The experience did give me an appreciation for the difficulty of selling, though. In 20 years as an editor I had developed an attitude that’s common for people who produce products: I believed that most salespeople were overpaid, under-worked and basically lazy. My 15 months of hell taught me otherwise, and that’s why I was curious when Dan McDade sent me a copy of The Truth about Leads.

McDade Is an entrepreneur whose company, PointClear, helps businesses improve their prospecting and lead nurturing. The Truth about Leads is a short book – only 101 pages – but it’s packed with sales wisdom. Some of McDade’s advice will be difficult for sales managers to hear, but it’s hard to argue with his logic.

McDade believes that most companies invest far too much in lead generation and far too little in lead qualification and nurturing. Salespeople are too quick to discard leads that don’t show immediate potential, preferring to focus on the small number of opportunities they can close quickly. In doing so, they squander opportunities to pursue long-term relationships that can yield far more revenue over time.

This behavior contributes to the chasm that exists between marketers and sales people in many organizations, particularly B2B companies. Marketers throw large numbers of leads over the wall to sales because that’s what they’re paid to do. Sales people don’t effectively follow up on longer-term opportunities. Each party complains about the other’s incompetence.

McDade (left) lays equal blame on both parties, concluding that the net effect is “about 95% of generated leads are not effectively pursued by sales.” Lead nurturing takes time and persistence that few sales people have and fewer sales managers tolerate. The reality is that it may take 10 to 12 calls and e-mails to get the attention of a single prospect. Most sales people give up after three. And even that is only the beginning. Ten percent of qualified leads close within three months, but 45% will close within a year if they are properly nurtured. The good news is that the leads that take the longest to close are the most likely to be good sources of repeat business. Once they’re convinced, they’re all in.

McDade is particularly critical of the cost-per-lead (CPL) metric that is commonly used to measure marketing effectiveness. CPL drives marketers to outsource demand generation to unskilled contract telemarketers or to purchase lists of dubious quality. These tactics can generate a lot of names, but not many qualified leads. “Fewer than 7% of leads passed to sales by marketing should be,” McDade states.

In his view, lead qualification is a far more productive investment than lead generation because it focuses sales resources on the opportunities that have the highest conversion potential and the greatest long-term value. Lead qualification also demands cooperation between marketing and sales, which is something most companies badly need. Marketers should be rewarded for making sales successful, not throwing names over a wall.

The Truth about Leads has numerous other tactical gems that salespeople will appreciate. The section on selling to pain rather than opportunity is right on the mark as is the persuasive case McDade makes against “appointment setting,” a practice that focuses sales resources on meeting with people who have a lot of time on their hands.

The Truth about Leads does what a good business book should: Defies conventional wisdom with logic born of experience. Reading it is two hours well spent.

But with Facebook becoming the place you just have to be for businesses of all sizes, a little marketing know-how comes in handy. I recently spoke to Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media at the small-business-focused e-mail service provider Constant Contact about how to go beyond the Facebook wall and make the social network a practical and measurable small business marketing platform.

“When we look at what platforms our small business customers are using for social media marketing, 94% of them are on Facebook,” Schmulen said. However, “Most small businesses are doing Facebook without knowing why they’re doing it.”

That’s the herd mentality at work. While it’s pretty easy to create a Facebook page, the task of convincing visitors to create persistent relationships through the “Like” button and to engage in conversation requires different skills. Forrester Research has estimated fewer than 15% of people who click a Like button ever visit the page again. Getting that repeat traffic is the special sauce of Facebook success.

Here are five tips that Schmulen recommends:

Tip #1: Know what your goals are. Sounds simple but it ain’t necessarily so. Depending on the business, goals might range from generating orders to attracting subscribers to building thought leadership. Whatever your goal, you need an offer to match.

Archway Cookies and Fortune Cookies are both focused on trials, the first through coupons and the second via a contest. Vindale Research isn’t in the food business, though; it wants to recruit people who are interested in getting paid to take surveys.

Each company matches its offer to its goal, whether it’s a free trial, information or downloadable assets like ringtones. Offers should always include a clear call to action, and you can use rotating FBML (Facebook Markup Language) pages to test different offers. If you lead with your wall, you’re missing an opportunity.

