We all take our expertise for granted. We think that because we know something, everyone else does, too.

When you think this way, you start to believe your brilliance really isn’t that brilliant, so you hide it. As Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, “Big Mistake! Huge!”

It’s a mistake because your customers and prospects are HUNGRY for information from people who *really* know what they’re talking about (that would be you).

When I had my VW Bug in college, I used to do my own tune-ups. In those days, I relied on this awesome book, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual for the Complete Idiot. (People in the know simply referred to it as the “Idiot’s Book.”)

What I loved about the Idiot’s Book is that John Muir, the author, would walk you through step-by-step procedures for keeping your VW running. Each procedure included his own hard-learned lessons, like this (I paraphrase): “Loosening that nut is a real mother that will make your knuckles bleed; once you’re done, take a break and go smoke a joint.”

And, he was right — that nut was hard to loosen. (I plead the Fifth on whether I followed ALL of his instructions. )

The point of this story is that he created a book, and a huge following, by simply sharing his personal expertise — expertise you couldn’t find in other repair manuals.

As a small business owner, freelancer or marketer, you can use this strategy to create interesting, original — and dare I say it — brilliant e-newsletter or blog content. And one way to do this is to pay attention to the “little” things you see on a day-to-day basis.

For example, just yesterday I needed to call the company that comes out and shreds my documents. I did a Google search for them to get their phone number (because I’ve been too lazy to add them to my address book) and noticed right away that the company’s phone number read this way:

Now, I know that using a vanity number like this makes it easier for people to remember (except I didn’t remember it, so there you go).

But, the problem with vanity numbers, when used on your Website, is that they don’t work on smart phones.

On a smart phone, if a phone number on the Website is configured correctly (i.e. as text versus a .jpg or vanity number), it appears as a clickable link. You simply touch it and the phone makes the call. It’s a very cool feature.

Because of this feature, I now make sure that every small business Website overhaul I manage includes a correctly configured phone number in the top right corner of every page so that it’s easy to find. I also make sure it works by personally testing it with my own iPhone.

Because I’m passionate about this, I’ve written about it, and I always mention it in interviews with journalists who interview me about Web marketing. (Just yesterday one said, “OMG! That’s brilliant!” Thank you, thank you very much — said in my best Elvis voice.)

So, begin paying attention to what you see, hear and read as it pertains to what you do for a living, and then incorporate your personal expertise into your blog posts and e-newsletters.

Once you do, your brilliance will shine and prospects will begin to call you to say, “I read your article. You obviously know what you’re talking about.” It’s those kinds of calls that ultimately lead to sales.

I hear lots of reasons why a B2B company should blog:

• Google gives preference to “fresh” content.
• Search engine spiders visit your site more often when you’re frequently updating content.
• Blog content gets into the search engines faster (sometimes an hour after you post it!).
• Blog content provides the fuel for social media, i.e. Tweets, FB, G+ or LinkedIn status updates.
• Blogs allow you to converse with customers, prospects and fans one-to-one.

These are all great reasons to blog. But I have another one.

A blog leads to increased exposure for your business.

In October, just hours after I purchased my iPad, I had to reprogram my thermostat. I walked over to the wall panel with my iPad so that I could get the name of the manufacturer in order to do a search for the manual.

I found the manufacturer’s site easily enough, but when I went to access it, I couldn’t get past the home page. That’s because the site wasn’t iPad friendly. The menus didn’t work nor could I find a sitemap link.

To see if the site had the manual I needed, I had to boot up my laptop.

This article isn’t about what this inability to access content does to your sales process (kills it, basically), so I won’t go there. I think you get the point.

Once I had my thermostat reprogrammed, I quickly dashed off a post about making your B2B site iPad friendly using the site as an example of what not to do, and thought nothing more about it – until B2B Magazine made it their blog post of the week on December 7.

That same week, Jackie Jones, from Response Magazine, called for an interview after finding my blog post. “I read your post,” she said. “You’re obviously an expert on how marketers should be using mobile devices.” Ok, wow, thank you!

Once the article went live, I wrote a blog post about it – and again, just put it out there on a Twitter, LinkedIn and my FB page. Much to my delight, this post has been retweeted 66 70 times as of this writing!

