In a December 2009 CNN article, Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, stated that content curation would be one of the top Web trends to watch in 2010.

“The Web’s biggest challenge of recent years,” Cashmore, states, “is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: ‘Information overload’ has become an increasingly common complaint.”

Indeed, if you’re like me, you read a dozen or more blogs, you follow hundreds of people on Twitter, and you participate on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. In addition, you may read books, newspapers, and magazines.

I have some days where I feel like my brain is so crammed with information that I can’t squeeze in another fact.

Yet, to be successful online, B2B companies must continually create new content and constantly promote content others produce.

HiveFire is a new company that offers an automated content curation service — and they just produced their first e-book: Content Curation: Taming the Flood in B2B Social Media.

The e-book outlines three steps for successful content curation:

• Identify — Search and filter information
• Organize — Tag, summarize and rank content
• Share — Publish information consistently and frequently

The e-book authors also explain why B2B needs to pay attention to and practice consistent content curation coupled with content creation:

You draw prospects in with third-party curated content and then expose these people to your ideas via your original content. You do this through blogs, e-newsletters, a Learning Center, Webinars, etc.

The e-book is available via free download — meaning you don’t have to register for it. Read it and pass it on!

“Thanks to the Internet, buyers now know as much – if not more – about a company’s products and services than the company’s salespeople.

“This is because sales people are taught to sell features. Buyers, on the other hand, want to know how a company’s products / services will solve their business problems. Sales people often don’t understand their prospects’ businesses, so you end up with a real disconnect.”

So posits Ardath Albee, author of the new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale (McGraw Hill, 2009). And it’s this disconnect that’s made it marketing’s job to nurture prospects – via online content.

Content, says Ardath, has to address people’s concerns – it has to be an “anchor for conversations to happen.”

It’s developing the strategy behind this content that is the basis for Ardath’s book. “Prospect demographics are no longer enough,” says Ardath. “You have to know who your buyers are, their challenges, their likes, and their dislikes. You have to figure out how these people will find your company online when they have no idea you exist.”

Ardath’s book gives you a solid grounding in how to use online content to help these buyers find your company and then engage with you – from developing the content strategy (including personas) to creating “contagious content” that ultimately results in sales.

What I like about this book is that Ardath incorporates traditional marketing strategy with the new reality of marketing online. As she adroitly points out, the Internet has changed how we do business – not just because we’re all online searching for stuff, but because the Internet has put buyers in control of the sales process.

The book is filled with lots of practical advice on how to create the types of content that educates buyers as well as how to repurpose it (i.e. a blog post becomes a white paper that becomes a Webinar that becomes a series of Tweets). And, she explains how to tie your content marketing efforts back to the sales process using marketing automation tools.

Says Ardath, “I’m really enamored with marketing strategy, how to make it work and how to spread online content virally. I want to know how to get into buyers’ heads and what makes them choose the next step in the buying process.

“What it comes down to, quite frankly, is about adding value and not talking about your products. The companies who do that via content will be successful.”

You can purchase eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale at Amazon. You can learn more about Ardath – and see how she uses content to engage prospects – by reading her Marketing Interactions Blog, following her on Twitter (@ardath421), or connecting with her on LinkedIn.

Having spent over five hours writing Web content changes into a Word doc in order to send to the client’s Web designer, I realized that WordPress is one of those “best kept secrets” that businesses need to know.

Many people know of WordPress as being a blogging platform, but few realize you can use it for your company Website as well. I’ve come up with 10 reasons why small business owners and marketers should consider a WordPress Website.

1. It’s easy to make changes — Typos, SEO tweaks, copy changes, all are easy to do. Just open a page, make a change, and you’re done. No more sending Word docs to designers or trying to do it yourself using complex programs such as Dreamweaver.

2. You can find a plugin for just about anything — Want breadcrumb navigation? There’s a plugin for that. Want to allow people to view your most popular blog posts or retweet them? You can find plugins for those functions as well.

3. You can incorporate your blog — Instead of maintaining two sites, you can add your blog to your Website and in the process, send all that really lovely traffic to one site. Woot!

4. You can incorporate your newsletter — One thing I struggled with for a long time is newsletter html redundancy. Not only did I have to produce code for the Constant Contact interface (xhmtl, to be exact) but I had to produce html code for the Website in order to archive each issue. It was a total pain in the butt and cost money, too.

