• 75% of the brands surveyed spend less than 40% of their online attention on Facebook.
• 71% are focused more on Facebook fan engagement than acquisition.

And those are indeed interesting results. But the real news is the growing role of Big Data—the billions of pieces of data coming in from multiple sources.

Of the marketers surveyed, 91% are very concerned about driving ROI from Big Data. That’s especially true in the auto and financial services fields.

And 73% are focused on integrating their cross-channel data: behavioral, transactional, online and offline. This is a top priority for financial services, auto and travel marketers.

Finally, 70% are worried about making sense of the data they have.

What do brand marketers want to do with Big Data?

Here’s my guess: They want to make it actionable and facilitate more relevant messaging in real time. And they will welcome vendors who can help them do that.

One more Facebook-related finding: Financial services and consumer packaged goods marketers are most likely to concentrate on fan engagement.

33Across surveyed 2,177 brand marketers and agency representatives.

Of 150 ad professionals surveyed by Heat, the San Francisco agency, 97% have Facebook accounts, vs. 82% of the 150 “normal” people polled.

They’re also far more likely to be engaged with Twitter (92% vs. 39% for the regular citizens), Google+ (61% to 23%) and Pinterest (57% to 11%). And that carries over to their private lives.

For example, 71% of the ad people pay attention to brand posts on Facebook compared with 23% of your average Joes. And 92% follow brands on Twitter, vs. 33% of everyone else.

Not that any of this is surprising. Marketers are in desperate struggle to monetize digital media. They spend more time thinking about it than people who don’t do this or a living.

Sometimes they get hung up on the technology and lose sight of the goal. It’s like Artie Shaw said about the clarinet— it’s a means to an end (good music), not an end unto itself.

And it may be that they’re too far out in front. Asked if companies should “invest more with their customers” via social media), 63% of the ad/marketing people said yes. Only 46% of the proletariat agreed.

And don’t think that social media use spells virtue. Ad/marketing people are more likely than John Q. Public to use drugs (26% to 3%), throw up from drinking too much (37% to 9%) and hook up with a co-worker (26% to 8%).

A pretty picture. But wasn’t it Peter Mayle who pointed out in Up the Agency that ad agencies will hire almost anyone—if they can do the job?

I’m looking forward to Heat’s next survey.

B2B thought leadership starts with a point of view, GlobalSpec says in a new white paper: How to Become an Industry Thought Leader in the Online Era. And it has to be original: “You can’t simply parrot what others are saying about your industry and market; there’s nothing special or worth paying attention to in that,” the paper says.

Don’t have a point of view? It’s easy enough to develop one. Talk with customers and employees. Call in your B2B leadership team. Make sure you have plenty of yellow legal pads. Then answer the questions suggested by GlobalSpec:

1. What is your company’s position on how your industry is changing?
2. What new challenges will your customers face in the next 1-3 years?
3. How is technological advancement shaping your industry?
4. What innovations do you see on the horizon?
5. What is your company’s approach to helping the marketplace understand and overcome challenges?
6. What differentiates your company’s market position from others?
7. What can your company do in the market that other companies cannot?

“Your answers to these questions will likely overlap,” GlobalSpec writes. “From this common ground you will begin to identify your unique point of view.”

One more thing: Make sure your view is new, relevant, valid and practical. Achieve that, and others will see the industry you’re part of “as you do, approaching and solving challenges the way you recommend,” the paper continues.

Yes, and you’ll be a true B2B thought leader. You’ll have “a reputation in the market as a company with unique, innovative, and important ideas about your industry, the forces shaping it, the challenges confronting it, and the future awaiting it,” GlobalSpec concludes.

They want trustworthy, readable content that does minimal selling, according to a survey by DemandGen Report. While they’re finding more content on the Web, they have less time to read it.

So what should you do?

First, scrap the hard sell, if you’re using it. Of 120 B2B content readers polled, 75% want fewer sales pitches. Focus less on product specifications and more on value.

Next, shorten the text. But don’t eliminate prose: readers value text and narrative above all. White papers are the most popular content format, and readers are mostly likely to share white papers and case studies.

