In the first of a regular monthly series, our digital director René examines the more significant developments in the digital space over the last month, and their likely impact on B2B marketing.
1. Social media
The search giant made a number of announcements in the last month, firstly launching several updates to Google Docs its free to use cloud-hosted business software, as well as the business roll out of Google+.
Updates to Google Docs saw new Gmail apps for Apple’s latest suite of iPhones and iPads, and a neat ‘suggested times’ feature to Google Calendar appointments. With Google+ quickly amassing 40m users, the opportunity to create business pages is something that might give it the edge over Facebook and its focus on personal connections. These developments will no doubt have an impact in the business arena over the coming weeks and months.
Linkedin has come on in leaps and bounds as it builds its profile as the ‘Facebook for business’. Making the most of the networking opportunity presented is critical to making LinkedIn work for business. As such, LinkedIn Events has been given an overhaul and now includes functionality that suggests events that you might like, as well as an attendee list to allow you to start setting up introductions and meetings.
And, once you’ve met, use the free new iPhone app Cardmunch to scan and add business cards to your Contacts and match them with their LinkedIn profile, seamlessly adding them to your contact network.
In a comparatively quiet month for the microblogging network, there was one interesting illustration of the power of the hashtag. In this animation all the tweets mentioning the date 11.11.11 were drawn together to show how this trended around the world, and when. Powerful stuff.
2. Email marketing
Marketing Sherpa posted an interesting five step guide to ensuring your email marketing is given the best chance of success. Factors to consider include citing where you got the recipients contact details from, confirming content and frequency expectations, delivering value, providing an unsubscribe function, and white-listing.
3. Search marketing
A news story that rocked a lot of people was the announcement from Google that it was now able to include Facebook comments within its search indexing. Adding comments to news stories and industry articles has long been seen as a credible way of sending traffic back to a nominated B2B website. The impact of this development is to further blur the line between personal and professional profiles online, leaving commentators needing to reflect about the comments they make before hitting the submit button.
Q: What digital marketing stories have made an impact on you over the last month? Share them below.