Tip #2: Make your offer shareable. There’s a Facebook phenomenon called the “power of 130.” The average Facebook member has 130 friends and the fastest way to spread a message is through social sharing. Facebook automatically offers members the opportunity to share a Like, but the real creativity comes when you can convince people to share some kind of unique content or offer you provide.

For example, Intrepid Travel invites visitors to play a trivia game and share results with friends. Players can also sign up to visit the exotic places highlighted in the game. Each answer to the quiz is shareable, as is the final score.

Tip #3: Keep it simple. Intel’s Facebook welcome page features product promotions, a gateway to its international pages, jobs, discounts and even a Twitter feed. Intel can get away with all that because it’s Intel, but for most small businesses, less is more, Schmulen recommends. He favors an approach like that of Fitness magazine, which rewards new fans with “our all-time favorite abs workout!” Fitness has a variety of other offers on its Facebook presence, but it leads with the simplest one.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have multiple offers, but give each one its own page and rotate them through different promotions. It’s easier to test results that way, too.

Tip #4: Promote everywhere. “’Field of Dreams’ was a horrible move for people who are learning about marketing,” Schmulen says. “Just because you build it doesn’t mean people will come. When you create a campaign, share it across all your social networks and e-mails. Use every channel you have.” I couldn’t have said it better.

Tip #5: Measure. Surveys, A/B tests, website analytics and marketing automation are essential tools for professional marketers, but you don’t have to be a statistician to understand whether or not your campaigns are working. Facebook’s built-in analytics give you a pretty good idea of what’s sparking conversation on your page. Take the 10-minute tour and learn what they mean. PageLever is one of the first independent Facebook measurement tools, and I expect there will be more. You can also use free and simple utilities like Bit.ly and Google URL Builder to track the popularity of links you post on Facebook. Most commercial e-mail services also offer pretty good metrics to show which messages are resonating.

Schmulen ticks off some factors to consider: “How many people visit the landing page? How many participate in the offer? How many share the offer? If people visit the page but don’t take the offer, it isn’t compelling enough. If they accept the offer but don’t share it, it isn’t distinctive enough. A great campaign gets people to connect, accept your offer and share it with their friends.”

Getting people to Like you is just the beginning, of course. A really effective Facebook presence is an ongoing conversation with lots of questions, challenges and responses. For inspiration, you could do worse than look at Constant Contact’s Facebook wall, where the company constantly seeks input on everything from new product ideas to the choice of band at a celebration party.

I’ll admit my biases up front. I’ve known author Katie Paine since her days as a PR pro in the 1980s and am an unabashed fan. For the past five years I have worked with her closely as a member of the Society for New Communications Research, which awarded her its “Fellow of the Year” distinction in November. I am also quoted on the back cover of the book, although I did not get a chance to read the full volume until recently.

Like many former publicists, Paine has smoothly migrated her relationship-building skills into the social world, but unlike most of her peers she has chosen to specialize in numbers. That’s a good thing for the rest of us because social media marketing, like PR, has always been challenged by the lack of reliable success metrics.

Paine (left) believes that anything is measurable if you know where to look, and in this book she offers plenty of ideas. Measure What Matters isn’t about social media as much as it is about the importance of relationships and the need to understand how they equate to success. This is an important point because many of the tools Paine recommends work well in any medium.

In fact, one of her favorite measurement tools – the Grunig Relationship Survey - was invented in the days before blogs and Twitter, but is every bit as useful today as it was a decade ago. Even conventional research tools like mail surveys and focus groups still have their place, Paine argues, despite the fact that many people consider them to be passé. The point isn’t for organizations to argue about tools but to figure out the best ways to measure success. If that means counting mentions of a brand in newspaper headlines, so be it.

Volume 2

Measure What Matters is essentially a revised and expanded version of Measuring Public Relationships, a self-published 2007 title that I reviewed here. This time Paine has a major publisher at her back and the benefit of many new tools to tackle, including Twitter and Facebook. When you scan the table of contents, however, you’ll see nary a mention of those social networks. Instead, the author focuses on identifying constituents, defining messages, selecting tools and reviewing and tracking results. The role of communicators in a democratized media world really hasn’t changed all that much. They still seek to communicate a message or favorable impression. While there are a whole lot more tools they can use to do that today, the noise level is also a whole lot higher.

