunity, especially for businesses to grow and for marketers to continue to play an increasingly important role in the transformation of our world economy.

The Bad News

Inc. Magazine is suggesting that you should brace for two scenarios in 2012: bad and worse. They identify the leading causes of their pessimism as the troubles over European debt, stagnant U.S. growth and the U.S. government’s belt-tightening.

From a technology point-of-view, Henry Blodget is a little angry that his internet went down for a bit and thinks that after 17 years, the internet is “still broken.” Maybe he’s right and maybe he was just venting some steam or trying to generate more ad sales.

My friend Steve Olenski also predicts that the “Internet is dying a slow death”  and television viewing as we know it is over. But I think what he is really saying is that information delivery over the web and on screens is morphing into a more consumer-directed affair (i.e. – apps, on-demand viewing).

In the end, everyone knows that it is the consumer who drives the world economy.

The Alternative View

I don’t believe that looking at the geo-political landscape or to yesterday’s technology is a decent indicator of the potential or opportunity inherent in today’s business environment. I believe we are at the dawn of an amazing time in business and here’s why:

Booms Come After Busts

After years of decline and one of the greatest recessions in history, there simply isn’t much pruning left to do. Sure there will be some mini-bubbles and mini-bursts as the housing market removes the backlog of foreclosures, but in many U.S. markets, housing is starting to pick up.

I came into the working world after a recession in the early nineties and who would have ever guessed at the growth we would see in that decade. I have since come to realize that the world operates on cycles and I’m not talking about the Mayan calendar.

Businesses will start hiring again and they will start to spend money on capital projects at a much higher rate than the government pulls back. The business cycle has taken a little longer to heal but I believe we are more likely to take off in 2012 than we are to regress.

Consumers Are In Charge

As I said, it’s the consumer who drives business growth. Whether it’s tablets, smart phones or the social apps and internet connections these consumers are after, today’s consumer are increasingly in charge. And these technologies have no boundaries and are connecting people that don’t have electricity or toilets.

They are helping to drive change in the geo-political world and they are driving change in businesses of every type. The innovations available to consumers today are almost staggering: cloud computing, social networking, mobility. These are all trends that will continue to take off as a new digital generation of consumers and information workers begins to collect paychecks.

“Transparency” is not just a buzzword for these folks. Companies will need to deliver on their promises or they will pay very dearly and very publicly for poor user experiences. I believe this will put increasing pressure on today’s businesses to react in real-time to the challenges they face. Companies will need to analyze more data than ever before but more importantly, they will need to act on the information in near real-time as well.

Marketing Is Leading The Change

Marketing is nowhere near perfect.  Instead of offering “marketing resolutions” for the New Year, I suggested these 7 things that marketers need to stop doing. But I believe Marketing is the group best positioned inside most businesses to help lead our companies to address the majority of these challenges.

We are the only group that is organized to address the needs of the market en masse with large-scale programs and response management approaches that improve customer satisfaction. We will support sales with social selling as the entire business seeks to understand what it means to operate transparently in a social world. And we will align more tightly with our customer service counterparts.

Marketing will need to continue to deliver more tangible business results while also representing the needs of the customer. And this is becoming more and more important as this balance now plays out publicly.

Marketing is also best positioned to help our colleagues analyze consumer data, interpret trends in the market and the impact they have on purchase behavior. Years of media buying have allowed us to understand the changing nature of media consumption and the importance of adding value in the customer journey.

And finally, marketing knows best how to create content that can best meet the needs of a more demanding audience. Just look at Coca-Cola’s “Content 2020″ initiative.

Now all this puts a lot of pressure on today’s CMO and may be why they feel unprepared for today’s market conditions. There is a vast amount of data (aka “Big Data”) required to manage today’s customer and marketing landscape and a lack of digital skills in today’s marketing departments.

But I am confident we will engender an audience-first marketing mentality as we re-tool and re-train our work force to meet the data and digital requirements of modern marketing.

And we’ll use “the big three” of  Social, Content, and Mobile marketing to reach these demanding audiences in new ways that help to drive businesses forward.

Maybe your marketing department is “the little engine that could.” Well I think that it can and will in 2012. How about you? You with me?

