The project is aptly called Business Model Generation, and includes 470 visionaries and business leaders from around the globe. The result is an amazing book and website that literally illustrates (in hand-sketched diagrams and vivid, full-color images) the process for canvas-based business model innovation for myriad industries and the challenges they face.

It’s as much a guidebook for how to – through workshops and creative visualization – graphically analyze risk/reward models as much as it is an unfinished work of art that invites answers (in one section, the CEO of a service-based consultancy invites readers to contact him with new approaches to the tried and true services billing model).

If it isn’t obvious, we’re big fans of the canvas approach. When we work with clients to automate certain aspects of their marketing operations, we often begin with SWOT exercises (workshops containing cross-functional teams designed to get to the bottom of the company’s operational strengths and weaknesses in sales and marketing). The answers are always surprising, and end up delivering value to customers and new revenue opportunities to the company. Likewise, when working with sales teams to create better content, we develop content matrices that generate specific pieces of content for every state of the buying cycle.

The Business Model Generation project is full of similar exercises designed to improve and change organizations. I hope you’ll check it out, or at least try the free 72-page download at BusinessModelGeneration.com.

In short, they’re great for social search because they make your tweets much more visible in social search than they might be otherwise, and may draw quality followers who are interested in the broad topics you tweet about.

But there’s also a downside. As Google revealed in early 2010, the search giant has deemed hashtags a red flag for spam, and consider it a negative ranking factor. This means that if you use hashtags, your tweets are much less likely to show up in Google’s real-time search results. Until now, I’ve clung to hashtags because (a) I believed Google’s assertion that hashtags were spammy was ludicrous, and might soon be overturned, and (b) I also believed that the benefits of being more visible in Twitter outweighed search visibility. Now with Google’s real-time search in full swing, however, traditional search’s reach can no longer be ignored. I’m going cold turkey.

Here’s how to compensate for a hashtag-free existence:

•Keyword-Centric Profile – Take care to make your profile keyword-rich, including broad topics that you hope to be found for within social search. In other words, if you tweet about the housing market, include “real estate” in the description of yourself.

•Keyword-Centric Headlines – Like any good SEO copywriter, utilize broad keywords within your headline. This may mean that certain keywords get utilized over and over again in your headlines, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff to not being found.

•Consider Custom-Shortened URLs – If you have high-value keywords in your domain name that you feel may help people find your tweets in traditional search, consider utilizing a custom URL shortener from a service like Awe.sm that allows your primary URL to be recognizable.

Facebook's new 'like' button

The game-changing feature, however, is the new ability for Web publishers to add the Like button to virtually any piece of content on any Web property. For example, let’s imagine that you operate a music blog, and you’ve posted a video reviewing the new MGMT album. You also add the Like button to this video that is associated with a subcategory “MGMT” on your site. Anytime someone comes to your site who is also simultaneously logged into Facebook, that person can Like the video. When they do this, it will show up as an item in their news feed, enabling their friends to find your content from Facebook as well. In addition, using the new plugin, it’s possible to view anyone else in their network who has liked that content without even going to Facebook (they’ll be able to see it from your music blog).

Using our example, when important news about MGMT comes out again, you could push a message into the news feed of anyone who Liked the original video and potentially drive them back to your site. They would of course be able to unsubscribe to these messages, so it will be extremely important to stay 100% on message. In other words, this enables you to send users who Liked MGMT content only that content, as opposed to also sending them content about Bob Dylan, Brahams and Ke$ha.

This is a total revolution for both market segmentation and permission-based marketing. It’s difficult to imagine, two years from now, many Web marketers who would still prefer to manage dozens of targeted email lists when it’s possible to allow Facebook users to opt into an unlimited number of topics and digest them anywhere on the Web. This is a critical addition to the social media optimization toolkit.

While embracing these concepts is important, it’s important not to get too locked into any single piece of SMO strategy or functionality in the near term. Facebook will no doubt be making many adjustments and wholesale changes to these new tentacles as they essentially focus test these on its more than 400 million users and the thousands of Web publishers that will no doubt jump in with both feet right away.

Furthermore, year over year increases in social media spend are expected, with CMOs cited in the study projecting that social media will consume over 17% of their total budget by 2015. Much of the spending patterns between B2Bs and B2Cs are similar, with heavy emphasis on branding, CRM and service promotions. Projected B2B spend over the next 12 months to promote company services is even slightly greater than B2C spending for the same category (11% vs. 10.7%).