The book is chock-full of gems, ranging from useful asides like the fact that 40% is a good response rate for an employee paper survey, to the exhaustive list of 27 different types of conversations in chapter 4. The “five phases of engagement” in chapter 5  walks readers through the process of understanding how relationships proceed from initial impression to purchase advocacy. That chapter also features an eight-step process for analyzing social media content that keys in on core issues like understanding how the message was received, how it was interpreted and who did the interpreting. PR veterans will recognize many of the same concepts here that they have been using for years. In some respects, the world hasn’t really changed all that much.

Chapter 11, which looks at crisis communications, imparts basic wisdom that I hadn’t even considered. For example, the definition of “surviving a crisis” is situational. Long after the initial damage has been swept away, the reputational fallout of a crisis may make the company vulnerable to a takeover or limit its ability to attract quality talent. Paine also astutely points out that good relationships with customers, analysts and other influencers may prevent a crisis from occurring in the first place, an outcome that is almost impossible to measure.

The final two chapters look at measurement tactics for nonprofits and educational institutions, two clients with which Paine has extensive experience.

Paine’s practical and time-tested advice is a welcome relief to a Klout-obsessed world that seems more taken with fans and followers than with business results. I highly recommend it.

A recent survey of more than 2,000 small businesses by e-mail marketing provider Constant Contact found that 81% say they now use social media for marketing, up from 73% in the spring. Furthermore, a significantly larger percentage agreed with the statement that social media marketing is “easy to use,” “doesn’t take up too much time,” and “works with my customers” than did so in the spring. Facebook was identified as the most effective tool by a comfortable margin, but Twitter, LinkedIn and video sharing are all creeping up.

It should be noted that the majority of respondents to the Constant Contact survey were customers, which means they are already marketing online. Other research studies over more general populations have indicated that small businesses still lag far behind large enterprises in their adoption of social media tools.

It’s also worth noting that 81 percent of respondents use face-to-face interactions to connect with customers or prospects, underlining the fact that Facebook has its limits.

A new global study of chief marketing officers (CMOs) at midsize businesses released today by IBM shows that marketers are concerned about improving customer engagement but are unclear about how to proceed. More than seven in 10 respondents said they aren’t sure how to improve customer loyalty at a time when peer reviews and open sharing are making customers more informed, more critical and less loyal. Only 40% are taking the time to understand and evaluate the impact of consumer-generated reviews,  blogs and peer rankings on their brands.

The CMO research further reveals that 62% say they are unprepared to take advantage of the opportunities presented by mobile commerce and 72% say they don’t know how to cope with declining levels of brand loyalty that could result from easier comparison shopping. So while midsize firms may be using social marketing, they aren’t necessarily confident in the results.

There is no question that the concept of “social business,” which is being promoted by IBM and others, is gaining traction. Social business involves using tools both inside and outside the organization to unearth knowledge, improve business responsiveness and create new paths for engagement with customers. The concept has gained momentum in the form of “intranet 2.0″ platforms, which augment traditional intranets with Facebook-like features.

An IBM study of more than 4,000 Information Technology (IT) professionals from 93 countries and 25 industries found that adoption of the social business concept is erratic and geographically influenced. Indian companies were three times as likely to have embraced social business concepts as Russian companies. The US and China showed strong adoption rates, but both lag India by a significant margin. The research, which was conducted by IBM’s DeveloperWorks organization, also showed rapidly growing acceptance of cloud computing as a platform for application development and a swing toward developer preference for the Android mobile operating system.

If, as many people believe, small and midsize businesses are leading indicators of economic growth, then there’s also good news in survey of 1,295 small and medium business IT professionals conducted by Spiceworks. The study found that IT budgets grew 9% in the second half of 2011 compared to the first half. That’s the largest increase in two years. Nearly one third of SMBs said they are planning to hire new staff, which is also an improvement over the stagnant staffing rates of the past two years.

Disclosure: IBM’s Midsize Business organization is a client of Paul Gillin Communications.

