CEO and Founder Alyssa Rapp of Bottlenotes.com, a popular online community for wine lovers, believes that all businesses need a social media strategy.

Bottlenotes.com is a cool, active website where new and experienced wine lovers share recommendations and educate each other about favorites.  Bottlenotes members also learn from the experts.  According to a recent Success Magazine interview the (already) fast growing small company Bottlenotes is on the road to even more growth.  And social media played a part in that growth by helping with brand awareness.

Rapp shares how she took her startup in 2005 from a wine marketing firm and ecommerce site to a social media site by changing her business model.  Bottlenotes.com has now become a vibrant online community of wine enthusiasts and experts.

For small businesses and start-ups still on the fence about adding social media marketing to their business, this interview is a good read.  Especially for small companies marketing and selling to consumers.

When asked how important a social media component is for today’s businesses, CEO Alyssa Rapp said,

“ I think all businesses need to come up with and develop their social media strategy. All those targeted verticals have to interplay with the Facebooks of the world and the Twitters of the world. You can’t create this silo and not interact with social media and the rest of the community.

I’ve seen data that shows that luxury brands with more Facebook fans in 2009 showed higher average sales than those without. Maybe it’s not your fan page driving sales directly, but your brand awareness, as reflected by the fans on your page, does translate to sales.”

Find the complete interview here.  Enjoy!  And dust off your social media strategy and let’s get going on your company blog or Facebook page.

If you liked this post, here are others you might enjoy:

How a Bank Won Small Customers by Really Understanding Their Customers’ Personas

Does Your Small Business Have 8 Key Social Media Marketing Basics in Place?

I love reading how-I-did-it interviews with successful start-up CEO’s!    Especially entrepreneurs that share how they grew their small businesses by bootstrapping—pure gold.  If you’re a B2B small business owner looking for real world examples of growing a small business, you’ll get great ideas from a NY Times blog interview with CEO Elizabeth Charnock of Cataphora.

You’ll get insights about how Charnock grew the software company from 13 employees in 2002 to 60-plus employees today.

Bootstrapping Lessons from CEO Charnock

Make all employees owners of the company. Most start-ups can’t pay big salaries so providing stock options is a great way to go. Offering stock options in lieu of a big-company sized paycheck also ensures you’re recruiting people committed to making your business a success.

Mentor employees into managers. Charnock explained that one of her biggest challenges was finding qualified Silicon Valley employees on her start-up budget.   Senior managers, in her experience, were looking for large salaries—even at a start-up.  So early on she made a decision to hire good people and then help them grow into managers by doing, in her words “large amounts of personal mentoring”.

Personal mentoring is rare in my personal experience in the start-up environment of the 1990’s.   Kudos to Elizabeth Charnock!

Use public relations and marketing effectively. I’m betting many folks recruited and mentored by CEO Charnock are in marketing because Cataphora is doing a bang up job of getting its story out.

Surf around Cataphora.com and you’ll see prime examples of effective marketing.  The company uses both traditional marketing/public relations and social media marketing.  Here is its news page.

Its news page shows that they’ve been ‘getting ink’ in tech publications since the beginning of the company.   They have positioned CEO Charnock as a thought leader.  Here’s a column written in 2004 (2 years after launching) about a panel Charnock participated in on the topic of the malware threat.  Media exposure like this is a big win for any business—especially a start-up.

Build a B2B team or group blog.   My personal favorite is the Cataphora team blog, Catablog.  Well, the catchy name helps.

The post titled, What is the ‘Digital You’?  demonstrates how to effectively use your business blog to share your company culture.  The author wrote about how two major company events taking place that week came together.

• The new book, E-Habits, by CEO Elizabeth Charnock was published

• Digital Mirror, new software for a brand new segment (consumers) was released

She explained how employees really pulled together to make sure the new software was ready at the same time the CEO’s book was given an early release by the publisher.

