B2B business model is often selling enterprise level products to other business or providing services to another business, when the business will search for the product or service is when they have need for it, either direct need or indirect need, and in the case of direct needs, the business will look for the product or service that will solve the problem for them, in that case they will search for the companies that provide that solution, they select the companies( or product) based on the budget, how exactly the solution fits in for the solution they are looking for, and of course the brand or how trust worthy the company is to buy the solution from them, to get the answers for all these questions they have two options

1. Directly approach the companies
2. Do some research online.

If they are directly approached, its well and good, companies will have their marketing and support team in place to convince and add them to their invoice, but if the company choose the other way around to do the research online, they probably need to fed with proper information already, it is companies responsibility to be present where customer(company) going to do get their research details from, first place customer going to begin their search is from “www.google.com” or other search engines like bing and yahoo, their search could be anything like these:

1. How do i solve problem xyz
2. Who are best in providing solutions for xyz
3. Reviews on abc products
4. How to use abc product

As a company we need to provide contents for these topics, and ensure our information tops the list of search engine result page, and catches potential customers eye, not necessarily these contents should be provided from our blog alone, that is one mandatory step we need to make, also we need to ensure we have presence in all key areas like industry specific blogs, forums, websites etc literally wherever our potential customer goes fishing for information, we may have to write contents from third party point of view and refer to our primary website.

thats pretty much explaining why we should have blog and content presence, what if we dont do that?

Well, unless we do extensive advertising or we have super strong market presence, we are bound to get buried over the pile of information without getting noticed by the world, and if we are going to take word of mouth approach, you know how fast we are going to snail from customer to customer. When customers search for the solution exactly your product/service will solve, customer going to find the information provided by some other company merely matching their requirement, probably going to get in discussions for next stage.

we know why we need a strong content presence for the B2B company and what effect it will have when we dont, now let us see what needs to be done:

1. Have a corporate blog that talks about your product, not say ‘we have product xyz, wanna buy?’ sort of contents, but explaining each and every features and how it is going to solve real world problems, who could be best to write those content than your engineer, support and marketing personnels?
2. Have social media presence, not just just top three facebook, twitter and google+, but also those least popular sites even with the slightest chance of your potential customer might use it.
3. Talk customers language, replicate other customers language, this cannot happen in your own blog but in relevant forums, sites etc
4. Measure and channelize the flow, so your customer came to know about product/service, have proper ‘call to action’ in place.

Like always, open to learn and correct myself, let me know if you have any comments through comment section below:

when installing plugins to your wordpress blog, it is very important to note two things, it should not hard your existing theme, then it should not slow down your blog for its visitors and bottom line is to improve your blog in terms of search engine optimization, navigation ease for visitors, speed for the blog itself

below is the list of wordpress plugins I use in every set-up of my wordpress blogs, kind of default plugins for me.

• All in One SEO Pack – seo configuration for your blog
• Auto Post Thumbnail– generates thumbnail / features image for your blog posts first image, this is very handy if your themes uses featured image / thumbnails.
• Bing 404  – when a visitors lands with 404 page, he will be provided with possible urls to visit from your blog with the help of bing api
• Contact Form 7– simple contact form generator
• Crayon Syntax Highlighter– code highlighter
• Google Analytics for WordPress– to keep track of your blogs using google analytics.
• Google XML Sitemaps– very important if you want the blog to be seo friendly.
• PubSubHubbub– very essential plugin if you write original content and there is a possibility of contents theft, this one will report who wrote this article first.
• Spam Free WordPress– it will provide auto generated password that needs to be manually copied and pasted to write a comment, very effective in fighting the spam bots.
• Subscribe To Comments– name explains it all.
• W3 Total Cache– most trusted WordPress performance plugin. improves the speed and user experience of the site
• WordPress SEO– again another SEO plugin, not so essential but it is better.
• WP-Optimize- helps you to keep your database clean by removing post revisions and spams
• WP-PageNavi– if you have too many blog posts, you need better navigation system in place, this plugin does the job.
• WP Facebook Open Graph protocol – Adds proper Facebook Open Graph Meta tags and values to your site so when links are shared it looks great in facebook, g+ and linkedin.

You probably already know why you should be using twitter for business or branding, let me give brief intro for that and then head on to ” do’s and don’t of twitter for business / branding “, before starting my twitter handle is @diamontip

Majority of twitter users update their tweets very regularly from various apps range from mobile app to desktop religiously, so that means twitter has a engaged users, they follow tweet updates and update their status updates regularly.

This in return brands and businesses can access customer opinions, convey what they want to convey as a brand/business to its customers. And establish themselves as authority for the topic they choose.

And here’s the Do’s and Don’t's of twitter usage:

1. tweet only what your followers want to hear from you

2. tweet only about something relevant to your business / brand

3. retweet only that matters to your business

4. Maintain follower / following balance, normally if you are following more than your followers, it wont give a good impression.

5. Hashtag every ‘key’ words in your tweets.

6. Search for the hashtag and start talking/discussing with relevant tweeters.

7. Balance hashtag tweets + retweets + url tweets per day, all these three should not be more than your plain tweets per day.

