At least that's what the US Marine Corp thinks. They issued an order recently that
bans social media sites including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace on its network. The ban, which will last a year, essentially rules out use of all public social networks by Marines, unless a mission-critical need exists.
According to the order, "These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries. The very nature of [social networks] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage."
Here at birdsong gregory, our full-service Charlotte marketing agency isn't worried about the danger of social networking or our clients. Whether doing B2B marketing or building a consumer brand, companies of any size and in any industry can turn the power (and affordability) of connecting with the right audience into a true competitive advantage – especially in the battle for market share.
To learn more about the branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers, please visit birdsong gregory online, contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte
Companies such as Zappos, Dell, and JetBlue are all known as successes in harnessing the power of social media for business. However, the aforementioned businesses sell directly to consumers. How about the business that sells products to other businesses? What if you’re a company that builds inventory software or administers group benefit plans? Is Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or a company blog going to be of any use?
In a word, yes. There are plenty of companies utilizing the social web for B2B marketing purposes. To help you make sense of it all, here are a couple of tips that our Charlotte ad agency shares with our B2B clients to help them find customers, build up a reputation, and gain the upper hand on landing the big deal. Although the Charlotte social media scene is still catching up to other regions of the country, there is a lot of opportunity for area companies.
Step 1. Build a reputation of expertise
What use is a company blog if you only have 10,000 customers, rather than 10 million? While it may be true that a B2B’s blog or Twitter is not going to be followed by as many people, it doesn’t change the fact that it will affect the decisions of your customers. Say a potential customer becomes aware of your software solution, and goes to your website to find out more about you. How can you stand out from the crowd? By building a blog with your expertise in focus.
If a potential customer comes to your company’s website and sees an active blog with insightful posts on how your company’s product helps customers, reads detailed posts demonstrating your company’s knowledge, and comes across a few case studies, they’re going to be far more inclined to come to you for their needs. North Carolina Ad Agencies need to take note.
Social media provides an outlet for displaying who you and your company are. Talking about your industry in an intelligent way via Twitter and a regularly-updated blog can raise your company’s profile and brand it as a thought leader and expert in its specific business area.
37Signals, the maker of Software-as-a-service business collaboration products, is a prime example of this philosophy in action. Their blog is regularly read by thousands of people, shared among businesses, and has even opened up another revenue stream in the form of a popular job board. Social media builds reputations.
2. Research your customers
Everyone thinks of social media as a communication tool, but not enough people think of it as a research tool. With the ridiculous amount of data produced every day on social networks, blogs, and in conversations, it should be apparent that you can learn tidbits or spot major trends by tracking the social universe.
Know what your customers are saying: If you’re trying to secure a contract from a big business, then they are probably talking to their customers via Twitter, Facebook, and more. Learn what they’re saying to their customers and read the blogs of decision makers to learn what they value and how they think.
Know what your customers’ customers are saying: Your customers don’t care about you – they care about their customers and their bottom line. If you can find behavior patterns in their customers that your product can address, your pitch will resonate more. Driving the point that their current solution doesn’t work, and then proving that with social chatter is even better.
Step 3. Ramp up your networking
If you are competing with another company to land a big deal, it always helps to have connections and friendships within the company you’re trying to woo. You should always be networking, because you never know when a contact can become your advocate or even the decision-maker. And that’s where social media can help.
There are a lot of things you can do to get started on the networking front. They key, though, is that you have to reach out. Otherwise, how will people know to listen? While there are literally hundreds of ways to network with potential partners, vendors, clients, businesses, customers, and decision-makers, the truth is it doesn’t matter which tool you use as long as it is one that the other person values. LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo, etc. are always great places to start, but if you can network with them on niche social sites, you’ll stand out just a bit more.
Step 4. Learn from others
In the end, you want to come out sharper, more knowledgeable, and better prepared than your competitors. It doesn’t matter if you have 60 or 600,000 customers, and it does not matter whether or not you sell to general consumers or Fortune 500 companies. Almost everyone is using or tracking social media and it provides you a prime opportunity to make you and your business a leader rather than a follower.
- Seek out blogs and publications in your industry and subscribe via RSS
- Network with relevant experts, including those who may only be partially related
- Follow the insights of business leaders on Twitter
- Connect with commenters on your own blog
- Make yourself very easy to find on the web – if people search for your name or your business, you should be at the top of Google’s results. Building a blog, using a Twitter, and creating a decent corporate website always helps
- Keep an open mind
In closing, don’t underestimate how much information is on the web. It’s stunning what you can learn just by reaching out. If you and your business have a strong social presence, it’s simply easier for potential partners, customers, employers, and businesses to find you. So when it comes to B2B marketing, Charlotte needs to get ready!
In the world of banking, true innovation is rare. Banking is an industry driven by careful thinking, and any solution to the challenges it faces must provide the security, the accuracy, and the convenience that banks and their customers demand. Viewpointe, a Charlotte company formed as a joint venture by Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and IBM, created a way to digitize and archive the over 50 billion paper checks written each year. The savings, as you can image, were huge, and the downside was nonexistent.
So when Viewpointe asked our agency to develop B2B marketing and sales materials to launch this paradigm-shifting technology, we knew whatever we came up with needed to be creative, polished, and compelling. The resulting kit consists of a translucent folder with a timeless shelf life which reveals inserts which the sales staff customize based on the needs of the prospect.
