Next week is the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego.  (Having a “summit” in San Diego in February is GENIUS!)

I’m doing a 3 hour workshop on how to avoid social media stall out.

This is for the B2B social media crowd.

Keeping business to business marketers inspired to keep on keepin’ on with their social media is probably one of the bigger challenges.

B2C companies get it all a little more easily than the B2B crowd.

That amuses me, however, because it suggests that when people go to work buying and selling products and services for business they somehow leave their human parts at the door. It’s like they morph into analytical robots that only buy things based on quantitative analysis.

If that was the case every law office in America would not look like this:

If there is anything in the world that people probably buy more on instinct and emotion it is B2B products and services.

• How much money will your business accountant really save you this year?
• How perfect are those annual meeting notes your attorney drafted?
• How much money will that new plastic conveyor belt save you over 5 years?

You have no real idea what the answers are to those questions.

You just believe the sales guy that stopped by your office and told you things.

You are telling yourself you are buying intellectually. But really you are buying for unconscious reasons:

• You like the sales guy.
• The company you are buying from is the industry leader and you want to be associated with the best
• They take you out to lunch.
• If you are a really great potential customer they fly you on their private jet to sit in their NASCAR box seats.

You can’t possibly analyze a business product thoroughly enough to estimate how much money it is going to make you or save you. Eventually you have to take a leap of faith.

And with that, the B2B company selling their products have an advantage if they know how to use it. They will make the sale on the relationship building more than the features and benefits of the product.

For sure you have to have awesome features and benefits. But everybody has those – or at least they say they do. What will set you apart is the relationship.

This is where social media comes in.

If you had started a social media plan you believed this at some point.

But as time goes on you very likely lost sight of why you started in the first place.

That’s where I come in with this session.

I have 3 main goals I want to get across at the session:

Goal #1: Why doing social media is a good idea.

I want to discuss metrics that hopefully will inspire the group to remember (or learn for the first time) why social media is so important.

Like this, for example:

Social media is like this whether you blog, tweet, LinkedIn or Facebook. You get more leads if you actively engage in social media. I’ve got several of these types of slides.

Goal #2: Stop torturing your followers.

So often I see B2B companies sending out the WORST messages in the social media world. They are not interesting and are entirely self-serving.

There is no better way to alienate you and your company by just being a boring marketing message in the social media world.

This segment will include a series of examples of how people continually torture their followers. And then we’re going to have a workshop where we, as a group, come up with a super awesome viral marketing plan for one the people in the group. I’m especially looking forward to that. The group strategy sessions almost always come up with amazing ideas.

Goal #3: Tracking your way to success.

We are then going to finish up with different tools and techniques to monitor and track success. There are so many great, cool tools for helping you measure social media. We’ll look at as many as I can fit in.

One of my personal favorites is: http://www.socialbro.com/

That should be more than enough for a 3 hour workshop.

I’m really looking forward to it all. Rocky and Indy (my amazing wife and awesome kid) are coming with me. So I’m especially looking forward to LEGOLAND on Sunday.

 

I have 3 overarching desires in my life:

• Be in control of my own time.
• Travel.
• Gadgets.

Coming to the Consumer Electronics Show covers all 3 of those areas.

I’ve been wanting to get to this show for some time. But I haven’t been able to make it work until this year.

I would be lying if I’m here strictly because I want to study the crossroads of Web marketing and electronics. I’m here because I LOVE electronics.

But it also happens that every piece of marketing I do comes across on these devices. So understanding the bleeding edge of what is going on in this space isn’t totally superfluous.

I’m also here as press. I would suggest trying to go anywhere as press when you can. People are just nicer to you. We are in an age where the lines between consumer and press are becoming increasingly blurred. It’s not difficult typically to get access to a big event as press. In fact, the bigger the event the easier it usually is to get press access. They just don’t have time to vet everyone extremely closely.

Doing a search for “press credentials template” on Google Image search will give you a good starting point for making a press badge, if you need it. If you are a photographer, here is a good article on How to Get A Photojournalist Press Pass.

At any rate, last night I went to “CES Unveiled.” It’s was a press-only event featuring 75 exhibitors that were bringing something new to market.

Some of the more interesting things I saw where:

Augmented reality being made possible by ST ERICSSON:

 

BiKN.com is offering  active infrared to keep precise track of things that matter to you. This is especially cool if you need to locate something within about 800 feet. Your kid is a good example.

Tobii Technology has been doing eye tracking for years. But they are now starting to test eye tracking for consumer-level applications. They feel this is the evolution of using your finger on a tablet. In 5 years you might just look at things to interact with them.

Goal Zero is bringing out super easy to use battery packs that will charge anything & be charged BY anything – Sun included.

Here’s a video of the Parrot AR DRONE Hovercraft. This remote device has interesting video surveillance applications… particularly for reporters.