8. Bio should be precise and to the point that explains about your business, brand, what your followers can gain by following.

9. Use good display picture.

Thats all i have for now.

I aint a subject expert to tell you what needs to be done, i am here to share my experience with setting up facebook page for the another project i am working on.

first why i wanted facebook page, i read this infographic at marketinconfessions , it states by the time we read these lines (average 1 min) , the following happens inside facebook

• 510,404 Comments
• 382,861 Posts liked
• 231,605 Messages sent
• 135,849 Photos added
• 98,604 Friendships approved
• 82,557 Status Updates
• 79,364 Wall posts
• 74,204 Event invites received
• 72,816 Pages liked
• 66,168 Photos tagged

that’s a lot of activity online, and all these activity carried out by engaging audience, all these numbers are already convincing to have a presence in facebook for the brands, but if you still wondering why, let me explain, as a business you need your own audience and connect with the right people and then engage those audience with your brand, that is were we need to create facebook page, a platform to engage customers along with the brand.

As of now i didn’t do much to my facebook page, just the page has been created, added admin details, linked twitter to the page wall, filled info section. Once i am satisfied with all the information i have provided in facebook page, it is time to get many fans/likes, that’s another milestone, as of now i have no idea how to go about it, will share once i find any.

Small story:

once upon a time Lion and Tiger were near the lake and about to drink water, just before that, Lion uttered a loud Roar, and Tiger asked “why now?! just you and me are here, don’t you think its foolish?!” Lion replied, “well, i am king of the forest and i have to communicate the message every now and then, that’s my Advertisement and sending the message nobody come near”

Rabbit over heard the conversation and thought “if only this noise is required i can make noise and drink my share of water peacefully” so practiced enough to give a roar with its squeaky voice while drinking water, one fine day Fox walking by wanted to see where the noise is coming from and spotted the Rabbit and ate it.

Moral of the story: “when you advertise, be prepared to deliver or handle the situation”

with the power of social media and with proper blending of Inbound Marketing strategies, you will start attracting prospective customers even before you really are something, when you land the customer be ready to deliver else communicate you are not doing it NOW!

why? :-

it is simply over promise and under deliver situation when you don’t deliver what is expected of from you, you are just burning a bridge or future opportunity lead. i am not saying to play it safe, i am saying “deliver” at any cost, if not politely say, NO and direct them in right direction.

when you put your future lead in right direction you make much trusted customer for you, who will turn to you in future as well.

well i am not a management or marketing professional, so i am not sure, i googled and i just found few websites talking exclusively about it, maybe they have different terms for it.

what is benefit selling is?

simply put, you sell the benefit the customers going to enjoy buy owning the product for its unique features etc., instead of detailing out the features.

why this works?

take apple iPod advertisements for example, instead of speaking technical details about the product, they simply say “it loads 12,000 songs, 8 hours of music, sexy chrome finish” that is they are selling the benefit not the product features, this eliminates the customers to put extra effort to relate the features to the benefit they might get.

and in psychology perspective everybody wants to help themselves first, then they are ready to help others.

if a sales person approach a customer and says, “hi buy this mp3 player, it has 8GB space, i will get good commission for each sale”, even if the customer is in need of it, he wouldn’t buy, he wouldn’t buy from that sales person unless he sees some benefit for him.

alternatively, if the sales person approach the customer and says, “do you know listening to music increases concentration power? ”, “it looks really cool to wear a mp3 all the time” and “i am selling mp3 players hand picked myself, want to buy one?”

second approach leaves no option but feeling if he buys the mp3 players he buys only from the second sales person. because he sees the benefit of best hand picked mp3 player, he already know he wants to improve concentration or look fashionable.

that is exactly selling benefits instead of detailed feature information.

this is back in 2008 – 2009, i started a account with religare trading account, i am not sure how they are performing now, below blog post is about my experience with them in above specified period.

they have this highly secured access method, if i remember correctly, to login i need to provide two passwords along with very ‘unique’ username, and i have to reset my password every two weeks, and whenever you change password you cannot reuse the same password used in any of that two passwords for last 3 times, also password should contain at least special character, caps alphabet and small letter and a number, i am not a creative person for passwords, and with this much restrictions, i nearly have to act like a password generator myself. With all these pain, i end up writing down my passwords. One fine day i gave the service once for all. I still get emails from religare once in a while to checkout all new improvised platform, i never feel confident with them…

It is good to impose tight security, but in the name of security dont impose something unrealistic, for a user your website is just another service he uses, his life is not dedicated for your service.

i wish these password mechanisms are simple for end users.

from yesterday #airtel has been trending for india in twitter, almost for 19hrs it kept trending, once in a while i have seen so many tweets about #airtel and #airtelsucks about the bad services, but yesterday it got sparked from @vijayanands tweet about the unrealistic bill they received and irresponsible response they received and it went on and on with retweeting and quote tweeting and people kept adding their own complaints, i should accept this shamelessly i have been watching for every hour and reading almost all the tweets with #airtel. so i can tell you confidently 95% of the #airtel tweets are negative comments.