The amazing photo is “Love on Tehran`s Roof” by mohammadali thanks to Corbett Barr.

And if you are trying to drive positive change in your organization, sometimes a picture is better than a thousand powerpoint decks.

So to help you, I have curated some of my favorite marketing infographics that touch on some of the most important issues in marketing today like online marketing, content strategy, inbound marketing, mobile marketing, blogging and storytelling.

I hope these infographics help to inspire your objectives and efforts as we kick off 2012!

Quick Links:

1. “Storytelling vs. Corporate Speak” - by Lou Hoffman
2. “Blueprint for the Perfect Blog Post” – by Brian Rice
3. “The Actions, Motivations and Influence of Brand Advocates” – by BzzAgent
4. “The Size of The Mobile Market“ - by iStrategy
5. “The Noob Guide To Online Marketing” – by Unbounce
6. “The Content Grid version 2” – by Eloqua
7. “The Modern Marketer” by Hubspot
8. “Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing: The Dawn of Marketing You Won’t Hate“ - by Voltier Digital

“Storytelling vs. Corporate Speak” - I love this one from Lou Hoffman, (@louhoffman) CEO of the Hoffman agency. To me this captures the heart of what is wrong with most marketing today.

“Blueprint for the Perfect Blog Post” – by my colleague and fellow co-founder of Business 2 Community (@B2Community) Brian Rice (@BrianSRice) shows you exactly how to create blog posts that will generate the highest traffic and the most social sharing you can get with great content…

“The Actions, Motivations and Influence of Brand Advocates” – by BzzAgent (@BzzAgent) shows us that brand advocates are 83% more likely to share information about a product than typical web users, and 50% more likely to influence a purchase.

“The Size of The Mobile Market“ although this one from iStrategy (@iStratBuzz) is over a year old, it still shows that half the planet is covered by mobile technology with over 4 Billion Mobile Phones worldwide . See how that compares to other technologies…

“The Noob Guide To Online Marketing” – I love this one from the folks at Unbounce (@unbounce) because it explains in simple terms the whole online marketing landscape and also provides a guide on the steps you can take…

“The Content Grid version 2” – by Eloqua‘s (@Eloqua) Joe Chernov (@jchernov) is a must-have in every marketer’s arsenal of infographics and this new version updated last year maps marketing goals to the buyer journey to content types and outlines the metrics for each…

“The Modern Marketer” by Hubspot (@Hubspot) is technically an “infotoon” (and good for them for making up that word) but this one correctly makes the point that the hardest part of modern marketing is in creating an audience-first mindset.

“Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing: The Dawn of Marketing You Won’t Hate” - by Voltier Digital (@voltierdigital) is one of my favorite posts in 2011 because it helps to define the business case for change in marketing…

Photo is “Sunset is served!” by Milena T. thanks to Corbett Barr.

I mean if you want to lose weight, the steps are pretty simple, right?  Exercise every day, weigh yourself once a week, count your calories.

But sometimes it’s not about what you need to start doing, it’s really about what you need to stop doing that is so important. Everyone knows that if you can only do one thing to lose weight it is to stop eating so darned much.

So here’s my list of 7 things for marketers to stop doing right now.

And if you follow these steps, just think about all the amazing business results you’ll achieve and how great you’ll feel when it comes time to put that bathing suit back on!