I’m not saying that every single business needs to implement a blog – or that each post you write will garner this type of exposure. But, it’s happened enough – for me and for my clients – to allow me to state with certainty that a blog does have some wonderful PR-related benefits.

Blogging isn’t easy, it does take some time, and you do need to dedicate resources to it – either time, money or both. And no, you can’t simply push out press releases to it, and yes, you do have to create original content for it.

But, blogging does make sense for business-to-business and here’s why:

It shows your expertise – The marketers and small business owners I talk to worry that they’ll need to produce long, thought-provoking pieces. What I’ve learned is that people are hungry for quick tips and information they can use right now.

A blog (and an e-newsletter, too) is the perfect way to add this type of information to your site.

Your expertise gets found – Content marketers talk a lot about content getting “found.” Yes, that does happen. But what also happens is that your expertise gets found, too. Your ideas get linked to, tweeted, and commented on – giving you and your business yet more exposure.

Reporters come to you — I’ve written (ok, ranted) enough about clueless PR people who send out untargeted PR pitches. When you create original blog content that’s geared toward helping your audience — and that’s fairly interesting and well-written — reporters end up calling you. This is actually a much nicer way to do things.

In my own example, I didn’t have to send a press release to anyone touting my expertise. In fact, I don’t send out any releases or email and somehow seem to garner a respectable amount of PR for myself. You can do the same.

If you’re a small B2B business and you have a blog, what’s been your experience with regard to your blog generating press for you?

I spend a lot of time on my iPad now, and while I’m searching, reading and buying, I pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. I want to use my “hands on” experience with consumer sites to make my clients’ B2B sites better. What works for consumer sites works for B2B, too.

In this Response Magazine article, Consumer Electronics Market: Toying with Tablets, for which I was interviewed, reporter Jackie Jones talks about the rise of iPads and how they’ve given marketers a plethora of opportunities to connect with consumers.

A couple of takeaways for B2B marketers:

1. Mobile devices untether us from our desks. I know this is a “duh” thing, but what this means is that we’re spending more time accessing information from our devices — and this information needs to be mobile friendly and instantly accessible.

“The common factor [of what people can do with iPads / tablets] is the real-time sense of immediacy that comes with the modern consumer’s drive to purchase, a trend buoyed by the instant access and on-the-go capabilities afforded by tablet devices,” says Jones. “Most industry experts agree this puts more control in the consumers’ hands, and marketers must meet their customers literally wherever they go now.”

I know that for me, having the iBooks app built right into the iPad has made is *super easy* to buy books. It’s so easy, I haven’t visited my local library in weeks. In addition, I find it very easy to make purchases for consumer goods — provided the consumer site is mobile-friendly. Surprisingly, some still aren’t.

2. Mobile devices have their own challenges.

It’s not enough to test your site across the different browsers. You must also test it on various devices, including smartphones and tablets /iPad.

We’ve been trained to want everything now — if a site loads too slowly or a video is too long, we just click right back out. Ensuring your customers can access your site no matter which device they’re using or where they’re located improves the customer experience — and ultimately sales.

If you don’t have an iPad or a tablet on which to test your site, go visit an Apple store and play around with one of the many devices on display. No one will mind.

Be sure to read Jackie Jones’ article — you’ll find it full of excellent tips from marketers.

I’ve been paying more attention to Facebook with regard to B2B, especially with all of the changes going down (including Timeline, which deployed worldwide last week). I’m particularly intrigued with the competition between G+ and FB. I absolutely LOVE how G+ has forced FB to become more transparent and easier to use.

I also love how it’s now much more transparent that FB is no longer a strictly social networking platform — which it used to be. It’s now a network marketing platform.

Viewing FB from this perspective has made me re-evaluate it with regard to B2B. Can B2B companies use FB effectively? I say yes, but with a couple of caveats. One, FB is a place where you talk to people versus selling to them, which a huge mind shift for companies bent on measuring “ROI” in hard numbers (i.e. leads that become sales), and two, FB is a place where you can let your hair down a little bit and have some fun, also a huge mind shift for companies that have a more conservative approach to business in general.

With all of this in mind, I was particularly interested in the new report from Eloqua — 10 Ways to “Solve” Facebook for B2B. After reading it, I had a few questions, which Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing, was happy to answer.

