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

Lets start at the beginning.

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

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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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