See below for Feb 2012 updated data!

On March 21, 2011 Twitter celebrated it's 5th birthday: "200 million users and 1 billion tweets per week". But has it hit the mainstream audience and what is the adoption rate in the manufacturing sector? In…

The manufacturing industry has been somewhat slow to accept social media as a marketing tool. This is largely because it can be difficult to see how social media plays into the larger business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy. That, however, appears to be changing. Acccording to a…

With the 2011 Holidays behind us and the various Social Media companies back from there break it's time to look at what's on the horizon for Social Media. There are quite a number of indications of what may be coming down the pike in 2012 based upon where the 'holes' are in the various platforms.…

I was recently talking to a headhunter who ONLY does Social Media recruiting. It was an interesting conversation to say the least. He was looking for several 20 somethings to fill positions for Social Media managers. As I tried to provide him with some names we ended up chatting about the State of the Social Media market right now and that led to a conversation about Social Media consultants.

Social Media recruiting

His problem, as he explained, was…

After some initial disappointing press coverage indicating the iPhone 4S was a thud, it now appears that the real impact of the iPhone 4S and IOS5 won't be realized until users get the product in their hands. We have to wait for Newton's Third Law of Motion to move and realign some marketshare positions and, potentially, some changes in strategic direction for your Social Media marketing programs.  It could just end up being the "thud" felt round the world.…

An awful lot has changed in the past year with regard to Social Media.  More and more companies are beginning to talk about using social media for their B-to-C and B-to-B business.  Many experienced Marketing Managers are now facing a dilemma. …

Somewhere around 1439 Johannes Gutenberg is attributed with the invention of the printing press. Gutenberg probably had no idea how his invention would affect history.  Without Gutenberg, we would not have Social Media as we now know it.  Gutenberg improved communication amongst people. Ideas could be spread more quickly and to a larger audience.…

I asked Derek to contribute this blog to explain some details about Software As A Service or SaaS. It's also referred to as "cloud computing" "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) and "platform…

Recently Guy Kawasaki has been getting flamed for his twitter promotion of his new book "Enchantment"  Guy uses a twitter aggregator to schedule his tweets and the same "tweet" was running just a bit too often for some of his followers.  In their eyes it was just  too much self promotion.…

Everything changes. Yesterday I was sitting in a meeting with a client and the subject of SEO came up.  We talked about some of the black hat issues and the importance of organic growth over time: The quality vs. quantity of 'likes' and 'follows'. In the course of the discussion I pulled up a keyword from another client who had gone to a completely digital market program 8 years ago and really knows and understand the digital space. My other client OWNS the entire first page for…

As you probably are aware Rapid Production Marketing "touches" several Twitter accounts in some way.  In some cases we act as monitors in an oversight role, in other cases we act as the fully 'outsourced' social media. We cross several industries including industrial, manufacturing, automotive, medical and even music.  As a result, we tend to see innovative marketing ideas generated in one market segment successfully that we can then transfer to another segment.  That, after all, is really…

The following article was recently released by MAPI, the Manufacturer's Alliance  It's very very informative and well written. I think you'll find the analysis and result very very enlightening!

** MAPI Members - click here for a PDF version of this article and …

Everyone is talking about "Social Media" like Facebook and Twitter and how it fits into the B-to-B marketing and sales efforts.  But Social media is really just a "catch-all" for Web 2.0 direct engagement with customers. We are all at the beginning stages…

A true story.

Mr X recently found out his health insurance company UXXC started offering vendor discount for health related services and one of the vendor happened to be Mr X’s gym. Mr X was quite delighted and printed out the following details from the health insurance company website and brought it with him to the gym.

You will receive either a minimum 10% discount off of the initiation and/or monthly dues, or the best available public rate based on the…

I can only speak for my slice of the manufacturing world, the exhibitors of IMTS-The International Manufacturing Technology Show, held biennially at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL. 

Here is what I see; the adoption is slow but growing. 

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1. Why did you start using social media?

TechniksUSA is a very careful company and we like to do our homework in both our products and our marketing efforts.  We’ve moved to almost entirely to digital marketing over the past few…

Below is an excerpt from NielsenWire that is certainly worth paying attention to if you are in the B-to-B marketplace:

January 2011: Online Video Usage Up 45%…

Lead generation from their Websites is the number one objective of most manufacturers and industrial companies that I talk to. Yet, their existing Websites have little to no lead generating capabilities.…

It took a long time for me to understand that there are some common denominators in why some fantastic brands fail while other, inferior products, are successful in channels marketing programs. Below you will find six key points to think about. Think of these six as cylinders in a car. If five of them are working but not six you've lost all forward momentum.…

When Göran Fredrik Göransson founded Sandvik in 1862, he knew nothing about web based social collaboration. He was an innovator with ideas and solutions that turned the industry up side down though, and as he was constantly visiting customers around the world, he definitely knew what important ingredient social collaboration was for success.

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