A blog post/article like this one maximizes Cataphora’s blogging efforts because:

-    They didn’t simply republish a corporate news release on the blog (a big no-no in my book)
-   For bloggers/journalists that scour blogs for story ideas, they provided a view inside the company’s culture.  They shared how excited the team was about the new software and the CEO’s book being published.
-    The post is (yet) another chance to explain the concept of the new software “Digital You”
-    It summarizes the E-Habits book theme and positions Digital Mirror software by explaining, “Cataphora designed the Digital Mirror software to complement the ideas introduced in the book. Digital Mirror provides users with a reflection of their digital universe and their role within it.”
-    The blogger invites us to watch here for more news as ‘Digital Mirror’ expands to email and social networking.

This is smart corporate story telling.  I’m hooked!

If you’re looking for ideas on how to bootstrap a start-up, increase the visibility of your business and to position your company or yourself as a  thought leader, check out Cataphora and its company blog.  Click here for the complete interview.

Also, visit Adriana Gardella’s blog, You’re the Boss.  She publishes great stuff on ‘The Art of Running a Small Business’.

Photo: iStock.com

Other posts you might enjoy:

Marketing Tactics That Work:  How Social Media Led to Followers, Customers and Sales for Startup GoGo Gear

Putting Social Media Marketing to Work Like IBM

I love social media marketing success stories about small businesses and startups operating on a tiny budget.  If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur looking to create awareness, earn interest and actually win paying customers on a budget, blogger Mary Hall’s recent interview with the founder of GoGo Gear is a must-read.

Marketing expert Mary Hall published a valuable, how-she-did-it interview for anyone starting a new company or looking for a marketing tactic that won’t break your budget.

Mary Hall spoke with Arlene Battishill, founder of GoGo Gear, a new company making stylish and protective riding gear for women motorcycle riders.

This interview is a rich case study for small businesses and startups in all industries because it provides insightful detail about the founder Arlene’s thought process.  You can peek into her personal approach as she  shared steps to building her new brand using social media and no budget.

Social Media Was New to Founder
Arlene Battishill acknowledges that she didn’t know a lot about social media.   Importantly, she did deeply understand GoGo Gear’s target customers and her new company’s mission to fill a gap in the market.  This clarity helped considerably.

She knew that her future customers, women motorcycle and scooter riders, did not believe that riding apparel could be both stylish and safe (padded for protection in case of falls).   Why?  Because as a motorcycle rider herself, she couldn’t find any protective riding jackets that were also fashionable.

Arlene kept the skepticism in mind when she began her Twitter account @LAScooterGirls three months before launching the company’s finished website and new riding apparel line.

Arlene used a business approach to Twitter.  She searched for terms that pointed to her potential customers on Twitter (“motorcycle” or “scooter”) and began following them.  She crafted a clear Twitter bio that explained exactly what the company does. In her words, “… we only have only one  click to gain their interest.”

Seth Godin, visionary author of global bestselling books like Purple Cow and Tribes, would say, GoGoGear set out to appeal to only those folks that shared their worldview:  Women motorcycle and scooter enthusiasts who want to wear stylish jackets while riding.

Women motorcycle lovers on Twitter began following @LAScooterGirls because Arlene was a real person sharing her ideas for riding apparel quietly.

• She shared openly and candidly experiences in building the brand new company.
• She was not selling or pushing her new brand.
• Arlene posted on Twitter frequently and enthusiastically.

Twitter Followers Became Referrers

When the new company’s website was launched, three months after the @LAScooterGirls Twitter community began, GoGoGear experienced a wave of support and it’s Twitter followers acted like, well, a community.  They shared the new company’s website with friends, made purchases and then shared their delight with the fashionable riding jackets on Twitter.  In other words—Arlene’s Twitter followers built buzz for the new company by referring others to GoGo Gear.

The Best (Marketing) Money We Never Spent

According to Arlene Battishill after the launch of the clothing and website,  their Twitter followers   “…started sending out RT (Retweets) to their own followers and we continued to pick up more followers. The momentum continues to this day. The “Twitter-verse” has been the most important marketing tool we’ve used and the best money we’ve never spent.”

2 Key Success Factors

Personal Approach. I think the key success factor in this new company launch success story, is the personal approach Arlene Battishill used when posting on Twitter.  She was her authentic self and she was “all in”.    She achieved the personal touch in her Twitter posts  by sharing overseas travel anecdotes as they were happening.

