Atkinson Public Relations / Nashville PR

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BtoB Magazine Insights

Monday, February 22

BtoB magazine had an excellent Q&A in its Feb. 8 issue about the impact of emerging media on direct marketing. The panelists included Bruce Biegel, managing director, Winterberry Group; Adam Christensen, manager-social media, IBM Corp.; Michael Mendenhall, CMO, Hewlett-Packard Co.; Laura Ramos, VP-principal analyst, Forrester Research; and David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.”

Here are a few of our favorite quotes:

	Quote	Our reaction
Christensen, IBM	"At IBM, for example, there is equal footing between employees and the institution. Our focus now is how to get more and more employees engaged and participating in the social conversation."	That's an amazing statement from an organization with a company brand as strong as IBM.
Mendenhall, HP	"We've always had word-of-mouth; it's just never been scaled. Social does that...Marketers need to be incredibly careful to not market to people but listen to a conversion."	Emerging media is transformative because we've never dealt with media on this scale before. It can be mindboggling. And we think they may have meant conversation.
Scott	"Now, as for commercializing all this, I like to think of the Web as a big city, where eBay is the garage sale, Amazon is the bookstore, Main Street is the e-commerce sites and b-to-b companies are the office buildings. Social media—such as blogs, and forums and the like—are essentially private clubs and saloons. If you think of it in these terms, the reason you go to a forum is the same reason you'd go to a Rotary Club meeting: You want to hang out with people like you and have an interesting relationship with them. You wouldn't go to a cocktail party in a strange city and whip out your business card and start hitting up everyone you could see. Social media works in having people get to know you and know you're helpful. And when somebody says they need a product, you'll get the referral."	Context. Context. Context. Few provide it as well as Scott.