That doesn’t have to be the case, says David Brody, Managing Partner at North Social, a software as a service company that specializes in serving small and medium businesses (SMBs) with a suite of Facebook apps that they can quickly integrate into their Facebook presence. I talked to Brody about tips for SMBs that want to optimize their Facebook presence.

It’s not about the likes. Research has shown that few people who “like” a Facebook page ever return to it. That means that getting a like is a means to an end, but not a goal.

“This is a test-measure-modify world,” Brody says. In other words, experiment with different offers and incentives to build fans and then measure those that deliver engagement and return visits. Remember, this isn’t direct mail, and your cost of trying something new is basically zero. On the flipside, simply getting someone to click a button is not enough. “‘Excite, Educate, Motivate’ has replaced ‘Awareness, Trial, Purchase,’” Brody says.

Match the offer to the business. Those ubiquitous iPad giveaways may not be doing much more than delivering business to Apple. Brody tells of one business owner in Atlanta whose offer of a flat-screen TV as contest prize yielded only 60 new likes. Maybe the problem was that the company is in the heating/ventilation/air conditioning business. An offer of offer of free or discounted air conditioning equipment might have played pretty well in Atlanta during the summer.

Capture and communicate. Facebook pages and apps offer easy ways to collect e-mail addresses. This creates a permission-based vehicle to continue a conversation. E-mail and news feeds can be used to deliver an ongoing stream of information that reminds people of who you are. Clif Bar asks first-time visitors to like its page in order to sign up for a newsletter, while Moosejaw Mountaineering touts giveaways, rewards points and tips..

This doesn’t mean e-mail is obsolete, but with inboxes mail clogged and people spending an hour a day on Facebook, the newsfeed has become an attractive alternative channel.

Use Facebook for sampling. Conventional wisdom holds that product samples need to be distributed on the street or unsolicited to the mail. It turns out Facebook can be an even better channel. One North Social customer that makes pretzels distributed 10,000 samples in less than 24 hours by sending them to people who liked its page. People who have opted in for a sample are more likely to be buyers than passersby in a supermarket. Audience quality more than compensates for the higher cost of distribution.

Be creative with promotions. You don’t have to incur manufacturing or mailing costs to distribute incentives with value. Think of a digital asset you can create that has zero marginal expense. Dentoola consulting gives away reports on how to apply social media in the dentistry profession. The Animal Print Shop gives away desktop wallpaper. You can exchange a like for a customized press release at Hunter PR.

Buy ads against pages of competitors or similar products. The great appeal of Facebook ads is their narrow targeting. Davids can ride on the backs of Goliaths by targeting ads to fans of much bigger brands. “If your product is candy, buy ads on the Skittles page,” Brody says. It’s the fastest way to find candy lovers online.

Keep the message simple and change it often. Don’t flatter yourself by thinking people will spend a minute on your page trying to figure out your message or offer. “Facebook is the equivalent of an out-of-home billboard,” Brody says. “You only have a few seconds to make an impression. Keep your message to a few words and make it compelling.” Remember the earlier point: You can always change the offer and test something new.

Get people involved. Brody is no fan of the automated tools that enable page owners to auto-post content across multiple social platforms. “No one wants to be friends with a robot,” he says. “Motivate your alpha evangelists.” Games, quizzes and giveaways work well, particularly if they challenge the audience to be creative.

One midsize business that Brody thinks does a lot of things well on Facebook is footwear maker Sanuk. From its provocative “like” message to its offbeat video to an online store that juxtaposes user comments with product shots, it provokes conversation at every turn. North Social’s examples page has plenty more.

I opened both envelopes without realizing what was inside and had to chuckle at how I was taken in. They fooled me good. And then I thought about what that says about the state of direct marketing today. Have we sunk so low that we need to trick people into reading our messages? Is it any surprise that forecasters expect direct-mail marketing to decline nearly 40% over the next two years?

Dump the Junk

Like many people, I’m less interested in reading mass marketing material today than I’ve ever been. There’s far too much good stuff out there. More than 90% of the material that enters my mailbox goes straight to the recycling bin. I unsubscribe from any e-mails that don’t offer clear value to me. Unsolicited e-mail simply gets blocked. Fooling me doesn’t make me a prospect; it makes me mad.