Commitment to Use the Marketing Tool.  The founder Tweeted non-stop for three months before the company website and product line launched.  What did she Tweet (post) about?

She frequently Tweeted about her global travel adventures involved in finding manufacturing partners in Asia.  Arlene’s Twitter followers became invested in the progress of the new apparel line and startup company because they connected with Arlene as a person first.  They followed her progress for three months and became “invested” in the new brand.

Twitter Followers to Sales

For those (few) cynics among you that may be saying, well, Twitter followers are not customers—wrong! @LAScooterGirls followers soon became customers and sent their friends and family too.  When new riding jackets were shipped to a retailer, GoGo Gear Tweeted the details.  Retailers would find a line of loyal @LAScooterGirls fans lined up to buy the new jackets right out of the box!

Follow the new company on Twitter here http://twitter.com/lascootergirls
Their Twitter handle is   @LAScooterGirls
The company’s blog is here

Social media marketing is long on hype and short on from the trenches examples of what works.  Mary Hall has prepared a terrific case study for consumer marketing with the article, read full interview here. Thanks Mary!

Mary Hall blogs at Huffington Post and at the wildly popular blog, The Recessionista here.  You can follow Mary on Twitter here.

Business owners and startups are often looking for ways to increase visibility, stand out, and get known.   Social media marketing can level the playing field for small businesses working to get known online—even on a tight budget.  However, gaining recognition and visibility is still a steep hill to climb for many small businesses.

Here’s a from-the-trenches success story of how a small, startup organic skin care company named Four Truffles won an award for its “Do Good” work.  Four Truffles and its founder, Ana Soriano, were recognized along with three others with the “Do Good” award from Ladies Home Journal.

Full disclosure, I’ve been working with Ana Soriano and Four Truffles for several months.

Small is the New Big

Take note small business owners!  Size is not a barrier when it comes to winning recognition for your products and good works.

In addition to Four Truffles, three other companies received the LHJ Do Good Award: Lands End, Avon Products, Inc., and HERSHEY’S.  Three established companies with large staffs.  FourTruffles is a young startup with a tiny staff, but a big vision for giving back to the community and the LHJ editors recognized their work!

Small Company, Big Commitment

Ana Soriano founded Four Truffles a year ago with two key goals as her mission:

1) Expand her philanthropic work of empowering women
2) Develop eco-friendly skin care products that meet high performance targets

Before launching Four Truffles, Ana traveled to several countries researching eco-friendly ingredient sources.  Four Truffles makes organic skin care products using sustainable ingredients that also give back to the communities where they originate.

Giving Back from Day One

From the beginning Four Truffles has donated 10 percent of all profits to its charities.  Also the company sources all ingredients and most packaging from global communities where women are the primary workers.

Extending the volunteer work she does in her Southern California home community, Ana made it her mission to develop Four Truffles in way that helps to empower women globally.  She found the Women Cooperatives in Morocco to source the Ecocert certified Argan Oil used in the company’s body butters, body smoothers, body wash, and other luscious products.

The Women Cooperatives are the caretakers of the endangered Moroccan forests where the Argan trees grow.  The Cooperatives provide a structure for the local women to support their families in a sustainable way.   You can read more about Four Truffles’ sustainable sourcing here.

Get Social to Get Known

The Four Truffles team makes the time to participate in social media.   Not always an easy task for a small team growing a new brand.  They post as often as they can on the Four Truffles Blog.  They are active on Facebook, Twitter and ImagineThis TV.

They collaborate with their online partners like, BeautyFix to create fun giveaways.

In fact, the ImagineThis website is where Four Truffles learned about the Do Good Awards opportunity!  They took the time to prepare the application, reach out to the charities they support to request recommendations, and prepared a thoughtful post-interview follow up to the LHJ editors.  The process was a big investment of time.  But it certainly paid off!

Branding Opportunities

As a winner of the LHJ Do Good Award, Four Truffles can use the Do Good Award logo for two years on their website and packaging. They will be featured along with Avon, HERSHEY’S and Lands End, in the July 2010 issue of Ladies Home Journal.

Self Nominate!
What can your small company do?  Keep your eyes open for recognition opportunities such as the LHJ Do Good Award.  When you find them, invest the time to apply.  If giving back to the community is part of your mission, make sure others know about it.

