Popular Web 2.0 Tools for B2B Marketers?

This is a headline I read at marketinvox.com. And this is the info you get there:

B2B marketers have adopted blogs and RSS more than other Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, according to the report; moreover, smaller marketers – the Davids among the Goliaths – are at the forefront: Some three-quarters of surveyed marketers that have deployed Web 2.0 tools are in companies of 10,000 or fewer people.

Some other findings from „The B2B Web 2.0 Tools Report“:

  • Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents use blogs, 58 percent use RSS feeds, followed by podcasts (54 percent), videocasts (43 percent), social networks and communities (42 percent) and wikis (19 percent).
  • The most frequently noted blogging services were WordPress (35 percent) and Blogger (30 percent), followed by TypePad (19 percent).
  • Users‘ favorite RSS readers are those offered by Mozilla Firefox (23 percent), MyYahoo (20 percent) and Bloglines (17 percent).

Fascinating news. So I went to the website of the tools report. On this site you get the results, and you can also participiate in the survey:

Tools are ranked according to the number of mentions by qualified B2B marketers. The number of ‘Votes’ is tallied in the second last column of the table.

If you sum up the votes, you can see that there are only 61 votes sofar. In my opinion this is hardly a solid number for issuing such a press release! Don’t get me wrong: the findings will be interesting, once there is a substantial number of participants. But don’t start with such a bold headline on such a small number of findings!

Regarding the statement „qualified B2B marketers“: the survey can be filled in by anyone. There are qualification questions, but you can fill in anything you want. I am sure there will be quite a few people filling in this survey in any random way, only because they are interested in receiving a full copy of the results.

Let’s wait and see what the results will be in a few weeks.

Curiosity as the new career skill

The title gives it away, I know. But I do agree with Steve Rubel. Curiosity is a very important career skill these days. At least in our industry, where things are changing so fast, that typical approaches of a few years ago might no longer work – or at least not be the best approaches out there.

You don’t have to try everything or follow every single new Web2.0 gadget, website, or whatever. But you need an inherent interest in the movements happening out there.

So I have a twitter box now …

… you can see it on the right hand side. Does anyone know the German (or at least European) SMS number for updating twitter?

I am curious to see if this gets me hooked. I have thought about this for some time, but  never saw the point. I still don’t, but now I decided to try it nevertheless.  And later I shall also try pownce and jaiku, because that’s the next two services people talk about.

The changing landscape of (blog) search

Steve Rubel writes about the changing landscape of blog search. Google killed it, he claims, and it seems plausible.

For one, there is good reason why the attractiveness of search engines like technorati has faltered:

The improvements are nice, but I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007. […] While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. The lines are blurrier. Google News, for example, has lots of blogs. More importantly, the big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you’re seeking. It won’t care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting.

Is there anything that will put an end to Google’s dominance? Probably not. But it was never within their own fields that big monolithic companies were beat. IBM still offers some of the best servers. Microsoft is still a quasi-Monopoly in PC OS.

Whoever „beats“ Google will have find a totally new field of activity.

By the way, I love to take sneak preview of what Google is toying with

Blogs and their influence on stockmarkets

OK, regular blogs won’t have any influence on mostly nothing. But here is a story about Egagdgetthe top blog worldwide according to technorati – which posted a story, apparently without solid research on the information, something most bloggers forget about… Only this time, it cost 4 billion dollars:

Last week, technology blog Engadget wrongly reported that the FCC had failed to grant Apple a license for its iPhone. When they published a report based on a hoax Apple employee email that was sent to the offices of Engagdet it caused a drop in Apple stock by $4 billion. When they found out their mistake, Engadget quickly apologized and stock rose again when Apple finally announced that the FCC had approved the phone. The lack of fact checking by blogs has stirred the journalist vs blogger debate yet again.

Question is: will Bloggers have to face this responsibility? Do they have the same obligations as main stream media, only because they have a similar sized readership? Before, I would have doubted this, but reading that story, I don’t know. But where do you draw the line? At a 1.000 readers per day? Or more than 1.000 links on technorati? What is the threshold for moral obligations?