Disqus - Latest Comments for davidkamm

Re: Defining Inbound Marketing in 2012

David Kamm — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 17:56:38 -0000

You're welcome, Eric. You made some great points in that post. Nice to meet you through the blogosphere!

Re: To Be, or Not to Be (in B2B social media marketing, that is)

David Kamm — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:29:16 -0000

Thanks Ernest. Great point about ensuring top-down support (or at least ‘openness’ going into the strategy discussion). I can definitely visualize that scenario you described. I'm curious... which functional area was that skeptical director from?

Re: Everything You Need To Know About Content Marketing

David Kamm — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:58:22 -0000

Great piece of work here! Digital / content marketers should print this out and pin it to their office walls as a reminder.

Re: B2B Customer Case Studies….. Insights and Tips: Part 1

David Kamm — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:21:55 -0000

Thanks for your visit and comment, Mark. My experience with very large case study targets (let's say Fortune 50 or Fortune 100) is that their marcomm contacts will sometimes give you a blanket 'No Way' when approached about using their name/brand in a (usually much smaller) tech vendor's case study. I think this is less of an issue for large tech vendors, but a real problem for the smaller guys. I don't think this is fair, but sometimes the very large companies can just say it's their corporate policy not to engage with vendors on these projects. And smaller vendors often don't have the will and/or the clout to try to reverse this answer.

I do think the larger targets want clear evidence that you're not going to somehow harm their brand in the case study, but so far I haven't seen them delve too deeply into a vendor's formal reference program. But it seems like a great idea to show them 'similar' case studies for other large end-user customers, as a way to help convince them that they will be treated with complete respect and professionalism in the case study deliverable.

Case studies (in my opinion) should be win-win documents that both the vendor and the end-user organization can feel good about.

Re: B2B Customer Case Studies….. Insights and Tips: Part 1

David Kamm — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:20:52 -0000

Note that you can read Part 2 here: http://www.ibeamconsulting....

And Part 3 here: http://www.ibeamconsulting....

Re: B2B Customer Case Studies..... Insights and Tips: Part 2

David Kamm — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:17:01 -0000

I really like that way of characterizing it -- 'dramatic tension' as a key ingredient for realism and emotional investment. When incorporated properly, this element should help to build the trust relationships that vendors need to establish with prospects during the sales process.

Thanks for the comment!

Re: B2B Customer Case Studies….. Insights and Tips: Part 1

David Kamm — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:40:53 -0000

Thanks, Jonathan. I'm really glad you liked it, and I appreciate your positive feedback! I'm looking forward to adding post #3 on the topic soon.

Re: Don’t Let the Dog Groomer Cut Your Hair … or the Social Media Expert Run Your PR

David Kamm — Sat, 02 May 2009 11:50:02 -0000

Christine,

Nice post, and I definitely agree there's a big "tactics vs. strategy" problem out there with respect to social media and its role in the overall marketing/PR mix. Social media is and/or will be hugely important for many firms, yet may remain a relatively small and complementary tactic for others. I'm looking at this primarily from a B2B and technology marketing perspective, and I appreciate the balanced viewpoint you're helping to drive here.

Re: B2B Buyers are Social

David Kamm — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:01:53 -0000

Lee,

Thanks for posting this. It's great to see some good material/studies appearing on B2B-specific social media issues. I do believe that social media is a 'natural' for B2B, especially in product/service segments that imply greater risk on the part of the buyer. We already know that these buyers are peer-seeking in terms of simplifying the decision process, so outreach via social media tools seems ideal - *as long as* B2B companies are focusing their energies where the target buyers are actually hanging out.

Re: Welcome to iBeam Marketing Consulting Services!

David Kamm — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:39:31 -0000

Feel free to add comments to any blog posts here. I do moderate these posts to avoid spam, etc. Note that if you want to add the *first* comment to a post, you may have to first click on the headline of the post to open a new page, and then comment at the bottom of that page. Easy enough.

Re: Choose Me — Bring in Product Management before Other Marketing Disciplines

David Kamm — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:17:00 -0000

Grace,

Excellent post, and I generally agree with your arguments for hiring Product Management first. Yet in some small/emerging companies, the Engineering/technical team may decide that - at least in the short term - they can adequately cover the core "Product Management" duties, whereas they likely view the marcomm function as completely foreign turf. Hence the situation you describe, where marketing communications gets hired first in order to fill that perceived gap.

A somewhat related issue I've seen is that Product Managers can get so swamped with their day-to-day core PM duties, that they have little quality time to devote to the more market-facing activities of product marketing, let alone the marcomm function. While this isn't always the case by any stretch, it does happen. And of course, some PMs absolutely excel at the more technical aspects of their job descriptions, but aren't necessarily the best resources for writing collateral and press releases, briefing analysts, conducting webinars, etc.

Having been in product management, product marketing, and marketing communications roles, I'd probably go with hiring product mgmt. first, then adding marcomm (including corp. comm.), then adding product marketing if needed as a separate function, and/or to add firepower to the outward-facing efforts.

Great site and great blog. I'm looking forward to reading more here!

Dave