Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/10/9

As with any week, themes seem to develop. This week's theme appears to be influence - measuring influence, developing influence, and understanding influence. Although a number of the posts don't have a lot to do with marketing automation this week, they are hopefully of interest to anyone working in B2B marketing in general. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did.


Laura Ramos on B2B Marketing Posts covers 7 degrees – a tool for mapping connections among people in your network that has a lot of promise in understanding who is able to influence whom:
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/10/05/peoplemap-a-real-tool-for-sales-enablement/


Kipp Bodnar on Social Media B2B looks at some interesting tools for understanding influencers - although it is still a very nascent industry, there are some interesting developments that might have longer term implications:
http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/10/b2b-social-media-influencer-marketing/


Aaron Pearson on B2B Voices talks about using storytelling to draw in and ultimately influence customers – even in B2B marketing:
http://www.b2bvoices.com/2009/10/use-storytelling-to-draw-in-customers/


Kyle Flaherty on Dance With Strangers looks at the abundance of self proclaimed experts and sets out the requirements for truly being a Rock Star in an industry and having influence on people within that industry:
http://www.dancewithstrangers.com/2009/09/29/social-media-rock-stars-as-abundant-as-oxygen/



Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent, one of my long term favourite writers, list some insights she picked up at the inbound marketing summit:
http://www.conversationagent.com/2009/10/12-things-i-learned-at-the-inbound-marketing-summit.html


Roger Dooley on Neuromarketing reviews the book “How We Decide”, which, although I haven’t read it, sound like a great resource for understanding how decisions are influenced, both emotionally and rationally:
http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/decide.htm



Rob Meyerson from Semantic Argument looks at elements of differentiation in B2B branding, and some of the approaches that can successfully be used to differentiate enough to influence buyer behavior:
http://www.semanticargument.com/2009/10/01/dimensions-of-differentiation/