To learn more about our branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers, please visit
birdsong gregory online, contact me at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
As a Charlotte NC ad agency, we’re increasingly finding the need to strengthen and evolve our clients’ online brands. A strong online brand means more than a well-designed website. Whether you’re trying to reach a retail audience, or your company needs to strengthen its B2B marketing channels, there are a whole host of online branding opportunities for Charlotte, NC companies, including social networks like Facebook, video/photo sharing sites like YouTube, and microblog tools like Twitter.
Having said that, smart, engaging web design is still critical since a large function of online marketing is to drive traffic to more robust branded environments (like your corporate website or an e-commerce engine).
Here is a fun look at a few forecasted website design trends for 2009.Please take a look, and if you would like to find out more about ways you can enhance your online presence to take full advantage of the relationship building power of Web 2.0 – or if you’d like learn more about the branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers – please visit
birdsong gregory online, contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
National Gypsum, headquartered in Charlotte, is a fully integrated building products manufacturer and one of the leading gypsum board producers in the world. Placed end-to-end, the company’s annual gypsum board production would travel around the earth over 14 times. National Gypsum also offers a full line of interior finishing products including joint compounds, tape, and textures. Its growing cement board product line has a strong customer base in the United States and several other countries.
To build brand awarness among architects and material specifiers, National Gypsum selected
birdsong gregory to develop and execute a B2B marketing campaign that touts the versatility of their PermaBase product. Our Charlotte NC ad agency responded by desiging and producing an intelligent visual narrative and sample kit that catches the attention of a discriminating B2B audience.
To learn more about our branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers, please visit
birdsong gregory online, contact me at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
Here at
birdsong gregory, our Charlotte NC ad agency has done a lot of conventional advertising and marketing for clients over the years, and we’ve provided the same model that global agencies provide to Fortune 100 brands, i.e., a company has a new product or new message it wants to sell, and so it pays an ad agency to come up with creative ways to reduce complex ideas and brand ideals into a short, single, overarching message.
Think “We bring good things to life” or “Just do it.”
Now, of course, it’s getting harder and harder to grow market share through yesterday’s advertising and marketing strategy. Charlotte, NC companies are increasingly looking to connect with consumers online in deeper, more authentic ways than a few blinking banner ads. But going online and talking about oneself can be risky – not to mention difficult.
Even in the digital age from a brand and marketing perspective many companies (and many Charlotte graphic design firms) are used to and most comfortable with the messaging and branding tactics of broadcast.
But online brand representation is not really an exercise in message reduction; interesting complicated thoughts don’t need to be condensed into a singular message. Brands now have to tell stories and plan activities along parallel pathways. They might even need to tell different stories at the same time and have their audiences filter them out, trusting that they’ll find what they like and ignore what they don’t like.
Let’s use Nike and Blendtec as examples of two extremes of online brands. Nike is a huge company with a lot of products. Its marketing-led brand image is a big part of the value of their products, so they need to do innovative online marketing. There are many brands operating like this, e.g., fashion, car companies, spirits, where marketing is a key component of the brand value.
At the other extreme is Blendtec. You would never have considered buying its $600 industrial blender for your home until you saw a charming guy in a white lab coat asking you, “Will it blend?” This is the more significant extreme: a brand that probably didn’t do any significant marketing until the Internet showed up. Then someone somewhere realized that there is a low-cost medium where you can just be funny or clever and gain a huge audience. Blendtec used the Internet to transform itself from a B2B to a B2C company in barely a year.
What we’re seeing here in Charlotte, however, are thousands of small to middle market companies that have a static website but are slowly waking up to the fact that the Web 2.0 has become much more than a place to park your information and hope potential customers stumble across it somehow. You have to be active for anyone to notice. You have to tell rich stories with a believable, informed, friendly voice. You have to have to take the time to build a conversation with the market – not just throw clever slogans at it. And above all, you have to begin building an effective, believable online brand sooner rather than later. The Internet isn’t going away, and companies that figure out to use content-rich social media to deepen consumer relationships will gain a whole host of cost-effective benefits. If you’d like to know more, please visit
birdsong gregory online or give Jim Cusson a call at 704-332-2299.
Sometimes clients approach our agency and ask us for the full branding monty, and sometimes they have targeted goals and need a single piece of marketing or advertising. Horack Talley, one of the oldest law firms in Charlotte, wanted to let the local business community know about their new “green business” practice group. Dedicated to supporting the growing number of eco-friendly commercial real estate projects under way throughout the Carolinas, the growing practice area needed to announce its presence, and birdsong gregory got it noticed with a creative execution which touts the firm’s expertise in LEED-related matters which ran in the Charlotte and North Carolina publications.
To learn more about the branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers, please visit
birdsong gregory online, contact me at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
Meridian Specialty Yarn Group may be the most innovative yarn manufacturer in the world, and to capture the company’s unique brand personality birdsong gregory designed a marketing brochure with strategic die cuts to showcase the most visible demonstration of Meridian’s creativity – its yarns. This elegant piece uses a rich black paper as a background to highlight the yarn’s vibrant colors and innovative spinning techniques. A ball and chain assembly ties the pieces together and expresses the personal attention to detail Meridian provides its customers.
To learn more about the online and offline branding, marketing, and advertising services our agency offers, please visit the birdsong gregory website, contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
Comscore Media Metrix have come up some fascinating demographic data about Twitter users. 18-24 year olds are 12% less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-34 year olds and 45-54 year olds who are really the ones driving its use (i.e. this older group are 36% more likely than average to visit Twitter). Interesting to see the oldest groups are not your usual techno-laggards. This blog posting by Reuters is also worth reading. Maybe older people have more to talk about? Our personal experience, as a Charlotte marketing agency and ad agency: the people using twitter are the ideal age for a smart B2B social media strategy.
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