Thanks to WordPress, I can now easily add each issue to my site and in the process, my newsletter archive page is updated automatically. Even better, people can now leave comments on each issue versus having to email me.

5. You can make SEO tweaks on the fly — Using the All in One SEO Pack plugin, it’s really easy to develop Title and meta tags, plus the plugin tells you the character count of each. Previous to WordPress, I had to write my Title and meta tags in Word and then use the “word count” feature to determine the character count.

When you want to make minor changes to a tag, you open the page and make them. Presto, you’re done.

6. It’s easy to add new pages — Once you have your Website template in place, it’s super easy to make new pages and post them to to your site — an important consideration now that we’re all content creators / publishers.

7. It’s easy to add video — As Matt Cutts of Google stated, the search engine is looking to see if sites now incorporate video. WordPress makes is very easy to add video clips.

8. Your site is smart-phone friendly — WordPress sites render really well on iPhones, Android and other smart phone devices.

9. You save time — Instead of back and forth, back and forth between multiple people over email, you can create a page in WordPress and have people view it and/or edit it in “Draft” mode.

10. You save money — You can make lots of simple changes on your own in a quarter of the time. (For more advance changes, I do call on my WordPress designer. I also use him for help with plugins as some of them can get a little tricky.)

Can you think of other reasons why small business owners and marketers need a WordPress-enabled Website?

Ok, I love the title of this new series of content from Marketo — The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media. Anything “definitive” means my reading list has been reduced significantly (a good thing, if you’re a student of Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week).

And while it’s not a free e-guide, meaning you will have to register for the series, you do get four meaty guides that explain what is social media and why your business needs it.

Parts One, Two and Three are now available for download:

• What is Social Media and Why Does My Business Need It?
• Laying the Foundation [for Social Media]
• B2B Social Media Tactics and Metrics

Part 4 & 5, Incorporating Social Media at Every Stage of the Revenue Cycle & The Return on Investment of Social Media, will be available March 16, 2010.

One thing I like about this content is that it’s in the Zmags Viewer so that you can flip through it as if you’re reading a magazine. I also like how Marketo emails a link to the guide as well as inviting prospects to a one-hour Webinar on social media via the download landing page. (I also like how the blog page remembers you’ve registered, so it’s easy to download the parts in the series without having to re-register.)

Giving B2B prospects information in different formats — i.e. online content, Webinar, and a blog post, helps them make those crucial buying decisions as pointed out in my post on Monday about GlobalSpec’s report on “How to Align Your Marketing with Your Customers’ Buying Process.

Yesterday evening I posted on Twitter that I had achieved a “zero inbox” (i.e. no email in my Gmail inbox), and Chris Yates (@chrisyates11), one of my followers, asked how I did it.

Managing email — versus it managing me –has been my holy grail for months ok, more than a year now. I am completely overwhelmed by it. Not only do I have my Gmail account, I also have a personal Yahoo one — which fills up with clutter from temple, my son’s school, my personal stuff, and spam.

My problem is compounded by the fact that I work in different locations — from home, at my office, at my son’s fencing lessons, at Starbucks between client meetings, etc.

I tried Xobni for Outlook for a few months, but due to the work in various locations problem, I realized I needed email “in the cloud.” Gmail works well — but isn’t ideal, if you want my opinion — but email-in-the-cloud still left me with an overflowing inbox.

You can’t manage email. You have to reduce or eliminate it.

The strategies I’ve been training myself to use to aren’t difficult per se. You’ve read these tips in other places, but I’m posting them again because they do work — the trick is that you have to be incredibly disciplined and use them (that’s the hard part).

1. Don’t check email constantly. The checking-email-constantly addiction has to be worse than smoking. I have learned the hard way that I simply cannot keep Gmail open all day long as I tend to live in my inbox and get nothing done.

You really have to set pre-determined times when you’ll check email. For me, that’s now 11:00 AM, 2:30 PM and 4:00 PM. When I do check it, I try to process all of it. I even write these times on my daily task list. Sometimes I write, “Don’t check email until 11:00.” It works.

This strategy is still a work in progress but it’s getting easier. One thing that helps is to keep track of just how many “urgent” messages you get per day. For me, that’s just about zero. I’m not a brain surgeon.

