A recent survey conducted by Buzz Marketing, and sponsored by Marketing Profs and Trackur, shows that more than half of the BtoB marketers polled aren’t adequately prepared for an online crisis.

Although the sample universe was small, it is an indication of what BtoB marketers are thinking and doing.

• 60% say they have a good understanding of their current reputation
• 63% don’t have a blogging policy in place
• 53% place strategic importance on measuring and monitoring their reputation in 2008
• Only 42% have a strategic plan in place to manage their online reputation
• More than half (54%) are not monitoring traditional media using services like Burrells/Luce or Bacons
• 63% are monitoring social media and blogs with free online services
• Only 33% use a paid subscription service to monitor online content
• 54% say they are leveraging social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn
• 45% are monitoring their brand on these social networks
• 71% say they are not developing widgets that can be added to social sites

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As a social media agency, we get inquires every day from companies who are trying to figure out how social media marketing will impact their current marketing and business models. As you can imagine, the primary reasons these companies reach out to us is because either a) they have a specific project they need our expertise in, or b) the company has quickly realized the demands of social media marketing on staff and resources.

Lets face it: even though social media marketing is generally less expensive in the long-run than traditional mass-marketing, it still poses a rather large expense on a company in regards to staff and resources. For instance, a company trying to employ social media marketing without hiring an agency would require its entire marketing department to become up to speed in social media marketing, internal staff to be trained and/or new staff hired, and a generous amount of internal resources in order to effectively employ the social media tactics.

This being said, I found a very interesting podcast (below) on PodTech about one such company that has discovered this through its latest foray into social media: H&R Block. In the following podcast, Paula Drum (VP of marketing for H&R) shares how one of the big surprises to social media marketing was, “how much human capital they had to spend to make the programs work”.

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Running a business, particularly an online business is a complex task with many facets, which can make doing so incredibly overwhelming.

Of course employees are there to handle much of the load, but the more knowledgeable you are in more aspects of business, the more prepared you will be to run one effectively.

WebProNews has introduced an invaluable tool which can be used as reference to anyone running or working in eBusiness.

The eBusiness Directory at directory.webpronews.com was made to serve as a resource, indexing only quality links that fit into the niche of eBusiness, which includes many sub-categories including everything from marketing and finances, to web design, programming, and security.
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Having a consistent SEO process is critical for any SEO company as well as any SEO professional. By taking the time to write out a training manual for your employees (even if you haven’t hired any yet) you accomplish a couple different things. First, defining your SEO process allows you to be more consistent in your own work, and it allows SEO teams to be more consistent in the work they deliver. Especially in cases where multiple SEO team members are working on the same project. So for example, writing out step by step instructions on how to create a page title tag ensures that every page title tag, whether its your work or another team members, adheres to whatever best practices have made you successful. There are of course many different opinions on what the best approach for any aspect of SEO is. But whatever your approach, it should be consistent. And defining the approach is the first time to ensuring that consistency as well as providing a standard of accountability.

Secondly, defining your SEO process makes you really dissect what you do and why. And that leads to a better overall process. Defining your process makes you start asking questions about why you do, what you do, and why you don’t do other things. And in SEO, you always have to adapt to emerging trends and having your process well defined allows you to quickly integrate new activities into your process without a lot of confusion. Their are a lot of small details to doing an SEO campaign, and without a well defined check list for your process, especially when there is more than one person involved, its easy for things to fall by the way side.

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I’m going to presume that most startups would like to be found online by people (you know, like potential users or -gasp- customers) . People try really hard to get their internet marketing “right” so as to increase their chances of being found by the right people online. There’s a whole industry based on this need. I should know, I’m in the business of helping businesses get found.

That’s why this particular example really struck a chord with me.

Lets start at the beginning.

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Someone asked me the other day what their staff member could be doing to help with SEO as they had some spare time on their hands. While there isn’t really a perfect answer that will fit any business, these tips should be useful on the whole (not in any particular order)

1. Submit your site to directories.

If you aren’t already doing this as part of your link building efforts, then directory submissions can be a quick and easy way to help with your SEO efforts. As long as you train your staff member on the basics (following submission guidelines, varying anchor text) there’s not really anything that can go wrong.

Lists of directories to submit to can be found easily enough via search engines.

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Training seems not to be taking place in agency life, or for that matter, in corporations. Or, well, PR and communications cannot just move past pushing the message and learning to work. It goes back to when are we ever going to learn?

This past week, Johnson & Johnson pinged a few of the momosphere bloggers to invite them to a camp, and then sent out one of their PR firms, RF Binder, to make more of a mess (although, I am not sure of the order of the mess and who was responsible for what). I thank Erin Kotecki Vest for pointing me to the first post, and for letting me see the whole thing blow up from the start.

You used to be able to see the pitch letter here: one word of advice, if you cannot get a blogger’s email address, move on or do it less obviously. Or, just be a good sleuth because you usually can find a working email address (she has since taken down the PR pitches).

I am not going to break it down and write what I think of the situation. Susan Getgood did a great job breaking it down, and you can get the full story from Stefania of CityMama / Kimchi Mamas (one point - no one ever reaches out to her as an Asian mom, but only via CityMama).

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All is not well at broadcaster CNN, if the story of Chez Pazienza is anything to go by.Pazienza, a producer on CNN’s American Morning TV show until a few weeks ago, was fired for blogging.

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I’ve seen lots of predictions for 2008 with regards to search engine optimization and marketing. Most of these come from SEO firms and consultants. They all focus on what they think Google will do or how Universal Search (blended search), Social Marketing and such will change or affect how we will view search engines and their results on our websites. But I’ve not seen any predictions related to what businesses should do about all of these predictions and changes.

Five things businesses should plan on doing for themselves and their websites in 2008:

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At the Triangle Social Media Club, Kipp Bodnar led the group’s discussion regarding the business applications of podcasting.

I will attempt to recap some of our highlights for those who couldn’t wake up at 8am.

For those companies or individuals that may be determining whether or not to start a podcast, the group consensus was that an evaluation of assets is necessary. The following are some questions to ask:
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