Have your own Big Image/Giving Back success story? Post it in the comments below.

These are the nonprofits that FourTruffles supports:

Bridges of Hope South Africa

Paul Carlson Partnership

Palos Verdes Jr. Women’s Club

How Service-now.com is Beating the Goliath(s) in the IT  Management Software Space

Shannon Free-Cleveland, UCSD Extension, Matt French & Rhett Glauser of Service-now.com  (San Diego, Dec. 3, 2009)

• Does your small B2B business have a great story to tell and no one is listening?

• Are your primary B2B lead generation tools cold calling and large (pricey) industry events?

• Do you have more than 1 mention each month by your industry analysts/influencers?  Less than 1 mention each month?

If so, you’re where Service-now.com was about two years ago with their marketing efforts. Think: small team, small budget.  You may benefit from reviewing a presentation made at a recent Marketing Boot Camp I put together for the TechAmerica San Diego Sales & Marketing Roundtable.

Service-now.com is the industry’s first IT management software as a service (SaaS) provider. Two years ago the small startup company’s marketing efforts were not increasing visibility and awareness for the Service-now.com brand.  Service-now’s then 2-person marketing team dug in and tried new marketing tactics like content marketing using webinars, Twitter to drive attendance at webinars, blogging to keep customers and prospects informed and more.

The results? Service-now.com has nearly doubled annual revenues to north of $35 million, has won 335 of the world’s biggest companies as customers, and has over 130 employees.  And the marketing team is all the way up to 4 folks.

Find out how Service-now.com:

1. Dove into social media—Twitter, blogging, Ning and more—learning as they went along and began to get their story out.
2. Put their raving fan customers to work telling the Service-now.com story without asking anyone to spend hours/days writing a detailed document.
3. Created valuable content in the customers’ own words using cost- and time-effective webinars.

Here is Service-now.com’s PowerPoint from the TechAmerica San Diego event.   Enjoy:

If you’re marketing and selling to a technical customer, you’ll be interested in how startup company IndustrialInterface.com is creating and sharing valuable content. The interview below with T. Brian Jones, President & Founder
of Industrial Interface, offers key insights. Read on to find out how they are building their brand online using blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Brian: It’s not always about marketing. Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away. Why? Because it’s usually meaningless drivel that conveys no real benefit to anyone. Social media marketing is all about people sharing with other people.

1. Describe IndustrialInterface.com and what you do.

Industrial Interface is the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way for engineers to find industrial products and services. An engineer posts a project to our website, we notify relevant suppliers of the sales opportunity, and sometimes within minutes, the engineer is collaborating with a supplier who has a solution. Suppliers can review all the technical details of the leads we share with them, but the posting engineer remains anonymous. When suppliers find sales opportunities that are a good fit for their business, they pay us for the engineer’s contact information.

2. Who are your customers and prospects, and what problems do you solve for them?

Our customer base is two sided–Engineers and Suppliers.

The engineering side includes anyone who sources industrial products and services. This group includes degreed engineers, technicians, purchasing agents, project managers, manufacturing supervisors, maintenance personnel, among others. They currently rely heavily on past experience with suppliers or dated online industrial directories to find products and services for their projects. It literally takes weeks or months for an engineer to find an appropriate supplier for a particular need.

The supplier side includes anyone who sells industrial products and services. This group includes sales reps and sales engineers at manufacturers and rep groups. These salespeople currently must sift through endless cold leads to find a single sales opportunity. This is because current industrial marketing avenues cost a lot of money upfront and don’t guarantee any value over time.

An email vs. dozens of calls…

Industrial Interface makes sharing a design problem with dozens of relevant suppliers as easy as sending a single email. Engineers don’t need to call dozens of suppliers to track down the few that can fulfill their need, because our system does the work for them. We anonymously share their project with relevant suppliers and they either contact the engineer directly or share that lead with a colleague that is a better fit. We’ve leveraged the knowledgeable and well-networked supplier base to help us find engineering solutions.