A new way of creating objects. http://Sculpteo.com Make custom 3d art at home. Here’s an ashtray that was designed and then “printed” in 3d by Sculpteo:

There were only 75 vendors at this unveiled event. I would say there were at least 15 of them that had really  innovative stuff. That’s a pretty impressive percentage, if you ask me.

I also saw a ton of speakers, cases and headphones for the iPhone. I don’t know if I saw one thing for an Android device. Every once in a while I would see something that could also be used on an Android.  That strikes me as odd when you consider this:

COMSCORE: Android Has 47% Of The Mobile Market – Business Insider

The Android platform reaches just under half the mobile market at 47%, according to the latest numbers from comScore.

I could understand this at another, less innovative, show by just saying, “they’ll get to it next year.” But there was so much innovation in this one small room last night that not addressing Android more seemed like a glaring issue. But there are thousands of other vendors here. I’ll keep my eye out and let you know what I find.

Today is “Press Day.” There are a whole lineup of press conferences from:

• LG Electronics
• Intel
• Monster
• NETGEAR
• Sharp
• Audiovox
• Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc.
• DISH Network
• FUJIFILM
• Samsung
• Nokia
• Panasonic 2012
• NVIDIA
• Ford/NPR
• Sony

I will be tweeting the event for the rest of the week live. So if you are interested in this stuff you can follow it all here:

http://twitter.com/sagerock

 

Well really I don’t care who you make sweet love to:

• Twitter followers
• Facebook fans
• LinkedIn connections
• Foursquare mayors

Just love, love, love ‘em.

Chris Brogan said it much more professionally here:

Our Responsibility as Media Channels

Attention is a currency, and if we spend too much of other people’s attention on frivolous posts and shares, we risk losing that attention.

As social media becomes easier and easier to do you have the ability of sending endless garbage to your followers.

I actually saw Guy Kawasaki (no I’m not linking to your Twitter profile, Guy) go on stage, as the keynote at a Search Engine Strategies conference and show how “easy” it was to get people to retweet anything he said.

He randomly picked a recipe off of some site (live on stage) and we watched as people just mindlessly retweeted his garbage.

I was embarrassed for everybody.

The only way you can win the content wars is through quality… not quantity.

Take a look at this Followerwonk report Comparing of Twitter followers of graywolf & leeodden & aaronwall - 3 highly regarded search marketing experts.

(If you’ve never used Followerwonk, I highly recommend playing around with it a bit. It will show you Twitter in a way you never saw it before.)

Follower Wonk: Twitter analytics, follower segmentation, social graph tracking, and more

Here are their Twitter accounts (unlike Guy Kawasaki, I’d strongly encourage you to follow all three):

• Michael Gray @graywolf
• Lee Odden @leeodden
• aaron wall @aaronwall

Here is a comparison of the average number of tweets each of them do a week:

You can see that graywolf more than doubles the number of tweets leeodden does. And aaronwall is a small percentage of both.

All three of these guys got on Twitter about the same time. (Actually leeodden and graywolf literally joined Twitter the very same day.)

I ran this report on November 17, 2010. As of that day here are the total number of tweets each did:

• graywolf - 42,925 tweets
• leeodden - 19,797 tweets
• aaronwall - 4,884 tweets

Graywolf is prolific.

But take a look at this chart of average number of new followers per day:

Leeodden is outpacing both of them.

And then finally, here are the total number of followers:

 

• graywolf - 17,214 followers
• leeodden - 33,264 followers
• aaronwall - 22,488 followers

That chart also shows the cross-over of followers for each of them.

Here is what I DON’T want you to take away from this:

Leeodden having more followers (and getting more followers every day) has nothing to do with the number of tweets he sends out. Do not try to reverse engineer the number of tweets you need to put out to be successful.

Aaronwall gets more followers per day than graywolf even though he “barely” posts (compared to the other two).

The secret to leeodden’s success is quality. He puts out really good material.

I highly encourage you to read some of his blog posts and his tweets. It is evident that he spends a significant amount of time on his content.

Leeodden is making sweet love to his Twitter followers down by the fire. (I really wanted to make that the title of this post. But I chickened out.)

Following aaronwall is no biggie for you. He doesn’t post a lot but it’s a good read. So please follow him too.

Graywolf is a lot of information. But I still want you to follow him. That’s because he is doing important work in testing the boundaries and capabilities of Twitter. He is a well known experimenter in Twitter automation.  Even though there is a lot of automation, you might find it hard to separate the automatic stuff from the live stuff. His Twitter feed is quite good.

By following others who are very successful in social media, you can learn techniques to make yourself more successful.

But it all just boils down to this:

Love your followers. 

Oh… and as an added bonus, there are 41 people that all 3 of those guys follow. And then there are another 19 that graywolf and aaronwall follow.

If you are seriously into the search engine world, you probably want to follow all of those people as well. But have no fear! I’ve put them in a Twitter list for your enjoyment.

You can get that list here:

Twitter / @sagerock/oga-special-list