2. Don’t check email first thing in the morning. Again, this is another tough habit to break. Instead of checking email first thing, I sit down and get right to work on my biggest task of the day.

To make this step work, you have to write your task list the night before.

3. Decrease the amount of email you send out. Back in the days of hand-written letters, the advice was that if you wanted someone to send you a letter, you had to send one yourself.

Well, it works the same with email — you send out an email and the person replies to it, putting more email in your inbox. I now find myself asking, “Is this email really necessary?”

I also found I have a really bad habit of sending multiple emails, either because I type too fast and forget to include information, necessitating another email, or because I’m giving status updates on multiple items.

Once I became conscious of this, I realized I needed to better manage projects.

4. Use project management tools. I’ve tried to use Basecamp, a project management application, numerous times, but always seemed to fade out on it. This is because I never really gave up the email habit.

However, due to multiple clients and multiple projects, I was just losing track of important details as they would get lost in the email shuffle.

I’m back on Basecamp and now that I’m better managing my email, Basecamp is working like a charm. I email clients from it and since everything is grouped by project, I can keep track of discussions and add to-dos and milestones as soon clients give them to me. Best of all, everything is located right there in Basecamp, making it easy to keep track of details.

5. Eliminate “status” updates and other unnecessary stuff. I discovered by accident that you can receive Google Alerts via RSS. What a relief! I’ve added all Alerts to my Google Reader — eliminating in one fell swoop dozens of daily email Alerts.

I’ve also begun unsubscribing from those newsletters I no longer read as well as those that people send me without my permission (in the past, I would simply delete them). For those newsletter I want to read, if they have an RSS feed, I subscribe to it instead.

I’ve also charged my VA with reading HARO emails for me — she reads them for other clients as well, so it was easy for her to add my potential PR opportunities to her list. That eliminated another three emails per day from my inbox (plus freed up some valuable time).

And finally, I eliminated all those “status” updates from social media platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn, and configured my blog so that I don’t receive email whenever anyone posts a comment.

These are the steps I’ve taken to reduce email and get to a zero inbox. What strategies have you used to reduce and manage email? Post them below.

You hear lots of excuses reasons why B2B companies can’t participate in social media. One reason I hear frequently . . . “We’re a B2B company.”

This is code for, “We’re a traditional company,” “We sell widgets,” “Our products don’t lend themselves to social media,” “Our company is run by staid old men who don’t ‘get’ it,” “Social media won’t give us the leads we need,” or “There’s no real ROI.”

True, true.

I recently stumbled across Rabbi Jon Spira-Savett, of Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire, who is using social media to reach out to busy congregants.

A little bit of back story: as with many organized religions, Jewish congregations struggle to reach people who are very busy with work, kids, etc. Education and learning is the lifeblood of Judaism — but getting people to temple on Saturdays, when kids have their athletic events and other activities, is difficult (even more so when parents of pre-teen kids have to schlep them to Hebrew school on Sunday mornings — who wants to blow off two weekend mornings at temple?).

Instead of making people feel guilty about not attending temple, or banging his head trying to develop “innovative” programming designed to get people in the door, Rabbi Jon has developed a series of weekly blog posts and monthly podcasts to reach people where they congregate — online. Think about what this outreach does:

It helps congregants feel connected to the temple, the Rabbi and the community and instead of a full meal, it gives people “bites” that they can consume in between dealing with kids and work.

It helps those people shopping for a new temple to get to know Rabbi Jon and his philosophies before they even set foot in the door.

Even better, however, it helps draw people back into the temple — for holidays, for events, and for Saturday services. Why is that? Because people feel engaged and connected.

Think about how you can use social media to help prospects and customers feel connected with your company.

Instead of saying, “We’re traditional,” use social media to become a little bit untraditional, the way Infor is doing with its “Big ERP” campaign.

Instead of saying, “Our products don’t lend themselves to social media,” look for ways to educate people about your industry and help solve their challenges / problems through information-rich content.

Instead of worrying about ROI, start engaging your prospects. Use social media to meet people where they congregate — online! — and get to know them. Offer them the content they need to make purchasing decisions, answer their questions, and introduce them to others in your network.

Once they feel engaged and connected with you and your company, they have a much higher chance of becoming long-term customers.