1. Stop making everything all about you. Put your marketing super ego aside and start making your marketing all about your customers. Putting your audience first in everything you do is probably the most important resolution marketers can make. But this can only happen when we lay aside our human tendency to self-preserve. And that my friends, takes courage. But don’t worry, we’re here to support you.
2. Stop making everything so darn complicated. Sometimes my mouth moves faster than my brain and I confuse the acronym K.I.S.S. Is it “Keep It Stupid-Simple” or “Keep It Simple. Stupid!” Certain situations might require either interpretation. And this is so true for many of us marketers as planning and tactics and details are part of the skills we need to be successful. But in the end, the simplest path is often the right one – as long as you stay focused on adding value to your audience.
3. Stop acting like an automaton. Read your website, your emails, or your latest campaign and ask yourself if the copy is written in the way you would write a personal email to a friend or if it is written by a computer for a machine. Get personal. Be human. Be interesting. Take a risk and tell a personal story or two. I often debate whether the difference between B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing still exists. The real answer is that to be successful in both, you have to simply relate to people and be more human.
4. Stop speaking to yourself. Many of us in marketing are speaking to ourselves. We never get out of the office and when we do, it might be to a conference to speak to other marketers who are just like us. So stop insulating yourself. Get out and speak to a customer. Talk to your colleagues in sales. Make great friends with the CIO and the CFO. If you’re an introvert, that’s OK. Do some customer research. Analyze search traffic and keywords. The point is to allow the realities of the outside world to guide your perspectives.
5. Stop focusing on tasks and activities. Ask many marketers how they did last year and they will tell you how many campaigns they executed. But is the number of activities completed any real measure of success? We need to start focusing on results. To be successful in marketing today, we need to contribute to the business using metrics the business uses. That’s why you need to be friends with sales, finance and the technologists. Make sure you have the tools you need and understand the process inside your company well enough to analyze what really works.
6. Stop being anti-social. You can still be an introvert and yet be social. We live in an increasingly social and inter-connected world. And as a marketer and a business person, I think it’s an imperative for all marketers to get active on social platforms. If you have friends or family, then you can start right now. Connect with them wherever they are. Start there and see how it goes. Follow people who you think do it well and emulate them. Find an existing blogger (like me) and ask to contribute a guest post. There are easy ways to dip your toe in the social waters. You have a brain and a personality and a perspective on the world that you can share in order to start getting involved in social conversations.
7. Stop holding on to the past. The “good old days” of uninformed and disconnected buyers ain’t coming back. Your audience is more informed than some of your own sales people. And they are telling their friends. They are also open to having a relationship with you based on common value and trust. So start by giving them what they want: educational content, maybe entertainment or even some sought-after distractions, not unwanted interruptions and meaningless promotions. Change has come to B2B Marketing. Are you Ready?

So it’s my first day back after a nice, long and relaxing holiday break. I thought that it was a good idea to try and define some ideas for things we should stop doing. But my brain isn’t quite firing on all cylinders yet. So what have I missed? What things should we stop doing right now?

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Maybe there is just something in the human psyche that requires us to count the progress we’ve made, to recognize the success we’ve achieved, to learn what works so we can emulate it and to learn what didn’t work so we can eliminate it.

Whatever the reason for humanity’s obsession, here’s my simple objective: to share with you the B2B Marketing posts that generated the most traffic, conversation and sharing in 2011. I hope you found some value in the body of writing I created this year and I cannot thank you, my readers and supporters enough, for making this one amazing year.

And wishing all of you great success in 2012!

Will Content Strategy Save Marketing? In this post I ask if Marketers are up to the challenge of meeting the changing needs of our audience. And if Content Marketing is the answer. Based on the traffic, the highest number of social shares of any of my posts and a healthy exchange of comments, this was by far my biggest post of the year.

Change is Coming To B2B Marketing Here I used some great facts, some poignant quotes and a “call to arms” to ask our marketing peers if they were ready for the changes that have already become obvious in marketing today. This article had my highest number of comments and 2nd highest traffic.

20 Quotes To Inspire Your Marketing This post came out of nowhere to be the third largest traffic generating post on my site. I love these quotes and use them often. I hope you find them useful as well.

The 10 Traits of Successful Social Marketers The top traits of successful social marketers are not hard to identify. Having an audience-first mindset, understanding SEO and “walking the walk” all define some of the top characteristics. And apparently, this information is in high demand as this post took a top 5 spot with tons of traffic, huge social sharing and some decent comments.

Is This The End Of Social Media? This was one of my 1st StumbleUpon successes as this provocative post argued that we were entering the end of the beginning as social media becomes a basic skill for businesses to master if they want to reach their customers. The post also ranked high on all other measures.

Here were some other top posts from 2011 in case you missed them:

The Biggest Mistake Marketers Make

Have The Right Content. Help Your Buyers. Get More Customers.

The Traditional Marketing Playbook Is Dead!

How To Create Killer Content: Speak To A Customer

5 Steps To A Better Business Plan

Now I hope you will follow along in 2012: on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Subscribe. Have a great and happy New Year!

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