Third, structure your content by business role. Of those polled, 46% like to see it that way. In addition, 42% want to see it by industry and 33% by vertical area.

Fourth, get more involved with LinkedIn. Email is the top vehicle for sharing, but LinkedIn is the second.

It may also pay to build a Mobile web site. While laptops are the top device used for accessing content, mobile is No. 2.

And look for other ways to brand your content. Readers prefer peer reviews and content authored by a third-party publication or analyst and sponsored by a vendor. Their last choice? Branded content directly from a vendor. What’s more, their first step when researching a topic or challenge is to do a search. Going directly on a vendor Web site is a distant second.

The conclusion?

“Research shows that 9 in 10 buyers now connect with a solution provider via some form of content, regardless of company size or industry, and navigating this trend is an evolving process,” says Amanda Batista, author of the report and managing editor of DemandGen Report. Solutions providers need to “cultivate a greater role in content sharing by providing trustworthy content that establishes relationships with prospects,” she adds.

Some supporting statistics:

Content Providers Should:

• Curb the sales messages—74%
• Focus less on product specifications and more on value—55%
• Condense content to be shorter—48%
• Don’t overload the content with copy/type—45%

Content Used for Research in the Last year

• White paper—88%
• Webinar—73%
• Case study—67%
• Blog posts—63%
• EBook—51%

Valuable Online Content Formats

• White paper—48%
• Webinar—45%
• Video—45%
• Blog posts—43%
• eBook—40%
• Interactive presentation—40%

Content Preferences

• Text/narrative—47%
• Prefer more visual—33%
• Prefer data—16%
• Prefer more interactive—3%
• Other-2%

Content Most Likely to Be Shared

• White paper—70%
• Case study—56%
• Blog posts—485
• Webinar—40%
• Video-39%

Content-Sharing Mechanisms

• Email – 80%
• LinkedIn—54%
• Twitter—39%
• Facebook—18%
• Text/SMS/MMS—12%

Devices Used for Accessing B2B Content

• Laptop computer—95%
• Mobile phone—70%
• Tablet—49%
• Desktop computer—36%

To recap, Ace Hole is hired by the art dealer Laurence Potato-Head to find Al Floogleman, “a bird who’d passed him some bum Picassos!” It seems to be a comment on the genre, but Picasso makes an appearance to say: “We artists are indestructible. Even in a prison or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art…even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.”

What did it all mean? Having interviewed Spiegelman about Maus, the full-length work he had just started (see last Sunday’s post), I asked him what he was trying to do in the other strips in Breakdowns. Here’s what he said about narrative and perception on that warm spring day:

RS: Except for Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet, most of the strips in Breakdowns seem to veer from straight narrative. What were you trying to do in Ace Hole Midget Detective?

Spiegelman: Here I was interested in narrative and the function that it performs in society. When people go to the movies and watch television, which is what most people do with their free time, what they’re really getting is a dream. You’re just going into this state where you’re passively pulling in this story, which is only a mild permutation of things you’ve heard or seen before. When you watch a TV series, one week’s episode is not very different from another week’s episode. You’re just going into this comfortable warm bath each time, essentially lulling yourself—it’s sort of a way of putting a thumb in your mouth and suckling. That’s the appeal of detective stories and all other popular fiction. What happens in a detective story is the detective ends up being like a father figure in the story—he’s the one who knows all the answers. He gets beaten up, but he’s tough. On one level, you think you’re reading this to see if you can outguess the detective and solve the murder. And you never can if it’s a well-written story because it’s this crazy roller coaster ride you’re going on. You’re trusting that the detective will solve it for you. Since these books are written in the first person, you end up getting right into the main character’s head—you feel like you’re the detective.

RS: And you experience all the great scenes and backdrops.