Much in the same way that B2Cs followed their consumers to Facebook and Twitter, B2Bs are realizing that the decision makers and business executives inhabit the same space. B2B spend in social media is here to stay and planning now to accommodate its future growth is crucial.

What’s not yet clear is whether most B2B’s have clear ROI expectations, or whether they’re making an investment simply because they need to get a foothold in an increasingly important space.

For this project, the platform of choice was Marketo, an impressive marketing automation suite that integrates quite seamlessly with Salesforce to not only drive more leads, but give the sales team critical behavioral information that influences their sales strategy (disclosure: DemandResults is a proud Marketo Alliance Partner and also a Salesforce AppExchange Partner). As anyone with enterprise-level CRM experience knows, a CRM is only as good as the information that sales reps put into it. This directly affects marketing automation software too, as Marketo attempts to match demographic information and behavioral activities on prospects with data already in the CRM in order to score lead and customer profiles. The higher the user adoption rate, the more powerful it is.

This launch was a resounding success. First, the pilot program yielded results that could not have been achieved without Marketo. Secondly, the company’s SVP of Sales – who had once been understandably resistant to the idea of introducing yet another sales tool – went on record before the executive team that after witnessing the results of the project, he was now “drinking the Kool-Aid.” He also laid down the law to his sales team that Marketo use was mandatory.

The secret to successful system deployments aren’t necessarily technical, but rather tactical. After reflecting on this latest project, here are our top 3 tactical tips:

1– Involve the Sales Team in Early Planning Stages – Very often, marketing automation platforms are desired, researched and purchased by progressive members of a company’s marketing team. Since their jobs often depend on their ability to drive leads, they inherently want the latest and greatest tools available.

Sales teams, on the other hand, are often indifferent or even adverse to anything that might alter their existing process. As a result, the sales team is often left out of the loop for the most important part of the project – the strategic and configuration stages. This can be absolutely devastating; remember that companies are built around sales, not marketing. Thus, it’s important to involve the most important members of a sales team and ask them the most important question: “if you could wave a magic wand and make the system do something that would help your job, what would it be?” More often than not, the system can be configured to do what they asked for. Later, when it’s time to test the system, the sales team will be more invested in the project.

2 – Start with A Pilot Group of Prime Movers – In an enterprise-level company, it’s inadvisable to begin testing the system with the entire sales team. Work with executives to handpick a group of early adopters on the sales and marketing team who will be able to provide valuable feedback about the results of early tests. On the sales side, these should be effective sellers who are already heavily committed to using CRM. Start by involving them in one strategic campaign, touching base early and often to make sure that the system is wowing them with business intelligence that makes them more successful.

3 – Promote Early Successes – Were any leads progressed to a near-committed sales stage during the pilot program? What was actually sold? Were there unforeseen benefits that impressed members of the pilot group? Celebrate success from the pilot group at the beginning of company-wide training. The most difficult part is actually getting users to involve marketing automation in their daily routine.

As with any set of truly powerful tools, configuring Marketo use and implementation is an evolving project, as it becomes clearer over time how to best leverage it for each scenario and each organization. A strong initial deployment can set the entire project up for long-term success.

Bing– Just when Apple’s brilliant and searing marketing schemes had convinced the world that there was nothing less sexy than Microsoft product, the software giant launched Bing – a bodacious, complex and visually stimulating search engine that users seem to like. The latest ComScore stats reveal Bing continuing to gain market share, at 10.3%. Bing continues to roll out a motherload of innoviative, addictive features such as Map Apps and Visual Search, and the Bing API. The company is also gradually releasing guidelines and information for Web publishers.

Google Personalized Search – After experimenting with Personalized Search for four years, the company made personalized search an opt-out service. Apart from the few who will opt-out of personalized search, no two people are experiencing Google Search in quite the same way. It remains to be seen how much this will change SEO strategies.

Real-Time Search – Rather than face the prospect of Twitter emerging as a major search engine competitor, Bing and Microsoft struck separate deals with the service to serve up real-time search results. In addition, both services struck a deal with Facebook to index portions of its service, prompting a surge of Facebook users adjusting their personal privacy settings.

