B2B Lead Generation Gone Wild. B2B Lead Generation Gone Bad.

It should come as no surprise that lead generation has become an important force within B2B marketing. In fact, there is a good chance that lead generation efforts are one of the predominant elements within your own marketing plan.

But, what is lead generation really? Frankly, I have become increasingly concerned by some of what I see going on in the pharmaceutical b2b marketing/media space.

Effective and ethical lead generation programs require an offer—some in the digital marketing world call the offer a Unique Value Proposition. In order to capture a prospect’s contact information, you have to give them something. Examples of things you can give include: access to piece of high-level content (white paper, webinar, podcast, etc), a free product sample, a discount, a free consultation session. Your offer is solely limited by your creativity, but the value of your offer needs to be in line with the information you are asking for.

People guard their e-mail addresses and phone numbers carefully and justifiably so. Requiring full contact information to download a product brochure is not an equitable exchange. However, requiring full contact information to access a white paper, a non-commercial webcast - a piece of content that educates and helps someone solve a problem, is an equitable exchange.

I believe lead generation should be transparent. By this, I mean that it should be clear to the user that they are giving X company their contact information in exchange for access to Y deliverable. Enabling registration forms with cookies is great so that repeat visitors do not have to enter their information every time they want to download a piece of your content. But, a cookied registration form still makes it obvious to the visitor that they are offering their contact information.

I am not a tremendous fan of registration-based B2B industry websites as most of these sites do not require registration for a specific download. When registered users select a piece of content to download, they do not have to submit a registration form because the site knows who they are. Although these sites may not violate acceptable privacy policies, I believe that they count on visitors clicking away not realizing that they are providing a company a lead for every piece of content they access.

These sites are sometimes able to give large quantities of “leads” to their advertisers and the advertisers are generally unaware of the very passive action the visitor took to provide the “lead.” Although, I generally do not like a site registration approach to lead generation for industry sites, I would be comfortable with this approach for a specific company’s site if done in a thoughtful manner.

The big disagreement, no make that a huge disagreement, I have with many publishers right now is that many are giving “clicks as leads” and an increasing number of publishing companies are giving “looks as leads.” The analytics and behavior of specific visitors/audience members is quite detailed for e-newsletter subscribers and registered website users. For instance, I can access the specific individuals and their full contact information for anyone who clicks on any link (ad or editorial) within any of our e-newsletters. The same holds true for registered members of our websites. And our analytics technology allows us to identify specific individuals just looking (not even clicking) on specific content areas via “hot spot” technology.

However, I firmly believe that it is a form of identity theft to give this information to our advertisers. I do not and will not do this to our readers. Many of our readers are very loyal and without an audience we don't have much of a business...why would I steal from the very people who allow our business to prosper? And I will not fill our clients’ CRM systems with ill-gotten data.

We all have different views on business ethics and this is my line in the sand on this issue. Serving contextual ads or ads based on past behavior can be of tremendous value to the reader and is a tactic I support and utilize. Giving individuals' contact information without it being transparent to the reader that they are giving their contact information is a tactic I do not support and do not utilize. Period.

A “click” is not a lead and a “look” certainly is not a lead. Eventually, I think there could be federal regulation to keep publishers from doing this kind of thing. However for now, I wonder if we can keep the Feds out of this issue and just do the right thing? Can we apply the Golden Rule to our B2B marketing strategies and tactics? Most of us do not want our identities stolen. Why, then, would we do this to our customers and prospects?

Read Pharmaceutical Manufacturing's Digital Pledge to our audience.

Webinar: What Your Love Life & Lead Nurturing Having in Common?

Continuing on the dating/b2b marketing theme, the following is an Eloqua lead nurturing webcast that I think that you might find helpful. Click here to access the webcast.

Revisiting the B2B Marketing - Dating Comparison

Early in 2009 I wrote a posted entitled B2B Marketing and Dating - A Parallel for Consideration.

I wrote this post because I really do believe that the seduction effective marketing programs demand is in a lot of ways quite similar to dating.

Yesterday I had lunch with a couple of smart clients whose opinions and insights I really respect. That conversations simulated additional thought on the b2b marketing/dating comparison.