Sample project posting from IndustrialInterface.com:

Our system also makes it incredibly simple for suppliers to qualify sales opportunities, collaborate with engineers, and share opportunities with colleagues, something our users do millions of times a day in the real world and are already doing on our website.

Leads = Sales Opportunities

By using Industrial Interface, engineers can shave weeks off their development time. We also allow them to find the best solutions during the concept and design phase of their projects, ensuring great savings over the lifetime of the design. Suppliers save time sorting through leads because every email they get from us is a sales opportunity. If they call an engineer from our site, it’s guaranteed that the engineer is ready to buy.

3. How are you using social media to build awareness, generate leads and win customers?

We are using a number of online tactics in unison. Our overall goal is to present our brand as a professional yet comfortable environment for engineers and suppliers to collaborate. Our social media efforts reflect this as they are generally tied not only to the Industrial Interface name, but also to Chris’ and my name and face. This allows us to leverage our expertise in the manufacturing industry to enhance the image of our brand, something that can be hard to do as a startup.

Blog = Quick Reads, Useful & Fun

Our blog is a major outlet for us to communicate with the online engineering community. We write mostly thought provoking articles that are interesting and quick to read. This way the blog is professional, useful, and fun. We don’t want to just be more technical white papers, as we need to appeal to a broader audience and only have limited time to produce content.

Twitter has been a great distribution model for our blog and other great content that we come across via my account @help4engineers. Chris has also grown @techsalesleads that we use to distribute leads that come into our site.

LinkedIn is a way to share information and interact directly with our customers. Along with various other engineering based social networks, LinkedIn allows us to spread our content and news about our company through groups and via direct emails to users.

We have also created an engineering resources toolbar via a website called conduit.com. We share the most relevant online resources for engineers and have created a toolbar of great value to our users. This way our brand is in front of them every time they use their browser, and our site is listed as one of the many useful resources at their disposal.

4. What led you to use Twitter as a lead generation/customer acquisition tool?

Twitter seemed like another great way to interact directly with our customers. It was also an early and quick way to get a “blog” up and running, as Twitter is often referred to as microblogging. What better way to share interesting information with your audience, present yourself as an expert on a subject, engage directly with your target users, and promote your brand all at once, with only a few minutes a day?

5. What kinds of results are you seeing?

With the combination of all these efforts, we had over twenty thousand visits to our site in October.

• Messages and content we share on our blog, twitter, LinkedIn, EngineeringExchange, and Globalspec’s CR4 often see dozens of comments combined and always result in meaningful and direct contact with our target customers.

Since our product requires a lot of trust for a user to try the first time, continued and positive exposure is key to our marketing efforts, as is speaking with them directly.

6. How much time and budget (approximately) does it take to grow your business using social media?

To distribute all of the content we create and to maintain an active presence on the sites we’ve discussed take roughly 20-30 hours per week. Since all of these services are free, the cost consists entirely of our time. To keep this effort reasonable, however, it’s important to know what process to follow every time a new blog post goes up or we have a product announcement. If it’s not clearly outlined, we can waste a lot of time.

So much of social media promotion is monotonous and tedious, but it can pay off over time, and every so often you get lucky. We have a recent blog post that has been viewed over 12,000 times via Stumbleupon, and it’s continuing to be viewed a few hundred times a day. This makes sense though, because I think it’s one of the best posts we’ve done.

There is a lot more to all this than simply distributing content, however. Our sites need to constantly be optimized to work with our marketing efforts and to more successfully convert visitors to customers. This is a never-ending effort, and one that we’re just starting to work on.

Recommendations

In our next post, Brian shares recommendations for small/startup B2B companies that want to begin to use social media to stimulate leads and find prospects—but aren’t sure where to start.

Learn more about or follow IndustrialInterface.com here:

IndustrialInterface.com

@Help4Engineers

@TechSalesLeads

Related post: 5 Social Media Marketing Tactics from IndustrialInterface.com

We all know we need to do more to help the planet and lessen the impacts of climate change in our own small and big ways.   The challenge for me (and you?) is what more can we do?  If we’re already driving less (more calls), working to go paperless in our offices, following all recycling rules…

What are other small businesses doing?  Here in California, the State has a program awarding small businesses with outstanding contributions to being green.