Related content:

B2B Social Media Strategies for Small Business: Get Your Feet Wet

Grasshopper Engages People in Order to Build a Global Brand

Social Media: It’s About Engagement, Not Page Views

GlobalSpec recently published its latest survey report: Understanding the Industrial Buy Cycle: How to Align Your Marketing with Your Customers’ Buying Process.

The 17-page report covers ground most marketers (should) already know regarding the four stages of the B2B buy cycle: Needs Awareness, Research, Comparison and Consideration, and Procurement.

Buyers in each stage use various sources to find the information they need to make purchasing decisions, including supplier Websites, print catalogs, trade publications, tradeshows, and of course search engines and social media.

In fact, a whopping 69% of survey respondents indicated they use social media (defined as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) to find information in the “Needs Awareness and Research” phase while 60% use blogs and 55% use search engines.

Even more important for B2B marketers, 33% of respondents indicated that supplier Websites and catalogs are the most important information sources by the time the “buyer reaches the Procurement stage.”

While it’s easy to read into the survey results that traditional marketing tactics no longer work or that marketers should move all marketing activities to social media, the exact opposite is true: Buyers need to be exposed to your company and its products / services before they know they need you.

This means that you must engage in a long-term strategic marketing campaign that includes tradeshows, direct mail, e-newsletters, social media, and industry portal Websites, Webinars etc. — on a continual basis. As the GlobalSpec survey authors point out:

From the beginning of the buy cycle to the end, the supplier that is eventually selected is exposed to the buyer many times. The company may have first become visible through an Internet search, or exposure to its online catalog, or a banner ad on an industrial site, or any number of ways. A marketer may not always know what specific exposure initiated the process that culminated in a sale.

In fact, the survey goes on to say, 62% of respondents type company names they know into a search box versus typing the URL directly as it saves time and reduces error (this is very true for how I search).

What matters in the end, however, is that in order to make a buyer’s “short list,” you must ensure your company and its content get found by potential buyers.

During the initial Research phase, 42% of buyers evaluate four or more suppliers but as buyers move toward the Procurement stage, only 26% get quotes from those four suppliers — meaning 74% go with fewer suppliers.

Those that drop off the list are often those who did not provide the right level of information to buyers or did not meet some other perceived or real need in the buyer.

So, what does this mean for small and mid-sized B2B companies?

1. Continually add new content to your site that helps buyers at all stages of the buy cycle make purchasing decisions and that educates them about how you’ll help solve their problems / challenges.

2. Optimize this content — and push it out via social media and other tactics — so that buyers can find it no matter where they are (i.e. using search engines or lurking on LinkedIn) as well as driving them back to your site.

3. Develop methods for keeping your company top of mind for not-yet-ready-to-buy prospects, including Webinars, e-newsletters and other methods.

4. Ask your prospects what kind of information they need to make purchasing decisions — and then give it to them.

5. Rinse, repeat.

Related posts:

• Your B2B Small Business Website is Not a Brochure
• Is Your Website a Small Town or a Thriving Metropolis?
• Leads from Websites Best B2B Lead Gen Tactic

I’ve spent the better part of the last two months doing a serious update to my Website. If you’re reading this post through a blog reader, click on through and take a peek.

Because traffic to my blog had outstripped traffic to my site, and because I was tired of maintaining two sites, I incorporated the blog into my site and moved the whole kit and kaboodle to WordPress.

Woot! This is something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while now.

Working on a project of this nature is like redoing your bathroom. You take down the ugly wallpaper and realize you need to gut the entire bathroom.

I started moving content over and quickly realized my old copy did not describe what I now offer clients — my business having changed dramatically in the last two years.

As a result, I had an existential break-down trying to figure out what exactly I do for a living — and ended up calling Michele Linn, who graciously took over writing my Services pages and my “Why I’m Different” page. She also went through my entire site and made a bunch of recommendations — all of which I incorporated.

Michele, you are awesome! XOXOXOXOXOXOX

A huge thank you, too, to Stephen and Rachel at Cre8d Design who oversaw the move, redesigned the headers, and made sure everything works fine. If you need WordPress experts — call them. They’re the absolute best.

Take a look around and let me know what you think. And if you find any typos or broken links, let me know and I’ll send you a $5 Starbucks card.

Now I’m off to go have a cocktail (maybe two!).