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A solid lead generation strategy does both, Craig Rosenberg, author of the blog Funnelholic, told me. The appetite for content online is insatiable so marketers would be wise to indulge the public with registration-free content, Craig says. “I do believe that if people are addicted to content without the reg-path and you path stuff, it better be remarkable.” Rosenberg says the “vast majority” of your marketing funnel should be free without asking potential clients for personal info. Save the registration forms for further down the funnel where more research-heavy content like whitepapers resides.

Chris Jablonski, author Emerging Tech blog on ZDNet, who provided the following formula: 10% to 20% fully gated content, 20% to 30% name and email only, and 50% to 70% completely free.

30% of teens name Twitter as their most important social network, close behind the 33% who tab Facebook, per results [pdf] from Piper Jaffray’s 25th Semi-Annual teen research project, which surveyed more than 5,000 teens.

the proportion of teens naming Facebook as their most important has dropped 9% points, while those naming Twitter have grown by 3% points. Instagram is also gaining, up 5% points to 17% indicating it as their most important social network.

Facebook’s drop is a worrisome sign for the social network, as teens are often used as a leading indicator of future trends. According to data from Experian Hitwise, Facebook’s leading share of US visits to social networking sites and forums has dropped from 63.2% in March 2012 to 58.5% in March 2013.

Twitter not only was best for generating leads, but it also showed the highest conversion rates. Compared to the 1.22% average for social media (which was below the 1.6% average for all site sources), Twitter had a 78% higher conversion rate (2.17%), easily outperforming LinkedIn (0.8%) and Facebook (0.74%). That’s despite LinkedIn having the highest engagement rate by pageviews per visit (2.5), and Twitter the least (1.5).

2. Leads.  This is a new feature in SlideShare Pro.  If you insert a form into your content, SlideShare will capture the viewer’s profile and, through its LeadShare API, automatically import the contact into SalesForce.com.  Seriously, what other social network focuses on actual lead capture and sharing? 

Alternatively, you could simply survey the early adopters and decide if they are leaders worth following:  Edelman Digital, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, Razorfish, Dachis Group, JESS3, Dell Enterprise  and, oh, The White House. 

A great example of a company removing registration friction for a business audience is the online media division of The Business Journals. Since deploying Janrain Engage Social Login in June, they have reported a 12% increase in site registrations across 40 online properties.

Will social media play an important role for B2B marketers in the near future? We believe so and are seeing a growing interest from technology solution providers and other organizations that want to add a social element to their B2B website and marketing efforts. In Forrester’s report: Market Overview: 2011 Social Media Platforms For B2B Tech Marketing, they indicate: Today, there is increased demand for social media platforms from B2B tech marketers that are using social media tactics to engage with business technology buyers.

As might be expected in a difficult economy, lead generation topped all digital budget categories with almost 27% followed by display/banner at just under 20% and search at almost 19%.   As to what is driving digital media investments in 2012, audience composition, ROI and measurement capabilities, audience reach, and data targeting were selected by more than three-quarters of the respondents.By a wide margin, click through rate is the most important factor in campaign success with cost-per-engagement and interaction rate almost equal in importance.

Content marketing, which includes white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers, is among tech marketers’ top five spending priorities for 2012.  Led by collateral at 71%, followed by webcasts/virtual events at 61%, videos at 59%, research at 55%, and articles/features at 54%, marketers are investing in a wide variety of content marketing or custom programs.  Agencies are much mo

s for social media, YouTube and Facebook lead all platforms with LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter not as popular. Among BtoB respondents, 53% found social extremely/very valuable for finding relevant technology content on the Web, which is double the 2010 figure.  Not surprisingly, 18- to 34-year-olds are most active with social media.  According to all users in the IDG survey, 60% rely most on tech sites, 46% peers or colleagues, and 43% independent tech journalists/bloggers.

Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

As reach declined, the raw number of engaged users plunged as well, falling on average by 35%. Some pages saw engaged users fall as much as 76%. Only one page in the data set had an increase in the number of engaged users, coming in at 0.7%.

To add salt to an open wound, current research from Forrester and Wildfire shows that engaged users are a brand’s best customers.  They are more likely to purchase, recommend and prefer brands when they are socially engaged with that brand.  With fewer engaged users (-35%), brands bottom line are further penalized by the recent changes.

mobile platforms combined to account for 60% of total digital media time spent, up from 50% a year ago. And mobile apps accounted for more than half of all digital media time spent in May at 51%.

mobile sharing is dramatically outpacing desktop sharing: in Q2, sharing from smartphones and tablets grew more than 30%, while sharing from the desktop declined 5%.

Pinterest and Twitter have done the best job harnessing mobile users. While half of all shares on Facebook are mobile, that number jumps to 75% of shares on Pinterest and Twitter.

To achieve the marketing goals you need to drive qualified traffic to your website and convert that traffic into leads. From there the sales team can pick up and convert leads into clients. This means creating and distributing content and content offers to a relevant audience. It also means content should be mapped on the buyer’s journey which is structured in: awareness, consideration and decision stages.Here are the basic things you need to do:

Why are marketers stuck in 2010? There are four reasons:The crushing pace of technological change — A feeling of helplessness about the pace of change leads to uncertainty about direction, effectiveness, and even personal relevance as a marketing leader. Marketers rely on what they’ve always done because they don’t understand the changing world.

Over-reliance on technology and automation — Today, marketing has become a glorified IT department. Marketing decisions are being made by statisticians and data scientists in ways that may increase efficiency – and maybe even sales leads — but drive us away from the heart of our customers.

Organizational paralysis — Companies formed departments and teams years ago to work on social media, content, and other initiatives that don’t work like they used to. Becoming “locked-in” to marketing tactics that simply don’t work any longer might be due to outdated agency relationships, organizational resistance, cultural obstinance, lack of skilled leadership, relentless bureaucracy … or some combination of these factors.

Marketers are siphoning budgets from display campaigns on Twitter to its video ads, which when synchronised with TV media buys can lead to a 10 per cent lift in their return-on-investment from the legacy medium.

To propel its own video offering, Twitter is working on features such as demographic targeting and validation, gross rating point and target rating point as well as reporting.

We are focused on live premium content in all sports, news and politics as well as entertainment to bring together for our users what they are already talking about, what they already care about," added Bain.  The company will be hoping live streaming help lift its monthly active users. It’s been an ongoing problem for the social network and while it moved up slightly in the quarter, up to 310 million compared to 305 million in the previous one, growth has been fairly stagnant for the last year.