There are some marketing messages, though, that are so valuable to me that I actually look forward to their arrival. Here are a few that I welcome into my inbox:

Bulldog Reporter’s Daily ‘Dog –  This e-mail arrives every morning packed with news and insight about the latest happenings in media and corporate communications. It’s so useful that I make it a point to read every issue, even if that means saving them for a few days until I have time.

Marketing Charts – This is an invaluable daily digest of the latest market research in media and consumer behavior. I bookmark many of its summaries for later use and frequently tweet two or three items out of an issue.

HubSpot reports – The maker of “inbound marketing” software regularly sends alerts about new white papers, tip sheets and e-books that highlight best practices in social marketing. I downloaded and read most of them. I tweet almost all of them.

Someecards – They make devilishly funny and marginally offensive greeting cards, and I love their stuff. The weekly newsletter is always good for a laugh. I’ve bought several branded items from their store.

Editor & Publisher Daily – This newsletter is little more than a curation of articles from other sources, but the fact that E&P puts it together in a compact, scannable format makes it one of my most useful daily reads. It’s a prime source for my Newspaper Death Watch blog.

Gizmo’s Freeware – Why pay for commercial software when products of equal or greater value are available for free? Each of these daily newsletters spotlights a different category of goodies I can get for nothing.

Other than a general media and marketing theme, these communiques have little in common other than the fact that they enlighten or entertain. With the exception of Gizmo, all the companies have something to sell. I may not buy from them, but I sure do help promote their wares. With 9,400 Twitter followers, 1,200 LinkedIn connections and regular columns in BtoB magazine and The CMO Site, I can extend their reach at very little cost to them. And I do, nearly every day.

Think Like the Customer

This is direct marketing that doesn’t suck because it delivers value that I can share to enhance my own value to others. When you think in terms of what your customer wants, rather than what you need to sell, you create new channels of word-of-mouth awareness.

Lots of direct marketers still haven’t bought into this idea. In the weeks leading up to DMA, vendors contacted me with offers of movie tickets, gift cards and a chance to win an iPad. These are the same corny come-ons I’ve heard from tradeshow exhibitors for nearly 30 years. Does this stuff really work anymore? Are serious buyers really willing to endure a half-hour sales pitch to get a crummy pair of movie tickets? And if so, were they serious buyers in the first place?

If you want access to my inbox and to my network, help me build my professional profile by making it easier for me to help my friends and contacts. Make me look smart, because I’ll return the favor.

But please, save the postage stamp.

My presentation to this week’s DMA conference is below.

Influence measurement is a natural evolution of conversation monitoring, a discipline that’s personified by Salesforce.com’s Radian6 tool and dozens of competitors. Monitoring is a solid practice that can keep you in touch with the topics and brands people are discussing online. Most tools now also provide some degree of sentiment analysis, which attempts to derive attitudes from comments. Sentiment analysis is devilishly difficult to get right, however. If a teenager calls something “sick,” it’s a compliment. Coming from a 50-year-old, it’s an insult. Most experts I’ve spoken to on this topic say that sentiment analysis tools are at best 70% accurate.

Topaz Partners has developed the "Circle of Influence" to depict the different factors that go into decision-making (Click to enlarge). TopazPartners.com

This isn’t stopping vendors from tackling the even more complex issue of Influence analysis. This goes beyond sentiment analysis to attempt to determine a person’s ability to drive action. The problem is that there are lots of variables and intangibles to influence that resist being boiled down to a single number. For example:

• What is action? A “like” or retweet is a form of action, but not necessarily one that leads to a decision.
• Online actions have different gravity depending upon the stakes and the effort involved. Writing a comment takes more effort than clicking a “like” button. Posting a blog entry referencing someone else’s words is more involved than writing a comment.
• Which actions really matter? I have yet to see a tool that can correlate influence with purchases or donations with any degree of certainty. We assume that conversation about a topic influences decisions, but are they the decisions we want? A lot of people have been talking about Hewlett-Packard lately, but I doubt it’s driving profitable sales of HP products.
• Influence is contextual. If I’m considering buying a Yamaha stereo and find a blog entry from someone who exhibits deep knowledge of the model I’m considering, that person may have a disproportionate influence on my decision, regardless of the number of followers or subscribers he has. The weakness of most influence analysis tools is that they abstract broadly, looking at things like reach and amplification. However, decisions are more likely to be influenced at a micro, rather than a macro level.

