A Shiny Needle in the B2B Marketing Haystack

There's so much information available across the web.It's a tough task to find the most relevant content for your own B2B efforts. Even aggregrators compile too much information - making the search for B2B Marketing content feel like that proverbial hunt for the needle in the haystack.

Tom Pick and Tony Karrer decided to do something about it. They created B2B Marketing Zone as a resource for serious B2B marketers. I had the chance to interview these two guys about their thoughts, goals and insights for the future of B2B Marketing Zone. Here's the scoop.

With all the marketing sites on the web - from blogs to roll-ups like AllTop and others, why did you decide to create B2B Marketing Zone?

Tom: There are topic-focused content aggregators and quasi-publications like Social Media Today Tom-2 for social media and Search Engine Journal for SEO, but there was nothing specifically focused on B2B marketing. B2B marketers have specific needs and content interests that very different from consumer brand managers or B2C internet marketers.

Tony: There are also some important differences in the way in which B2B Marketing Zone and TK-med-portrait the underlying Browse My Stuff system works that makes this site a bit different. The goal here is really to provide a launching point to all the great content that gets created already. Alltop, Social Media Today and most aggregators try to take that content to produce a new destination. We want people to still go out to each blog to make comments and connect with the blogger.

What are your top goals for this community?

Tom: In the short term, we just want to create a great site that attracts top-notch B2B bloggers as contributors, and attracts B2B marketers and other executives on the strength of the content. We'll also offer some focused RSS feeds that will save readers time, giving them great information in a convenient manner. Longer term, there are any number of ways we could monetize this, replicate the model for other types of audiences, etc. But I don't want to get ahead of myself here - Tony, your comments on the goals of B2B Marketing Zone?

Tony: Really the goal is to create something useful that makes sense of all the great stuff going on already. I personally value the connection this creates for me with bloggers that I've been reading for a while and it helps me to find the best content from them. Tom's right that there are a host of longer term monetization possibilities, but I don't see those for the B2B marketing zone itself as much as I do in helping B2B marketers see that there's value in this for attracting audiences around all sorts of B2B topics. In other words, the same people who will get value from this site, might want to think about using the same approach as a B2B marketing vehicle.

What range of content are you including in B2B Marketing Zone?

Tom: Within a B2B focus, we're leaving it fairly broad. So, that could include blogs about any aspect of B2B marketing--online, events, direct mail, SEO, SEM, social media, email marketing, white papers, video--PR, even sales-oriented blogs, as long as they address marketing and not strictly sales.

Tony: Well said Tom.

What's different about B2B Marketing Zone than other marketing sites - say for example Junta 42, or Alltop marketing?

Tom: Both are great sites, but B2B Marketing Zone sort of all falls in between in terms of focus. Junta 42 has a narrower focus, specifically on content marketing. So they generally wouldn't address other areas of B2B marketing-like search marketing, events or SEO-that will be included on B2B Marketing Zone. Alltop, on the other hand, aggregates content on everything from ADHD to Zoology.

Tony: And Alltop's marketing domain will be much broader. Plus even if Alltop were to do a B2B Marketing subdomain, it still would have a different focus.

I should also mention that Joe Pulizzi and I have had several discussions and we feel that Junta 42 and B2B Marketing Zone are going to be great complementary sources.

How many blogs are you planning on including?

Tom: We don't have a specific number in mind, but that's a great question in the sense that balancing quantity with quality will be a key challenge for the site. If we try to keep it too exclusive, we'll risk missing fresh voices with new perspectives, which would do a disservice both to those bloggers and our readers. If we leave the gates open too far, on the other hand, we risk diluting the site with off-topic or overly-promotional content.

In general, we're looking for blogs that are 1) active and have built up both a track record and somewhat of an audience, 2) B2B-focused, and 3) high quality. For requirement #1, we generally look for bloggers that post at least once per week on a regular basis, have been in existence for at least six months, and have a Google Pagerank of at least 3. Those aren't hard-and-fast rules, but that's generally the floor. Requirements #2 and #3 are somewhat subjective, a bit more "we know it when we see it."

Tony: I would add that one of the nice things about the system is that it uses social filtering to surface the best stuff. As a long time blogger, I know that some of my posts are pretty meaty and some are more announcement like. Social filtering will bring the meaty stuff to the top.

Who are your readers and how are you helping them?

Tom: Other bloggers are one audience of course, but the readers we focus on serving are B2B marketers, PR professionals and other executives. Those are the readers who benefit most from the content developed by our featured bloggers. We help them by combining aggregation with filtering; we bring them all the best B2B marketing and PR content in a convenient package.

Tony: And I think within those audiences, we are especially trying to help those people who are not regularly subscribing to these blogs. My experience is that only about 10% of audiences use RSS readers to regularly read blog content related to their profession. The other 90% likely will not find and read that really great content that's often far better than what you will get through more mainstream trade publications. So, having something like the Best Of feed provides a way for that 90% audience to become introduced to this great content.

Anything else you want to share?

Tony: I've done several of these sites in different areas where I have interests and where I want to learn. Tom has been great to work with and has really helped steer this ship. I look forward to learning a lot from Tom and from all the contributing bloggers.

That's it for the interview - but there's so much more! Check out B2B Marketing Zone and see for yourself what they have to offer. You'll be glad you did!