Spiegelman: All that’s really being changed is the character’s specific situations—the essential situation is always the same, story to story. I was more interested in dealing with the things that relate to detective stories rather than telling another detective story. On the other hand, I wanted it to work on a level of a detective story—if you read it, it would be a little haywire in a few places. At the same time, I ended up getting involved with the nature of the first-person narrative, what that does to you, and the nature of comic-strip panels and what that does to you. There are several things happening. On the first page, each character is drawn with a different tool. I never want people to forget that these are drawings, that these are lines on paper. So on the first page, you usually have the characters’ faces in these boxes. This would be Ace Hole, this would be Gretta, this would be Mr. Potato Head. Instead, I’m showing you the brush stroke. This is the brush I use to draw Ace Hole with, this is the curvical pen I use to draw the Picasso lady with, this is the rapidiograph that I use to draw Mr. Potato Head with. You’re being forced, I would hope, into looking at the fact that these are drawings rather than creatures that you can live with.

RS: What do these techniques have to with something more socially relevant like Maus?

Spiegelman: They’re not techniques. I’m dealing with something really fundamental, which is perception. And perception is fundamental to understanding Maus, to understanding Hell Planet, to understanding social change. It’s the way you take information in.

RS: You’re working this out for yourself?

Spiegelman: I’m not working it out for myself or anybody else any more than Hell Planet was for somebody else. I didn’t draw Hell Planet to amuse people or tell them an interesting anecdote from my life. Nor did I do it to warn people about suicide. Hell Planet was as much involved with my own interests and needs as these other strips are. It’s just that my needs are complex. I’m a complex person. Most people are, I would hope. And I don’t see them as that different or separate. I understand what makes some of my strips more difficult for people to understand than other strips, but for me these are all part of the same thing. The same needs of expression are at work in these strips as in Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Since one focuses more directly on content, it becomes easier to take in. That’s why I’m doing this Maus strip with the means of perception that are employed in reading Maus. I’m aware that what I have to do is very directly tell the story, and not get in the story’s way. Most of the time, I’m dealing with stories that are trivial. Most people are dealing with stories that are trivial. Therefore, I’m more interested in the way of telling the story, making people understand what they’re looking at when they’re looking at a story, rather than just telling them a story and lulling them to sleep one more time. I think it’s more important that people, myself included, be more aware (in a sensory way) of what they’re going through. When you’re looking at a movie, it’s important to know that it’s a movie. You can’t think you’re looking through a window at something that’s happening. You’re affected too greatly by what you see. Most people’s information comes to them from newspapers and from TV. That information is highly distorted by the medium that it’s coming across to them in. And unless you’re aware of those distortions, unless you’re aware of how they work, they have much greater effect on you. You’re much more capable of being controlled. You’re much more capable of being at the mercy of the people who have the power of the medium. And as a result, that may be the most important thing about the media is how they work. It’s important that when you’re watching the Holocaust, a Lysol ad comes on between segments.

RS: Lysol?

Spiegelman: Yeah, it really is, and it’s very significant, that you’re being shown something that broken up. Most of the people watching Holocaust on TV are not even aware of whether it’s a story or not. From what I understand, for television it was powerful. In terms of what actually happened in terms of life, it wasn’t powerful at all. And I’m told that for people who watch television, this was a significant event. That was close as they’ll come to understanding the Holocaust. I guess that’s good, but it’s also too bad that’s as far as it went.

“Content marketing is a pull strategy,” said Lieb, an industry analyst for Altimeter. “It’s the marketing of attraction.” And this shift from push to pull is imperative for brand survival, she warned.

What role does content play in a pull marketing program? It drives customer engagement, word-of-mouth, purchase intent and trust. And it works. For example:

• K-SWISS generated millions of views and a 250% increase in online sales with its Kenny Powers videos.
• Indium Corp. increased its customers contacts by 600% within a single quarter with blogs and keyword research.
• Blendtec boosted sales by 700% with its Will It Blend videos.
• Eloqua directly attributed $2.5M in revenue to four free guides in 2010. The company tracks content by requiring users and provide contact information, and promotes it in its blogs.
• Salesforce draws over 11,000 views per day with its 2,600 YouTube videos.

Content marketing also leads to lower acquisition costs, Lieb noted.