One of the most illuminating books I’ve read on this topic is Influencer Marketing by Duncan Brown and Nick Hayes. The authors argue that the influence of media in general, and social media in particular, is greatly overrated. They count no less than 50 kinds of influencers, ranging from resellers to academicians to government officials. Most of them have little or no online visibility, but their knowledge, leverage and/or connections make them enormously influential. What’s more, the larger the purchase, the greater their influence tends to be.

I don’t agree with everything Brown and Hayes say, but I commend them for resisting the urge to oversimplify. Their basic message is that influence and audience are two different things. Celebrities can have huge audiences but little power to affect decisions. Conversely, people with very deep knowledge can have small audiences and great influence. Seth Godin said it well: Small Is the New Big.

In the mainstream media world, audience was associated with influence because we had few tools to understand the true dynamics of decision-making. Our natural tendency is to apply this same metric to online conversations. The danger of this approach is that social media is more about quality than quantity. In the same way that early automobiles had steering mechanisms that mimicked reins, we are applying old assumptions to a new medium. I’m not saying that influence measurement tools are inherently unreliable, but they are attempting to measure what may be immeasurable. Just be skeptical.

I actually think insurance is a fascinating business. It involves taking calculated risks about the unexpected. Insurance companies need to know a lot about the world around us, because their business deals with so many variables, from accidents to earthquakes to the chance of being hit by a meteor. This morning’s audience of about 100 social media practitioners truly believe in the value of new platforms to reach their customers, although they have understandable concerns about the many regulations that govern what they can say.

Here are some notes I took away from the three speakers on my panel.

Gregg Weiss (@greggweiss) of New York Life says the company’s social media content strategy is driven by constantly asking, “What can we do that isn’t about life insurance?” This was a theme that was borne out in every presentation: It’s not about the company but about what motivates customers.

A sampling of what New York Life has done:

• Partnered with the NFL on a “protection index” of pro football teams;
• Created the New York Life Game of Life in partnership with Hasbro. The goal was to get people talking about financial stability and have a chance to win the popular board game;
• Hosted a Twitter chat about Halloween safety.

New York Life has carefully cultivated more than 100,000 likes on Facebook. “We believe 60% of our Facebook fans are prospects,” Weiss said.

His best story actually had nothing to do with insurance but everything to do with using social marketing to build loyalty and word-of-mouth awareness.

He told of buying a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts: milk, no sugar. But when he got to the office, he found the beverage was loaded with sugar. “I couldn’t drink it.” He tweeted his dissatisfaction. Within two minutes he had a reply tweet from the head of corporate communications at Dunkin’. She asked for a phone call, during which she apologized and offered a gift card, which arrived in the mail two days later. “I tweeted about Dunkin’ Donuts’ great response,” he said. “It was a huge win for them. “

His  advice to social media marketers: “Think big. Everyone in this room has the power to change things at your company. That’s incredibly empowering.”

Quotable: “The VP of Social Media at New York Life is the hundreds of thousands of people who have online relationships with us.”

And finally, “Seek a higher purpose. I hope someday to hear a story of a kid who got to go to college because a parent bought a life insurance policy from us.”

Kelly Thul (@kellythul), State Farm.

State Farm got started in social media when it set up a blog to find New Orleans-area employees and agents who couldn’t be located after Hurricane Katrina. “Within 24 hours, that blog was key to our locating ever agent and employee,” Thul said. Today, State Farm is all over Facebook, with pages for the corporation, careers, Latino customers, the Bayou Classic football event and an innovative youth-oriented forum called State Farm Nation (right), where people can “discuss life’s challenges and opportunities, connect with others facing life-shaping decisions [and] find helpful tips and information.” With 1.3 million likes, it’s doing pretty well.

The insurance company’s YouTube channel has had more than five million views, many for its TV commercials. The ads have spawned parodies, but Thul says the company is pretty sanguine about them. “If people care enough to have a bit of fun with you, that’s OK, as long as it isn’t brutal,” he said.