If you want to know my personal experience with airtel, click here.

Ok, actual point of this blog post is, will these negative trending tweets impact stock prices?

My answer is YES!

simply put, buying a stock is investing on company’s future and current situation.

what these negative tweet trend can do?
1. stop their potential new customers
2. motivate existing customer give-up service

any business survives only when they have customers (b2b or b2c) to serve

more customer – more success
less customer – less success
declining customer – declining success
increasing customer – increasing success

when a company is loosing customers, their future is very dim without proper counter action to stop it, as we know stock is about investing in companies future and current condition, investor will think twice before investing.

Between as of now 11AM, 23 November 2011, Airtel stock is featured in NSE as top loser.

1. passion
1. do it for love – not for money [its not like work for charity, but it should be last in the list, if you have seen “The Social Network” movie, Mark’s friend will be asking him to start monetizing the website, but Mark stands firm and says we don't know yet what this website is upto and when Sean Parker steps up, he will refer as making million dollar is good, but billion is great, so when you are just beginning or whatever you never know the real value you and your work is upto, so don't do it with the price tag]
2. work
1. work, hard work – have fun at work [i have worked with many people and witnessed this myself, those who succeed in their work are the one’s that work really hard with smile on their face, they do it as if they are playing a game, they work hard and get thrill out of it]
3. good
1. be really good at what you do [nobody likes mediocre or incomplete work, we all love german engineering for its perfect finish and smoothness]
2. practice, practice and practice [improve daily]
4. focus
1. focus doing one thing – only one thing at a time [if you are doing all the above and feel you are loosing somewhere, it would be focus for sure]
5. push
1. push yourself [when everyone else finish doing at what is expected of them, you do one final round of check, that's extra – push!]
6. serve
1. serve something of value [you work should mean something to someone, find that someone and know what your work is doing to them, get motivated]
2. be useful
3. solve a problem
7. ideas
1. be creative [this will make our day to day work interesting and exciting…]
2. out of box thinking
8. persist
1. stay firm with your decisions, goals [sometimes we have to face with troubles, you know if persistence isnt there…”quitter” will be born]

I was talking to my friend’s father, i treat him like my own uncle, he is a graduate from IIT madras, and a scientist at Indian Arms(they design/research weapons or something like that) what you have to know is, he is very techie with lots of knowledge, with huge potential to guide next generation engineers in his sector of work.

I was asking how he gather knowledge and how he share his knowledge with the world, and how he connect with the similar minds working on same subjects,the answer is pretty plain: i talk to my colleagues, i regularly read the journals and magazines on this topic from the office library, which is kind of shocking for me, then i ended up asking if he blogs about his learning, to my surprise he doesn’t do that, and he is kind of no idea about it, was asking what is it, then finally why the pain? so all his knowledge sharing happens among his peers. He is not alone, my father a electrical engineer with vast of knowledge in his sector, he never communicates about the subject with people outside his work circle. It made me to conclude many of seniors in previous generation, aren’t really sharing knowledge over internet, their medium of sharing knowledge happens only at work. These gentlemen are capable to share and guide the next generation and stop them from re-inventing the wheels instead focus on next big thing. for that these gentlemen should start blogging or get involved in similar activity.

here’s the series of questions i faced with when i ask them to blog:

Why i should blog?

For others:

You have spent more than a decade working so and so topic, you know the pit falls new comers will ought to face, you know what is proven and what is not proven, you know the challenges that needs to be solved, those who starting in your sector will be better informed and be thankful.

For you:

You will become the authority of the subject, almost every starters these days start to gain knowledge on something after searching over internet, there is the very good possibility you will be quoted whenever there is a discussion on that topic, “Mr.xyz said in his blog post that abc is possible…”, that is the moment to pride for, after you retire, you will still be asked for the help and guidance, if you are more giving insight on the topic, more you become the de-facto for the topic.

If you are convinced:

How do i blog?

Blogging is easy and free, you have so many options where to blog, prominent one’s are wordpress and blogspot.

Choose your platform and start writing the articles on your topic of interest, just treat it like your extended notebook, where you jot down your ideas and gained knowledge.

Ok, blogging requires lot of effort and time, what i will gain from it?

As i said earlier, you will become the authority of the topic, very good chances are you’re quoted among next generation professionals, if that sounds like a charity, i can show you, how business takes place in your blog…

You write a very content rich blog posts, which contains lots of useful information, which means you will attract almost everyone searching for the specific information to your blog site, say if your blog about electrical engineering involves uninterrupted power supply(UPS) for industries, which means many of your blog visitors are either working on UPS and electrical engineering, and you have product recommendation related for those visitors, eg: cheap UPS, battery, job sites for engineers, etc…(there are thousands of them).

Those are targeted adverts, i can explain them more, i have blogged them in detailed in other blog post.

I hope this is convincing enough to start a blog today! My best wishes and thanks for sharing your knowledge.