That said, the switch from pushing to pulling puts new demands on marketing departments. Companies have to rebalance, Lieb continued. And they have to know where they stand in the content marketing maturity curve.

For example, does your firm have a chief content officer in place (and all the people it takes to pursue a content strategy?) Are they getting cross-departmental support? “Content may live in marketing, but stories and opportunities flow in from other departments,” Lieb explained.

And does your content do one of these three things?

• Entertain
• Inform and educate
• Provide utility

Here are some examples of firms that all or some of the above:

• Old Spice uses humor to entertain and reach younger audiences.
• Mediative educates customers with white papers, webinars, videos and blogs
• GE Transformers’ iPad App is useful to GE’s Engineer Community group

Videos Rated Most Effective

Meanwhile, Altimeter asked 56 marketers what types of content have been most effective, and which they intend to phase out. The winners were online videos, eBooks and mobile marketing, followed by blogging/podcasting and product placement/sponsorship. The losers? Traditional television and print advertising.

Lieb also cited these top-level findings:

• Content initiatives are a significant investment.
• Content and advertising should be interrelated.
• Marketers are distracted by new channels and technologies.
• Over the next five years, content marketing will permeate the organization.

Want to jump-start your content marketing? Here are tactical tips from Lieb:

• Conduct a content audit to determine current assets.
• Generate a keyword list, using free SEO services.
• Create an editorial calendar.
• Reuse and repurpose content for greater impact

Firms that rebalance now “will enhance and improve their marketing initiatives, spend more effectively, and align to meet changing consumer expectations,” Lieb concluded.

• Keyword strategy and selection
• Site and page optimization
• Link building

That’s the main thesis of The Inbound Marketing Guide for Link Building, a new white paper from Optify. It bluntly warns that “even the best content can get lost, if it’s not optimized for the web.”

As Optify sees it, effective inbound marketing is based on attribution links. And one way to get them is to syndicate content and push it out in blogs and RSS feeds. But that’s only the start.

Do you have great content? Remember to:

• Promote it
• Research related keywords that are being searched and use them to develop new
  ideas for content.
• Use keywords in the headline and title tag of page content.
• Include a link with good anchor text back to the main content page.

Next, follow those tips from Optify with this six-point link-building process:

1. Select the directories you want to target.
2. Choose your keywords.
3. Alert people through blogs, Tweets and email that you’ve got great new content.
4. Call the local news desk.
5. Create a tool or widget.
6. Track your results.

How do you ensure that site owners will post and link to your content? Optify suggests that you “create a ‘best product’ or ‘certified partner’ badge and reach out to partner or related sites with this ‘award.’ Or, create a template for WordPress or other content management system with a link back to the design website in the footer.”

Here’s one more in inbound marketing suggestion: Develop a work plan and track what goes where. “The only thing more damaging that having six versions of content on your site, is having six versions of it on six other big, powerful sites,” Optify writes.

Yes, B2B marketing budgets are going up by an average of 6.8% this year. And high-tech is leading the way, with a 9% jump in the services area alone.

Last year, though, that increase totaled 11%. And the financial services sector is going from an 8% average hike last year to 5% in 2012, according to MarketingProfs’ report on the forecast.

Are these outfits getting more efficient at marketing or are they being cautious?

But there’s also some good news (for B2B media salesmen, anyway): Firms in the manufacturing, business services and high-tech product sectors plan average increases of 7%. And those jumps are higher than last year’s in every category.

Even medical suppliers are showing a renewed commitment to marketing. Last year, companies in the pharmaceutical/medical device/biotech field cut budgets by 3%. This year, they’re raising them by 2%.

Overall, 19% of all B2B companies are decreasing their market budgets this year, MarketingProfs reports. But 16% expect hikes of 20% or more, and 27% are planning for jumps between 10% and 20%. Another 20% are projecting 5%-to-9% increases.

Forrester surveyed 864 B2B marketing executives in North America and Europe.

Consumers expect relevant digital experiences in real time. Marketers are failing to deliver them. That’s the way it looks to PulsePoint, based on a recent survey of almost 400 senior marketing executives.