State Farm evaluates social media opportunities using four criteria:

• Relevance to business strategy;
• Role clarity: who is responsible for talking and responding;
• Measurement criteria;
• Activating platforms.

These four criteria provide a framework for making a rapid and relevant decision about new platforms and opportunities like Google Plus.

Words of wisdom: “People want to be heard. If they believe you’re listening to them, they’ll like you a little more.”

Theresa Kaskey (@TheresaKaskey), Director of Brand Management and Strategy at the John Hancock Financial Network, joined the company without any plans to get involved in social media. John Hancock had no social media strategy at time. Today, it’s 80% of what she does. There’s been a long education and adoption process, but company management is buying in, she said. John Hancock recently launched its first blog, Build4Success, and it’s posted nearly 40 videos on YouTube. Unlike the other two speakers on the panel, who speak primarily to consumers, John Hancock Financial Network’s audience is financial advisers.

YouTube has been one of its early successes. “We created more than 80% of our launch content in one day,” Kaskey said. “We had a meeting of our advisers and brought them into a room one by one to talk about how they delight their customers.” It’s been a low-cost, high-return recruiting success.

Words of widom: A key element of successful social media programs is “It’s not about us.”

In a survey of marketers conducted by BtoB magazine last year, Facebook was ranked last in usefulness among the top five social networks, trailing blogs, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter, in that order.

Nevertheless, some B2B companies have mined gold out of Facebook’s audience, particularly for recruiting young college graduates. Let’s look at some examples of what they do well.

Storage maker EMC makes particularly good use of Facebook’s “Welcome” page. This is an under-utilized tool that enables companies to present an HTML page as their default front door. It’s done with an application called Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) but there is little difference between FBML and HTML.

The advantage of a Welcome page is that you can use all the tricks of an HTML page, including hotspots, embeds and even forms. Buddy Media uses it to capture leads, as does e-mail marketing provider Infusionsoft. SAP plays inline videos. Use welcome pages to present an attractive and exciting introduction to your company.

EMC has several FBML pages, including a list of its other social media accounts and a game you can play only after liking the page. EMC doesn’t use Facebook’s wall to much effect, but its purpose seems more promotional than interactive. On that front, it hits the mark.

Other B2B companies that use their welcome pages well include VMWare, Lenovo, UPS and Intel. Fedex uses a cool Flash animation to link to its sub-pages. SocialMediaB2B.com has a nice roundup of Eight B2B Facebook Landing Pages

Conversation Equation

LinkedIn is all about efficiency, but Facebook is about generating discussion, even if it’s around trivial things.

For interactivity, it’s hard to beat Intel’s page, which has racked up nearly 2.7 million likes*. Intel uses its wall to great effect. Its language is perfect for the young Facebook audience, and its questions and challenges are often offbeat and fun.

“It’s 2026…what are your devices able to do?” Intel asked last week. Nearly 1,100 people have responded. Wow. Earlier in the week it used an in-line poll app to ask “What content are you most excited to see on our Facebook page?” Interestingly, videos and product announcements topped the list.

Cisco is also terrific at generating discussion. A post on Monday offered fans the chance to win a Casio camera by telling how the Cisco Unified Computing System can benefit their business. That’s a great way to generate word-of-mouth, because posts are shared with people’s friends. Contests and giveaways work well on Facebook.

Cisco also has a clever concept called the SuperFan, which is a recognition awarded to their most active visitors. There’s no money involved: SuperFans get their name and face on the Cisco page, and that’s good enough for many of them. Here’s how it works.

Salesforce.com leverages Facebook to drive attendance to its many events. The company knows that its core audience is sales professionals, and it uses discounts, referral bonuses and contests to reach these individuals. Salesforce also post lots of photos of people, which reinforces the image that this is a company with a personal touch.

Desperately Seeking People

One of the most popular uses of Facebook for B2B companies is as a recruiting tool. Facebook has an app to support career postings on your page, but some companies take it to the next level.

UPSjobs goes beyond simply posting job opportunities. It makes the extra effort to quickly respond to inquiries from its fans, often within a few hours. As a result, UPS has turned the tables on traditional recruitment: People come to its page seeking jobs because they know they’ll get a rapid response. As a result, most of the wall comments are from people who want to work for UPS.

