An easy way to connect with influence

If you’re a follower of marketing and sales blogs beyond just this one, you’ve probably noticed all kinds of blogs and tweets sprouting up today around The Blog Tree, just released by Eloqua and JESS3.

And I think the attention is well deserved.

Every blogger has some kind of blog roll, but without guessing from the names or clicking through each and every one listed, it’s challenging to know what you can learn from them and what value they provide. And if you wanted to know what blogs influence them, how they’re connected to other blogs, or how they contrast and compare to the rest, you were out of luck unless you had hours upon hours of time to invest in research.

Until The Blog Tree.

At a glance, you can see the scope of the best content in the marketing and sales blogosphere and how it all works together. Joe Chernov, Director of Content at Eloqua, puts it this way:

“Anyone can cobble together a list of Twitter tips or 'must-read' blogs and crown themselves ‘content marketers,'” he explains. “But when you produce content that surprises, informs and delights, you don’t have to market it. It blooms naturally.”

I look forward to watching The Blog Tree continue to flourish as more thought leaders share their insights and fresh blogs emerge.

2011 Businesses need to respond in "Real Time"

In his recent book,  Real-time Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott gives many examples of companies that suffer from not reacting in real time to customer issues.  Going “real time” means preparing an organisation to react to what’s happening in their world, cohesively and adeptly. It requires planning for the future with room for ambiguity and change, and the flexibility to react from the top to the bottom of a company.

Going real time is something most companies, especially large ones, are not geared to do.  Now that customers have the power they do with social networking, with their conversations visible to all, Scott’s premise is that creativity and improvisation is required in the "real-time" culture that consumers now demand.

2011 Social marketing not just Facebook and LinkedIn

2011 and the years ahead will be a time when marketers start to get away from thinking of social marketing in terms of the limited information posted on Facebook or LinkedIn, and start to figure out how to influence and encourage the transmission of information across the vastly larger real social networks their customers inhabit.

A recent study at Harvard showed that information and influence travel up to three degrees across a social network. The information you communicate to friends, family and colleagues is often passed on beyond your network – possibly to thousands of people, most of whom you will not even know. Similarly, the information you receive each day may have traveled two or three degrees before it reaches you.

This is where the meat is for social marketers. In our connected world of Tweets, blogs, emails and posts, this information transmission is captured in electronic form, and what we know as “word-of-mouth” in face to face interaction has become “word-of-digital”, and it’s incredibly track-able and useful.