B2B MARKETING POSTS — After testing the social media waters through much of 2009, I see B2B marketers waking up to the fact that successful social execution requires more than setting up group pages on LinkedIn, opening a corporate Twitter account, or posting videos to YouTube. To have the greatest impact, marketers will need to focus social media marketing efforts at the tail end of the customer acquisition and selling process -- at creating long-term, vibrant customer relationships -- not on building brand or generating leads. To turn social opportunity into marketing advantage requires marketers to adopt a community (in contrast to broadcast, direct, or one-t0-one) marketing mindset. It also requires new organizational structure, roles, processes, and incentives to help your company "get smart" about how it interacts with prospects and customers online...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — It’s been almost 18 months since I wrote Hispanic Social Technographics Revealed, which highlighted this consumer segment’s very strong inroads using social media of all types. And in that time, the volume around how, why, and when companies should use social media has grown even louder. Likewise, Hispanics' engagement in social media has grown...

DIGITAL INFLUENCE BLOG — We are a company of communicators. We embraced social media years ago as a new way to communicate for ourselves and, also, for our clients to push their business forward in new ways.We have always had a social media policy to help our staff use social media productively. The recent decision by Forrester to restrict their analyst/bloggers to publishing within the Forrester blog domain (vs. allowing them to publish personal blogs outside of Forrester and grow their personal brands that way), has kicked up a dust storm of opinions...

CONVERSATION AGENT — We know that what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff wrote in Groundswell a couple of years ago is true: people do use technology to tap into each other and get things done. The addition of this new overlapping group confirms something to me that I've suspected for a while - conversation is a technology, a framework to create the conditions for something to happen. More than any other grouping or label in Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, it signals availability and intention to connect...

GROUNDSWELL BLOG — Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That's because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs. Well, it worked. Despite the rapid pace of technology adoption, the rungs on the ladder have shown steady growth, with some (like Joiners) growing faster than others (like Creators). We have analyzed data for 13 countries, for business buyers, and even for voters. My colleagues and I have done profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors. In all that time, only one thing has been bugging me: there was no place for Twitter. We fixed that today...