Nomad Cafe won an award for actually, proactively eliminating waste.  They also  waste reduction programs save the business over $12,000 (green dollars) per year. How cool green is that?!  BTW: Nomad is a small cafe in Oakland, CA offering fair trade coffee and locally sourced food.  Christopher Waters, owner, has been green since opening in 2003.

Christopher Waters, Nomad Cafe, Image: CoolCalifornia.org

CLIF Bar was founded by a guy on a bike ride that bit into an energy bar and said “I can do better.”  And did.   Now the company practices clean transportation—see their case study here.

Here are CLIF’s sustainability blog posts.   Green actions CLIF Bar & company has taken to earn their award:

• The trucks that transport its products between the bakery and distribution center have run on pure biodiesel since 2006.

• Also in 06 Launched a program called Cool Commute to help employees purchase clean-burning biodiesel cars. Employees who participate can receive a $6500 cash incentive to apply towards the purchase of a biodiesel or high-mileage hybrid vehicle.

• Employees can receive up to $500 for the purchase of a commuter bicycle. And incentives are offered for employees that use public transportation, carpool, or walk or bike to work.

Pacific Motor Service is a “Certified Green Business” that has been around since 1947.  To qualify for the award Pacific Motor reduced environmental pollution:

• They were assessed and then implemented changes in order to reduce/eliminate pollution
• They trained employees in pollution
• Scored at least 100 points on the Model Shop Pollution Prevention Checklist.

Find more California small business cases studies about helping climate change by driving less, recycling, using green energy, saving water and more here.

For you business to business marketers and owners asking for relevant examples of other btob companies “like me” that have successfully used social media as a marketing tactic–this bud’s for you.

My erstwhile fellow marketers and bloggers have been on their toes and documented an interesting example, BreakingPoint Systems.

Brian Carroll and Jennifer Leggio both blogged about the company’s social media success in late 2008.

Brian wrote a step-by-step case study and Jennifer published a guest post from Kyle Flaherty, BreakingPoint’s (then) Marketing Director on the pesky question of ROI results.

Here are the tools and strategies they used; in a future post I’ll provide you with a Social Media checklist you can use to adopt these practices.

BreakingPoint (a high-tech startup in the network testing equipment space) used social media to generate leads and establish thought leadership.  They started with a company blog and monitored online conversations for industry topics to create the content. TweetScan gave them ideas for keywords and issues mentioned in Twitter conversations.

They used a Twitter account to alert interested folks to blog posts, webinars, contests and focus group questions.

Establishing a LinkedIn Group to discuss industry issues around networking security allowed BreakingPoint to further their thought leadership positioning.  They do not directly promote their products but act as hosts, letting the 450 group members take the lead in topics and discussions.  They contribute to the conversation when it’s appropriate.

To get the word out about the company’s social media presence, employees added LinkedIn Group and Twitter links to email signatures.

The last key step in BreakingPoint’s social media success story was to diligently track, measure and analyze the results.   In his guest post Kyle Flaherty reported that his team used a mash-up of tools (which took a lot of work and some time) to help with ROI.  (Sorry, dear readers, Google Analytics alone won’t get you where you need to be…)

In addition to Google Analytics, some of the online monitoring tools he listed: GetClicky, BUDurl, Google Reader, HubSpot, and more.  Above  Here is a snapshot of their results posted on Jennifer Leggio’s blog.

Kyle talks about the ability to tie integrate social media efforts with other marketing tactics such as webinars.  He says in part,

“For example, we are running an upcoming webinar and I’ve used all of our social media outlets to let the community know and interact. Using BUDurl I can tell how many folks have signed up for the webinar through Twitter, I use GetClicky to see the folks who went to the webinar page from our LinkedIn Group and I’ll even be able to view the folks who watch the webinar live on USTREAM the day of the event.

We can see how many participants then sign up for a product demo, choose to do a product evaluation and ultimately buy the product. I’m obviously simplifying this process, but it is just that, a process of measurement based on certain triggers that can show me the business impact of social media.”

Interesting stuff, right?

BreakinPoint’s blog is here.  Follow them on Twitter here or (for all of you network security fanatics) check out their LinkedIn Group here.