Dianna Huff: Joe, in this report you talk about sweepstakes. How can B2B use these? They seem more B2C.

Joe Chernov: Dianna, you’re correct. Sweepstakes can be tricky for B2B. After all, the potential audience for a B2B product is typically more finite than for consumer goods. That said, sweepstakes can work for B2B marketers, it just takes a little creative thinking.

For example, we ran a sweepstakes in concert with EmpireAvenue a “virtual” stock exchange in which members invest virtual currency, called Eaves, in one another. EmpireAvenue is immensely popular with our target audience: marketers and digital media professionals. So when we gave EmpireAvenue members a chance to win Eaves by joining our Facebook community, it was a natural fit. We were attracting the right audience.

DH: Interesting! You’re actually the second person I know to mention EmpireAvenue. Now I’ll have to check it out.

Regarding weekend posting, which you talk about briefly in your report, I think this is a really important consideration for B2B, especially since so many companies block FB. Can you expound on this a little bit?

JC: You’re exactly right: the “weekend Facebook” audience is comprised of different people than “work hours Facebook.” The goal on weekends isn’t necessarily to reach massive numbers of business professionals, but rather to reach new members, like those who work for companies where Facebook is blocked, or those who just don’t think to get on Facebook during work hours. A community is comprised of all members, not just the members who are available when it’s convenient for the brand.

DH: Joe, I like how you put that — reaching new members. That ties in with the report comScore and Facebook put out in July, The Power of Like: How Brands Reach and Influence Fans Through Social Media Marketing. According to the report, only 16% of Fans are reached by branded content by a brand that posts five out of seven days. One reason for this is that people miss content if they’re not logged on when you post the content.

In your report, you mention the Golden Ratio. Can you explain what this means?

JC: The Golden Ratio is a mathematical term that is derived from nature. Apparently the shape of a nautilus, the veins in leaves, even the proportions of humans, all share the same mathematical dimensions. So we decided to see if on Facebook there was a “Golden Ratio” … that is, a normal balance between “Likes” and comments, and whether or not that ratio differed between B2B and B2C companies.This data is in the deck so that brands can see if the way their Fans engage with them is consistent with these norms or if it differs sharply from them. It’s a baseline.

DH: Ok, excellent. And one last question. You also mention that automated posting tools have a NEGATIVE impact on posts being seen. Can you talk a little about that, too?

JC: In our experience, auto-posting tools had a NEGATIVE impact on our posts being seen. Historically Facebook’s algorithm has frowned on third-party publishers.That appears to have changed, according to a November 7 post at AllFacebook, but in our experience, our “jobs at Eloqua auto-publisher” had a negative impact.

Joe, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

Be sure to download Eloqua’s report. And, if you haven’t already, come join me on Facebook. I post content that you might find interesting — everything from links to new reports and data to articles that have ideas about how to improve your thinking.

What do you think about Facebook and B2B? Do you think Timeline will be a game changer and force more B2B companies to incorporate FB into their marketing campaigns? Leave your comments below.

I’ve been blogging since 2006. Since that time, marketing has changed — dramatically — and so has my business.

I want to make sure this blog is relevant, engaging and helpful to you. Help me help you by taking my blog survey. It will take just a couple of minutes. Your responses will remain anonymous — and at the end, you can see what everyone else had to say.

TAKE THE SURVEY!

I did a survey very similar to this one for my e-newsletter and was rather surprised at the responses. I’ve been sending out my newsletter on the first Friday of the month, for example. Survey respondents said, “We want it on Wednesdays!” All righty then!

Thanks in advance for your time.

With all of the changes going down on Facebook, it can be tough to keep up. One of the changes that I love — which I found by accident while poking around — is that Pages have news feeds.

I like this feature because it allows me to follow companies on FB without having to clog up my personal profile feed with a lot of gunk.

To see your Page’s news feed, do the following:

1. Log into FB and click on your Page on the left.

2. Click on “Use Facebook as [your Page]” on the right.

3. Click “Home” at the top. Viola! Now you can see the feed of the Pages you’ve Liked. You have to be logged in as your Page in order to Like other Pages and have them show up on your Page. You can see your Page Likes when you’re on your Wall — they’re on the left. Facebook shows five at any given time; you can change this by editing your Page.