It might be easier for many of us to see the comparison I am making if we look at consumer marketing. There is no question that the marketing programs of car, perfume, clothing companies, as well as many other categories are working hard to seduce us.

Is there a comparable seduction required to sell solutions like valves, motors, business software solutions...? I contend yes. Of course, effective b2b marketing needs to be more informational than a perfume ad AND b2b marketers need to tap into different emotions. But, effective b2b marketing still needs to seduce human beings.

For instance, clothing companies targeting my demographic work to tap into the fact that every woman wants to feel pretty, most want to feel thinner, many want to express their personalities via the clothes they wear. So, to a prospective woman customer in her late thirties/forties, clothing companies will likely present a pretty, sensual woman who is thin (but not too thin) and who has a fun, dynamic and sparkling personality. What woman of my age does not want to feel fun, pretty and that she still has "it?"

We all are the same emotional creatures when we walk into our offices...we just tap into different emotions. We want to feel smart, successful, upwardly mobile, safe/we are making the right decisions, less burdened, less stressed, like a hero to our customers and colleagues. I believe most of us often experience quite complex and deep emotions via our professional activities. Career satisfaction study after career satisfaction study clearly demonstrate that our jobs are not "just a job."

I don't know about you, but I can begrudgingly accept not being as thin as I used to be and having a few wrinkles here and there. BUT, I cannot accept feeling that I am failing. I don't think that these feeling are particularly unique to me.

So as b2b marketers we do need to seduce our customers and prospects--can we make them know that they will be heroes, make them more effective/successful, convince them that as solution suppliers we will not let them down?

And....just as when we are dating, can we accomplish this in an appropriate fashion that respects and embraces the emotional beings we all are?

In a dating situation, if we try to move too fast or if we violate our beloved's trust we will experience a lot of rejection and quick cooling of budding passions. Similarly, in a b2b marketing situation if we violate trust, try to move too quickly our conversion rates will suffer horribly....or to look at it another way, many potential customers will abandon potential engagement.

Check out the parable within the B2B Marketing and Dating - A Parallel for Consideration post and let me know what you think.

Top Spam Words and Phrases--Updated April 2010

The following is a list of the top 80 words and phrases common to business-to-business media identified to trigger spam filters. This list was updated in April of 2010. At the end of this list are spam triggers specific to Microsoft Outlook.

In addition to these words triggering e-mail spam filters, use of these phrases within web pages can negatively effect SEO/SEM efforts.

Finally, from our understanding Google can now (to some extent at least) read words within photos. Therefore, these words/phrases should be avoided within photos and other graphics within digital media efforts.

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Microsoft Outlook: Spam Words To Avoid In Your Emails (2/10)

First 8 characters of From are digits
Subject contains “advertisement”
Body contains “money back ”
Body contains “cards accepted”
Body contains “removal instructions”
Body contains “extra income”
Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “$”

The Difference between Social Media and Social Networks

by Greg Satell

Twitter is a social network, but social networks are not Twitter.

Much of the hype about social media obscures a vastly greater opportunity. Although social media types love to tell the rest of us that we “just don’t get it,” the fact is that very few social “gurus”s have actually taken the time to learn anything about social networks.

Happily, the joke is on them. Social networks are where the real money is. Read More

The Primal Forces that Drive Social Networks

Fascinating. You may need to "hang on" a little bit, but the network theories touched upon in this article, if strategically applied could have a powerful effect on marketing campaigns and approaches.

The Primal Forces That Drive Social Networks
by Greg Satell

Social Networks are revolutionizing how we view our world. People are connecting, businesses are being created or transformed, and the world seems like a smaller place. As with any transformation on a grand scale, a plethora of consultants, gurus, blogs, and how-to books have risen to meet the demand for information about the social revolution.

However, it is very rare to hear anything about the underlying forces that actually drive the social network phenomenon. Read More

Social Media Trends at Fortune 100 Companies

Interesting summary from Mashable regarding the prevelance and increased importance of social media amongst the Fortune 100.




Click here to read the article.