Brian Carroll’s full post is here.  Kyle’s guest post on Jennifer Leggio’s blog is here.

But one untapped resource all B2B companies have is real customers with authentic, from-the-trenches stories to tell about how your products and services helped them to be successful.  

So, how about putting a video camera in front of them and letting them tell their story about how your company helped them?

Source

That’s how Speakeasy—a provider of voice over Internet (VoIP) telecom and broadband services for consumers, home offices and small to midsize businesses—created four killer video case studies.

According to BtoBonline.com, Speakeasy traveled to four of their small business customers’ locations, interviewed them and let them tell the story.   No script was used and Speakeasy picked their most complex service as the subject for the case studies.

In these case study videos, Speakeasy’s VoIP services come across as cost-effective, easy to upgrade, seamless, professional, well you get the picture.  You can view the video case studies here.

The BtoB article talks about the extensive ‘earned media’ (public relations) coverage Speakeasy received in publications like BusinessWeek, InfoWorld, USA Today and Wall Street Journal and Web sites MSN Money and Yahoo Finance.

I like the way each of the four small business customers tells a story.  None of the videos were scripted.  It doesn’t feel like a typical case study—problem, solution, result—I was actually entertained.  And, I’d sure call Speakeasy if I needed VoIP services for my business.

BTW:  if I were buying real estate in Boston, I’d call the hard-working Ballast Realty Group.  Note to Ballast—get video on your site soon. You rock on screen!

Granted, these are well produced, professionally shot videos—hence the $200,000 budget (including travel).

Some next steps for you to consider:

• Who are your best customers that have been successful in part by using your products and services?
• Which ones could tell the story the best?
• What’s in it for me? (WIIFM) Your customer gets to showcase his or her own business in an online video.  Are they on YouTube yet?

Could you create short online videos with your customers that tell stories about how your products help them to be successful?   Sure you could!

Here is the Speakeasy.net YouTube Channel BtoBonline’s complete story is here.

When working to make their company better known, JER Envirotech put its customers first and created a great success story from a lead generation campaign and more.

According to a case study at MarketingProfs (subscription required) JER Envirotech (TM) needed to make itself better known and more credible.   JER makes  eco-friendly thermoplastic biocomposite materials used by other manufacturers.  (Very green!)

They were competing against traditional manufacturers with their innovative green products. JER’s technology was new in late 2007 when they set out to improve their credibility.    JER’s challenge was to explain why it was better to use their new green materials vs. traditional choices offered by competitors.

JER created a white paper that focused on its customers, not itself.  The white paper produced 500 leads in the first 60 days measured by downloads on the web site.  They also earned lots of good public relations with media mentions.

Keep the Spotlight on Your Customer

The 8-page white paper titled “Injection Molding with Thermoplastic BioComposites” (snappy title) did not focus on JER Envirotech as a company.   Instead, the white paper described how one of JER’s customers used their new types of products in an innovative way.  (Find the White paper here.)

MarketingProfs quotes the JER director of marketing at the time:
“We focused our whitepaper on one of our clients and their unique application of our technology. We were careful to keep the spotlight on them and not ourselves. This allowed the paper to be much more objective,” noted [Marc] Hoelscher.

White Paper Results

By keeping the focus on the customer, the company attracted the attention of a major trade publication when the CEO presented the white paper at a trade show.  That attention in turn resulted in major coverage of the white paper in Plastics Technology, a key industry influencer as well as a bylined article.  Expert articles that educate are powerful conversation starters.

How can you keep your focus on your customers in your content and your conversations?  Here are some suggestions:

Steps you can take:

1.    Find a success story amongst your customers and develop a strong, educational white paper.

2.    Think about how can you write an educational white paper that will be a conversation-starter.  Not a rehash of your capability brochure, features/benefits sheet or ad copy.

3.    Work with editors and other influentials in your market space to extend the mileage from your white paper.  The more educational your content is, the more attention it will drive from your industry.

4.    Find (more) ways to highlight your successful customers.  I really like how JER Envirotech’s home page showcases rolling customer profiles of their clients.

Have any other ideas to share from killer white paper examples?  Share your own or others you’ve observed in the comments below.