To see which Pages have liked your Page, go back to your Wall and click “like this” under the number of fans or Likes you have. This brings up a new window.

In that window, click the drop down menu in the top left corner where it says “People.” Check “Pages” and now you can see which companies / Pages are following you.

Is that cool or what?

What new tricks have you discovered for FB? Feel free to share.

Since I’m in marketing, I’m pretty wary of marketing gimmicks. I know that if something is offered for free, you have to hand something over in return (your name, your phone number, your email address, your first born child).

When I walked into the crowded Heav’nly Donuts this morning, Bill (in photo at right), from the New England Coffee Company, handed me a card for a free cup of coffee. I didn’t take it.

“What’s the catch?” I asked.

“No catch,” said Bill. “Our company loves its customers and this is how they show appreciation. Take one — no catch, honest.”

So I did and after I had my cappuccino in hand, I took Bill’s photo and said I’d put him on my blog.

Why? I like refreshingly good marketing — and coffee.

I needed to reprogram my thermostat, so I carried my iPad over to it and looked up the product name in order to find the manual online.

Ha! The company’s Website looked good on my iPad but for some reason I couldn’t access the drop down menus, nor could I find a sitemap link on the home page.

I had to boot up my Mac to navigate the site. If I hadn’t needed the manual, I would have ditched this company and its site seconds after encountering it on my iPad.

Here’s the deal: Apple sold 8 million iPads last quarter. It sold 15 million iPads last year. It sold 4 million iPhone 4ses in the first 24 hours.

That’s a lot of mobile devices people, and judging from what I see simply walking around in the world (e.g. the mall, restaurants, airport, grocery store, etc.), these iPad- / iPhone-toting people use them — a lot. I’m finding that I leave my Mac turned off unless I need it to do work and am using my iPad for everything else.

Before purchasing my toaster oven, for example, I researched prices on my iPad and then called the store closest to me to make sure they had one in stock. If this company’s Website hadn’t “worked” on my iPad, they would have lost a sale — without knowing it.

To make sure your Website works on the iPad or any mobile device, you can do the following:

Ask your Web designer to look at your site on all devices. This is something I do for clients as part of my value add even though I’m not a designer. Personally, I think all designers should have these devices for testing sites before they go live as it’s part of their job. #justsayin

Make sure you can access pages if you have drop down menus. I had a similar problem to RiteTemp when I first converted my site to WordPress and couldn’t navigate my site using my iPhone. I fixed that pretty fast.

Put your phone number at the top of every page of your site. Crazy busy people (and we all are) don’t want to spend the extra seconds hunting around for your phone number — especially if they’re on a smart phone. Put your number at the top of every page and no matter where they land on your site, they’ll have it. They can then “touch to call” you. Easy.

Ditto for email.

Test carts and downloads. If you sell stuff on your site, test your shopping cart to make sure it’s easy to buy stuff. If you have reports or other PDF documents, make sure people can easily download them, save them to the iBooks app — and most important — open them. I downloaded one PDF from a company and couldn’t save it as it was “password protected,” which necessitated a call to the company.

Do you have an iPad or iPhone? What are some of your Website pet peeves that you’ve encountered using these devices? Feel free to post them below.

Last night I met three other bloggers at the Publicity Club of New England’s “Blogger Relations for PR Pros” event.

You can read the Tweet stream to see some of the questions and comments. The questions were really good and everyone was engaged.

It was good for me to get out and meet other bloggers and to hear what PR pros are trying to accomplish. The one thing I learned, that wasn’t brought up at the meeting, is this: When you’re pitching bloggers, you definitely need a strategy.

You need to determine what your news is and which type of blogger you should be pitching. A huge difference exists between a blogger at a news agency or publication and someone like me. The news agency blogger needs content all day long. This person is following Twitter all day looking for trends and breaking news.

Someone like myself, on the other hand, needs a post or two a week — or maybe even less than that. I’m definitely not on Twitter all day because if I were, I’d never get any work done. My blogging objective isn’t to post breaking news.

To be successful at pitching bloggers, you definitely need to take this into account when developing your strategy and your objectives.

The panel, of which I was a part, featured four bloggers: two from actual news agencies, a food blogger who blogs at night after her day job, and myself — a crazy busy marketing consultant who blogs when I can squeeze it in.

All of us love blogging. All of us want to feature great content and great stories.

