Today was an exciting day for Compendium as we exhibited at the ExactTarget Connections user conference in Indianapolis and the MarketingProfs B2B conference in Chicago (I'm stationed at the MarketingProfs conference).

The keynote speaker was Chip Heath, author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. One of his points was that B2B marketers have especially hard jobs of marketing their products (and making the message stick with people) because...well, we have complicated services and products and like to over-complicate selling them. Even though we know it's wrong, we gravitate toward boring, streamline statements that are chock full of vague, fluffy words. So the challenge in front of us is how do we simplify the message and speak to people as individuals? And make sure that we talk about is relevant to what they care about?

By showing them people rather than institutions. The people behind the business. By having normal conversations. By making it easy for people to understand what we do and why they should care.

Blogging is a critical aspect of this. With easy to use blogging software, that includes an administrative layer, marketers are able to rely on lots of content contributors (employees), which naturally means more opportunities to talk to people in a normal and conversational way, and for prospective customers to find someone that they identify with.

So I'll leave you with this thought: these days, successful marketing isn't about finding the perfect message. It's giving real people within your organization a chance to share their expertise, voice, and opinions, (through powerful, easy to use blogging software), which leads to more opportunities to leverage the "similar situation" phenomenon, which simply means that people like buying from people who are like them and talk about their problems in the same way that they do!