Microsoft celebrates its interns on its recruiting page, which is a smart move given the young demographics of the Facebook audience. Sodexo is a master of using social media for recruitment. It uses apps for Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Foursquare to pull its content from other social networks into Facebook. This company’s entire recruiting effort  – it hires about 5,000 people in the US every year – is built on social media. Check out its impressive recruitment site, which lists the many social channels it uses. Other notable careers pages on Facebook include Shell, Hilton and Abbott Laboratories.

Takeaways

Now that we’ve looked at examples of Facebook best practices, what can we learn from them? Here are some of my takeaways:

Have fun. I think of Facebook as the after-hours social network. The style that works best is relaxed, informal and a little edgy. Be personable and distinctive. No company does this better than M&M Mars, whose Skittles page is closing in on 19 million likes. Its style is unique: funny, unpredictable and tuned to generate response.

Respond. Facebook is a place for conversation, not publication. If people ask questions, you need to respond and quickly. One common mistake companies make with their Facebook pages is to launch them and leave them. Successful fan pages feature a constant stream of new posts by the company and quick response to visitor comments.

Be Colorful. Welcome pages are one of the big differences between Facebook and LinkedIn. They enable you to add a colorful and multifaceted dimension to your presence. The best welcome pages have lots of entry points and a vigorous, hip feel.

Share. One aspect of Salesforce.com’s Facebook presence that I particularly like is its willingness to share content from other sources that its audience may find useful. This not only makes the Salesforce.com fan page a resource but builds goodwill with the sources it links to.

Ask. Firehouse.com has built an impressive Facebook presence for its audience of firefighters and emergency medical technicians. “Is your department participating in National Night Out?” It asked earlier this week. It’s “Sunday Morning Roll Calls” sometimes generate hundreds of responses. Something as simple as asking people what they plan to do for the weekend can create interaction.

* I’m personally not a big fan of tracking page likes as a measure of success, particularly since Forrester has estimated that less than 15% of people who click that button ever return. What impresses me more about Cisco’s Facebook presence is the number of likes and comments that individual wall posts receive.

The more sophisticated practitioners are turning toward metrics that indicate engagement. Examples include comments, retweets, shares and subscriptions. Now Awareness Networks has contributed some important new thinking to this topic with a free e-book entitled “The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing.” (Full disclosure: I am quoted in the book but did not contribute meaningfully to the methodology and received no compensation.)

Awareness outlines five priorities that companies should define in becoming a best-in-class social marketer:

• Measure and Grow Social Reach
• Monitor Social Conversations
• Manage Social Content
• Practice SEO
• Measure and Analyze Social Activity

Not surprisingly, the company has tools that help in many of these areas, but that’s one reason its research is so useful: The recommendations are based upon the experiences of more than 100 customers.

The most successful of those are reporting direct correlations between social media marketing and sales, and they have certain practices in common. Most use at least three major social media channels, compared to less than two for the average company. They also have multiple presences within each channel, such as product-specific pages on Facebook. And they measure like crazy.

Nearly 80% of the companies Awareness surveyed use social media channels to identify and respond to customer service issues and two-thirds use them for prospecting. Remarkably, only 18% said they have “formal tracking process in place to manage processes and better understand success criteria.” In other words, a lot of social media is still being done with seat-of-the-pants justification.

That’s going to change as more sophisticated metrics emerge, however, and here’s where this report has particular value. It describes four measures of content effectiveness that take into account multi-channel activity: Content-to-Contact Ratio, Comments-to-Content Ratio, Comments-to-Profile Ratio and Content-to-Share Ratio. I won’t describe these metrics in detail – you can find that in the e-book – but each speaks directly to the value of engagement.

As businesses spread their wings across increasing numbers of social communities, they need to get a better handle on what’s working and what isn’t. The cost of maintaining an effective presence is only going to go up as the market gets crowded, and it won’t be acceptable for only one in five companies to have meaningful measurements in place.

As I have noted elsewhere, our current obsession with counting fans and followers is an artifact of old media thinking. Online marketing provides much richer options for understanding how people interact with our content. Awareness’ e-book is an important attempt to try to nudge marketers toward realizing the potential of the information they gather.