Google PageRank Goes In-House – PageRank has long been at the core of Google’s complex ranking algorithm. The company went so far as to display PageRank scores for Web sites and display them prominently in its Google Tool Bar. Suddenly last year, the company changed course. It began telling Web publishers not to worry about PageRank, then made it impossible for Web publishers to use nofollow to determine how PageRank would be distributed. Finally the company stopped publishing PageRank in most of its toolbars altogether. Given the company’s push toward personalized search, it will be interesting to see whether the building blocks of PageRank stay intact behind the curtain.

News Industry Backlash – Both the Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch turned their back on Google this year, citing loopholes that allowed users to access paid content through the search engine and index content while contributing nothing in return. Murdoch is reportedly in negotiations for an exclusive deal with Bing. Exclusive content deals with the world’s major news industries might give Bing the advantage it needs to cut into Google’s market share.

Cross-Domain Canonical Tags – Canonical tags were developed as a way to for Web publishers to control which versions of content should be seen as the “original” version. This helped Google to determine which version to display prominently in search results. Now the tags have been modified to allow publishers with a single piece of content on multiple domains to use the tag as well. In some cases, Google is promoting use of the tags as a replacement for 301 redirects.

Death of the Traditional Search Engine – For years, Yahoo remained reasonably competitive with its aging keyword-based search engine, even as it watched Bay Area rival Google ratchet up both revenues and the complexity of its search algorithm. Even if Microsoft hadn’t acquired Yahoo this year – Bing is set to replace Yahoo’s back end in 2010 – the company has been bleeding market share all year. Given Yahoo Search’s lame-duck image, it will be interesting to see how long Bing waits to replace the front end as well.

However, significantly fewer respondents from the 18-24 year-old category disapproved of tailored ads.  The study may be fodder for legislators seeking regulations that would increase consumer privacy online. According to the New York Times, the FTC has signaled that they would be examining privacy issues closely, and Representative Rick Boucher (Democrat, Virginia) has stated his intent to introduce legislation that would limit marketers’ abilities.

Tighter regulations on traditional Web marketing may bolster the value and need for search engine marketing. Both paid search and search engine optimization techniques offer the unique opportunity to match a customers’ interests in any given moment with an exact results. Unless a user is logged in (triggering personalized search results), ads are only tailored to what a user voluntarily inputs into a search engine at that moment.

Just what those terms mean differs greatly depending on who you ask.

We see marketing automation as a technology that allows marketers to automate a number of high-impact tasks that are typically manual and repetitive. These solutions are not a replacement for sophisticated marketing managers, rather they allow marketing professionals to be far more effective and influential in driving sales.

Furthermore, marketing automation tools are typically based in the cloud, and are often interoperable with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. However, marketing automation systems can also be a replacement for other types of marketing suits, such as cloud-based email marketing services, analytics, page testing and Web site development tools.  For example, within an automation suite, companies can build entire Web sites, test and optimize customer response to those sites, launch related email marketing campaigns, create automated drip campaigns to prospects and manage invitations to Webinars.

That’s really just a small slice of what’s possible. What we’re witnessing is a sea-change: a small handful of companies are bringing together a multitude of services that have been incredibly fragmented for more than a decade. It also give you a sense of why the term “marketing automation” is so clunky – it’s really impossible to describe all the things these services can do in an eloquent manner.

As evidence-based marketers, we love these systems precisely because they make it possible to track nearly every relevant response by a prospect or customer within a campaign. They also make it possible to execute extremely sophisitaced marketing strategies within (or mostly within) a single solution.

B2B Keyword Discovery

Before we can tackle SEO-centric content development or revision, we have to define what keywords we’ll be optimizing. Without a tight focus on a defined set of keywords that we want to dominate, search result gains will be middling at best.

Sadly, it’s here that many B2B campaigns are doomed from the start.

In many cases, especially when a company is involved in a complex or high-ticket sale, there is a vast discrepancy in the lexicon used by the company and its customers. For example, let’s imagine that Acme, a cloud-based technology company, creates a product that does many things related to tracking employee productivity at agencies that bill by the hour (law firms, spa services, etc). Those services include client tracking, task management, project management, time tracking, productivity reporting and automated billing. But because the product does so many things well, the company decides that no existing names in the marketplace do the product justice. They then decide to create a new category for the product, which they call an “Agency Workflow Automation System.” This decision alone creates a common pain point – the good people at Acme are the only people in the world who would describe their product this way, meaning that their product almost never appears in search results.  This is something that is far more prevalent in the B2B world.

