Christopher Koch

The other day, I kept getting calls on my cell phone from the same number. Never left a voice mail, (which my gut was telling me should have been a signal), but the number was local. Could it really be that someone I knew was trying to get hold of…

Be careful, marketers! Mike Sullivan won’t accept the excuse that you can’t measure marketing’s impact on the business. Sullivan, who is CFO for an information security solution provider, has more than 20 years of financial and operational management expertise, primarily with enterprise software companies. He demands the numbers, but he…

Lately, I’ve been talking to B2B marketers about the content delivered by these thought leaders and asking, What defines good thought leadership content? Here’s what I have so far. Surely, you have a suggestion that will get us to ten attributes?   1. Visionary. It’s best to address a problem…

Marketing’s Golden Opportunity in Innovation When Netflix’s internal engineers struggled to get more than incremental improvements in the company’s movie matching algorithm, the company put the problem to the internet and crowdsourced a 10% leap in accuracy (of course, it didn’t hurt that they offered a million dollar prize). Even…

This cartoon making the rounds online captures the frustration journalists have with their online plight--and reveals the opportunity B2B marketers have to fill the content gap.   Marketers always struggle with what to do next. There are so many channels out there and so little time. But if you step…

Social media are growing up. The initial thrill of connecting to a bunch of peers that we’ve never met is giving way to the desire to get something useful out of those connections. Interesting research from Edelman shows that there has been a decline in trust in “people like myself” and…

This is the year that the personal brand begins to do battle with the corporate brand. I think we need to let the personal brand win—especially in B2B.   Featuring big pictures and bios of your subject matter experts on your website is a good start, but it is the…

All through 2010, marketers have been telling us that they are having a harder time getting their content noticed. Social media have created so much noise that it’s becoming more difficult for the good old white paper to stand out.   The social media noise is personal But let’s look…

Here’s a list of things I wish we would stop doing and thinking in 2011.   Social media   Social media cause people to waste time at work. Companies have a long and pointless history of resisting new forms of communication. From Facebook to email to putting telephones on employees’ desks…

Thanks for the great response on last week’s post, “Is the Era of PR Over.” Okay, so if the traditional model for PR is failing, what do we do instead?   Most journalists have discovered social media as an important research tool. And research shows that even the stodgiest C-level executive does…