Many of our B2B clients are now engaging in Web 2.0 Social Media Marketing

The problem is that it’s overwhelming – even the terminology sounds like a foreign language.

Another hurdle is that marketing measurement tools don’t apply in gauging success of the initiative.

We recommend that clients start with a few basic Web 2.0 strategies to help them understand the power of social marketing. B2B is hard to measure so we have selected strategies that have some measurable component.

Click here to see which channels do the brightest B2B marketers use to drive leads.

GETTING STARTED: B2B SOCIAL MEDIA

→ WIKIPEDIA

Build a page about your corporation and include links to highly targeted pages on your site. Warning! You must first read the Wikipedia content guidelines and strictly adhere to them or risk having your new page deleted by the editors.

Measurement: Track inbound visitor traffic from Wikipedia. Our experience is people from Wikipedia stay longer and view more pages than your typical visitor.

→ LINKEDIN

Build a company page using LinkedIn’s new Company beta feature. Request that the top management in your company also create LinkedIn profiles. This content gets indexed in search engines and can have a positive impact on your search rankings.

Measurement: Track inbound visitor traffic from LinkedIn and rankings.

→ LAUNCH A BLOG WITH RSS FEED

It’s a technically easy place for most clients to start. The biggest drawback being what to write about and who is in charge of this initiative. We suggest that one employee dedicate 4 to 6 hours per week to the blog and to posting on other appropriate blogs.

Measurement: Improvement in Inbound links, blog page views, blog posts and trackbacks.

→ CREATE VIDEO AND PODCASTS

Even the amateur video files in YouTube can get thousands of visits! I suggest adding video and/or podcasts to your site and submitting them such as Feedburner, YouTube, and even iTunes.

Measurement: Most of these sites offer measurement information. TubeMogul – a video publishing and analytics website – is a great resource that let’s video owners publish and track video usage (basic service is free).

→ ADD SHARING CAPABILITIES

All our clients seem to have a library of content and we recommend that they add the “share/book” links.

Measurement: Occasionally check to see the number of bookmarks. For example:

• Delicious.com: Under the Bookmarks tag do a look-up for your company URL and track the number of times pages from your site have been bookmarked and had notes written about it. (The notes can be very interesting to read as well)

→ TWITTER

Think of Twitter as a broadcast mechanism and the rest is easy. Use it to alert your followers about new blog posts, events, or your latest video. The hardest part is fitting the message into 140 characters.

Measurement: While measuring “Followers” is an easy metric – it’s not as reliable as you’d like it to be. What you want to have happened is for people to ReTweet (RT) your posts.

With a few videos, podcasts and a blog, the client now has the basics to engage in social media press releases, which include not only text but also images, video and audio.