The SEO’s job is to unpack the product’s impressive feature set and try to match it with language that will drive traffic to the site. This means language that people will actually use when conducting search queries. More importantly, it also means using search terms that are accurate, ethical and within the company’s comfort zone.

Product Research

Acceptable Entry Features – Does the product really deliver on all the individual things that it claims to do? For example, does the product really have solid task management features, or are those just “sideline” features? Because the SEO campaign will be responsible for much of the product’s lead generation, we need to consider whether consumers looking for a particular feature will be satisfied by what they find as a result of a keyword query. In the long term, this can also have serious online reputation management implications as well.

Keywords

Once we’ve nailed down all the individual features that we want to promote, we have to figure out what potential customers actually call these features. In most B2B cases, customers use completely different keywords for products than the product providers. This is true in the case of Acme’s product – very few searchers would think to search for something called “Workflow Automation System.”

For Acme, we’ll conduct our keyword discovery in three ways:

•       Internal Surveys – sales reps and customer service representatives are among the best sources for discovering what types of language real customers are using before they are “educated” with industry terminology. This pre-education lexicon often translates well to search queries.

•       Customer Surveys – customer keyword acquisition can be achieved through online polls, or through perusing the online forums and reviews for competitor’s products.

•       Keyword Tools – looking up customer keywords, searching for synonyms, and identifying keyword combinations that are both targeted enough but also have the highest possible search volume.

Narrowing the List

For Acme’s “Agency Workflow Automation System,” some of the resulting keyword queries – taking into account search volume trends and the language that customers actually use — might look like this:

•       “track employee productivity”

•       “project management software”

•       “resource management tools”

•       “quickbooks billing software for agencies”

Once we have this list, it’s essential to run it by Acme decision makers for final approval. Even though they realize that they might get a few dozen extra leads each month through customers searching for “project management software,” they may decide that this could ultimately harm their brand management. Whether it actually would do that is debatable, but brand considerations are tricky corporate decisions that SEOs should never second guess.

PPC Campaign

Ideally, the ensuing list of keywords should be tested using a Google or Yahoo search campaign. This way, keywords can be tested all the way through the sales pipeline, giving the SEO the ability to see which keywords not only lead to clicks, but to conversions as well. The downside of doing this is that many B2B cycles can take several months or years, making this an unacceptably long process to build into the cycle.

Organizing the List

The list should be organized into a spreadsheet with four columns:

•        Page (the actual URL with keywords in the folder structure)

•        Primary keywords

•        Supporting keywords

•        Remarks

There should also be a key. For example, primary keywords might be utilized whenever possible in H1 tags, including top level menu items, and used in text using bold or strong styling. Supporting keywords would be used in context and, if possible, repeated with synonyms, and so on.

Content Generation

Now that we’ve got a defined list and a usage key, content creation can actually begin.

If this work is delegated to a creative team, the SEO’s role will be in an editorial capacity, making sure that proper usage is employed without stepping into the realm of keyword stuffing, resulting in penalization.

This process, used in coordination with numerous other SEO strategies, should product competitive web pages in any given category.

Distributing 1000-10,000 word documents is definitely old school. But large-ticket B2B buyers, especially in the tech space, download them by the thousands each day. Just as every patient would prefer to visit a doctor that’s always up on the latest research, business buyers want to feel that they are buying into a knowledge-based organization. By limiting the white paper only to educational content, and avoiding using it as a sales vehicle, you are sending a message to potential customers that you will be not just a vendor, but also a partner that will help them grow their business.

Case Studies

While the concept of offering case studies isn’t new, the idea of asking for registration or contact information to see them is. Absolutely essential in any B2B service industry, and recommended in the tech world, case studies give you a chance to show off your problem solving skills. Customers are coming to you with pain points. Showing them how you solved others business problems gives them – and you – a basis for a real sales conversation. If you have the luxury of choosing which clients or customers you wish to take on, their reaction to your approach also provides you with an opportunity to decide if they will be good clients or customers.

But remember that case studies are actually quite valuable. Whether you realize it or not, valuable trade secrets are contained in nearly every good case study. You need to be able to put some filters on who should be privy to this information. Plus, this allows you to follow up on new leads that might become customers.

Online Demos

If your product or service can be demonstrated online, then video demonstrations will likely help you sell the product anyway. But if the sale or service is a big ticket item or a complex sale, as is often the case in the B2B space, require registration to view it. Most serious customers will freely offer basic contact information, and it helps you market to them after the initial viewing.