But all of us have different objectives and focus and needs, which is why it pays to develop a strategy first. This doesn’t have to be time consuming or even difficult. You’ll want to answer the following questions:

• What is the real news and who is our target audience?
• Why is this news important to them and what benefit is it to them to read it?
• What action (if any) do we want them to take once they read our news?
• Who are the bloggers and reporters in our space who might find this news of interest and who either reach or influence our audience? What is the best way to contact them? (This doesn’t have to be a huge list to be effective, by the way.)
• What will constitute success and how will we measure it?

That’s it.

Thank you to the New England Publicity Club (@PubClubofNE) for having me as a guest, and thank you to my fellow panelists, Jason Keith (@jaykeith), Rachel L. Blumenthal (@blumie), and Greg Gomer (@sliggity). This was one of the better events I’ve attended, mostly because I learned a lot, plus I came away with a great deal of respect for bloggers and PR pros alike.

And a special thank you to Jennifer McDowell, my rep at BusinessWire, who rescued me. I left my wallet at home; she graciously loaned me the cash to get out of the parking lot.

Katie Meurin, of Komarketing Associates, an SEO firm, posted a stat that I found interesting in her post, “15 Content Marketing and Social Media Takeaways from the B2B Marketing Summit.”

Of the 79% of B2B marketers using social media, only 28% use a blog.

If you’re a B2B company using social media, including Twitter, FB or LinkedIn, then a blog should definitely be part of your strategy. Why do I say this?

Simply put, a blog is how you easily, quickly and cost-effectively create fresh content on a regular basis. And if you’re using social media anyway, why not use these tools to get people back to your Website via this content?

Unlike an e-newsletter, which has its own specific format and publication schedule (generally once or twice a month), a blog gives you a number of benefits as it allows you to:

1. Respond to news and industry events as they happen — This is especially good if you work in an industry where timely response can position you as a thought leader and/or expert. I had one prospect say, for example, “Yeah, we wish we had a blog because so much has been happening in our space. We need to write about it.” A once-a-month newsletter, while good, doesn’t give you this timeliness.

2. Post customer stories / pictures — If you manufacture products and then install them at customer sites, you can take photos and post these to your blog along with a testimonial. In many cases, these photos and testimonials are much easier to obtain (and cheaper, too), than a case study.

3. Answer customers’ questions — If you’re like many small business owners or marketers, you probably hear the same questions repeatedly. You can write blog posts answering these questions. Or, consider using one of your engineers or product specialists and creating an “Ask Bob,” type of column where Bob answers technical or other types of questions. (Bob doesn’t have to actually write it — you, the marketer, can write it but get the info from him.)

Tip: Go through your Google Analytics keyword report to see what types of “How to” searches you’re getting and create “Ask Bob” posts from those, too.

4. Publicize your reports, case studies, company news, etc. — A blog is a great place to post your new content as people can link to it, retweet it, etc. Also mix in news about your company, including tradeshows you’re attending, new products, and anytime your company is featured in a mainstream or industry publication.

5. Show your personality — The one thing I love about working with small companies is the fact that they have so much personality. Once I get to know the owners and/or marketers, I hear all kinds of neat stories about the company and the owners themselves.

These stories make great blog posts. Why? Because people do business with people they trust. As you post more about the people inside your company, the people who read your blog get to know you. As they get to know you, they build trust in you so that when they’re ready to do business with you, they already feel as if they know you.

So instead of posting pictures of your building (zzzzzzzzz) or sticking with safe but really boring bios of your management team on the “About Us” page, let your hair down a little bit and post what’s happening inside your company. That’s the stuff people like to read — and keeps them coming back for more.

Notice I didn’t say that having a blog helps your content show up in the search engines. Yes, yes, yes, that’s a benefit, but it’s not the main reason you should write one. Writing for search engines means you’re writing for a bot, not people, and bot-driven, keyword dense content is pretty yucky, in my opinion.

What other benefits can a small B2B company derive from having a well-written blog? Leave your comments below.

Edited to add: Just read this great article by Robert Rose in the Chief Content Officer Magazine, “Best Practices . . . mediocre results” about why focusing on ROI can suffocate your “escape from the herd” thinking. He gives a great example of how this type of thinking killed what was going to be a great company blog.