“It is abundantly clear that there is a massive ‘digital divide’ between consumers engaging in real-time across channels, versus the digital marketing industry that is still largely siloed and not executing in real-time,” the company states. And it attributes this gap to two problems:

• Overwhelming complexity
• Lack of unified measurement

That flies in the face of some pretty powerful success stories. But it depends on the type of firm and the specific task, according to the survey.

Marketers give themselves low marks for just about all digital functions. They are especially poor at achieving a unified customer view, social listening, applying cross-channel lessons and attributing results across channels.

Publishers, perhaps because of the “the business demands of having to continuously monetize their content and audiences across channels,” are more effective, particularly at:

• Dynamically serving ads and content
• Employing newer channels
• Optimizing within channels

Agencies, “the most confident overall,” give themselves very high grades for:

• Measuring campaign performance
• Optimizing within channels
• Being consistent with branding across channels

But that’s not the real story. These differences “pale in comparison to the real glaring gap, which is the massive divide between consumers and the current digital marketing practices used to reach and engage them,” the study says.

The main challenges for digital marketers?

For end-user marketers, the top two hurdles are lack of real-time data and analytics and difficulty assessing ROI. For publishers, the hurdles the complexity of technologies and platforms and the lack of unified measurement. And for their part, agencies feel they need better attribution and an easier time securing executive support.

“Difficulties driven by conditions such as lack of real-time data and analytics, difficulty attributing and assessing ROI, and a lack of actionable insights have become root causes to our inability to synthesize and unify around the consumer,” the study concludes.

Here’s two other findings: Functional silos are seen as challenging by publishers and agencies, but not so much by marketers. And few respondents complain of lack of dynamic content delivery platforms, publishers least of all.

But you can turn it around by rethinking the roles, responsibilities, metrics and processes at your company.

So says Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, in his new book: Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales And Marketing Strategies To Accelerate Growth (Wiley, May 2012).

Most B2B CEOs and CFOs use the sales force and sales cycle as the basis for revenue planning and forecasting, Fernandez said during a Webinar last week. But they need to forecast the entire revenue funnel.

“When the buyer’s in control, they’re working on their buying process long before a sales cycle ever kicks into gear,” he said.

What to do? First, focus on the seed nurturing stage to attract early buyers—the discipline known as inbound marketing or content marketing.

“Instead of trying to find buyers during this stage, you’re trying to be found by buyers who are out there searching,” Fernandez said. For that, you need compelling content and the ability to get it out via Google and social so “when a buyer starts their journey, they find you and are ready to go.”

But don’t jump the gun. If you hand these buyers to sales, you’ll have “an early creative disaster,” Fernandez warned. “Buyers at this stage don’t want to talk to a salesperson.”

The next step is to stay in touch with buyers and understand what they want as they move through the cycle. The rule isn’t, “always be selling, but always be helping, always be teaching,” Fernandez said.

Good B2B firms mature those buyers along until it’s time for them to talk to sales. But when? That takes lead scoring—i.e., “determining through analytics and metrics which buyers are raising their hand and showing the most likelihood to buy,” Fernandez noted.

Salespeople are expensive, and should be wasting time cold calling people who aren’t ready. Give them best leads at the right time and you will “bend the curve of sales efficiency,” Fernandez said.

And remember: By visiting your Web site or Webinar, the prospect is “interacting with you marketing department so marketing better darned well take a seat.”

Right. And like sales, marketing should be compensated based on results, he added.

Finally, you need technology (the kind offered by Marketo, Fernandez contended).
Fernandez has a name for this new way of doing business: Revenue Performance Management, or RPM.

RPM is similar to Six Sigma, the philosophy followed by Motorola and GE, in that it becomes “a way of life for company,” Fernandez. And if businesses worldwide adopt it, “they have the staggering potential to create $2.5 trillion more dollars in aggregate revenue by 2017,” Fernandez argued.

He added that companies have been trying to cut themselves into profitability. But some now realize that “you just can’t slash your way into long-term success any more than you can diet your way into winning a muscle-building contest,” Fernandez said.