B2B social marketing

Jeremy Epstein has a nice post out about the ROI on B2B social marketing. He's also got one coming on B2C, that I'm especially curious to see. He and I had had a long discussion on the topic when I was at the Discovery Channel Store, and he's really proving out a lot of the points he made then.

Twin Tech IV

If you're looking to expand your network in DC, the Twin Tech series of parties is a great way to go. Twin Tech IV was tonight. The nice thing is the published attendee list ahead of time, so you can get a feel of who's going to be there. And, you can always watch Twitter search in realtime to see what's going on.

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Placeholder for running post re: sprint training.

Twitterfeed

If you have an active Twitter account, I'd highly recommend checking out Twitterfeed. Great way to get your blog posts, or other RSS feeds, included in your Twitter postings automatically. It'll answer the question of "Did we put that on Twitter?". Also, you can do some creative things. For Shop.org, we have an RSS feed of the top item on SmartBrief, and autopost it. You'll also see that in my personal Twitter feed to the left.

Phone call to verify email

Interesting online marketing tactic - I got a call yesterday from a vendor that I'd last ordered from two years ago. They sell consumer products, with their typical order probably in the $40-60 range. They were calling to verify my email, and to let me know they'd send out a gift code for a discount.
It was a nice gesture, and made me wonder if:
a) the cost of sending incremental emails made the cost of the call worthwhile
b) people who received phone calls had a much higher likelihood to purchase
c) they had an excessive amount of unused time from their inbound phone reps, so they were redirecting it.

What are your thoughts?

Blauction!

Shop.org is hosting our first "Blauction". You can see it at http://blog.shop.org/2009/04/30/sponsorship-auction-place-your-bid-2/. We're auctioning off a sponsorship slot for our Annual Summit. We think it's a fun way to combine social media with sponsorship sales.