With margins under ever increasing pressure, many IT solution providers and VARs are looking to the brave new world of Managed Services as a route to survival and hopefully long term prosperity. It's one of the few growth areas during this Recession, and we recently brought to market a new Managed Service offering for a major technology client. In doing so we learnt a few things about the marketplace...

One of the key challenges that existing IT providers face is not a technology one; it is a commercial and personnel issue. Talking to many small IT companies it became clear to us that their sales approach has always been about leading with the technology. This has resulted in haphazard sales with limited opportunities for regular, retained revenue.

If they are to benefit from the retained revenue Managed Services can bring, they require a very different approach to how they present themselves, moving away from delivering technology projects to delivering business solutions. It's is about the following:

- Simplifying the language and removing technospeak

- Learning to speak to the Managing Director not the IT Manager

- Demonstrating benefits to the business not the features of the technology

- Offering an insurance against failure not a fix to a problem

For many smaller firms this can take them outside their comfort zone and one many will struggle to achieve. Take a look at many small IT companies’ websites and you will usually see a plethora of vague, unquantifiable services littered with technology jargon.

We believe the first step to building a successful Managed Service business is to create a really clear offering. Prospective customers need to understand what is being offered, how it will benefit them, and how much it costs. A website is the shop window and should reflect this and present this clearly and concisely. Pricing should be transparent with different services for different types of customers.

We have lots of experience helping to market Managed Service offerings, making them viable business growth oppotunities for the IT solution providers and VAR marketplace.

Zunavision, created by Stanford University researchers studying artificial intelligence, is a new piece of software that can easily embed adverts into any video. This technology could be utilised to great effect as a reseller tool, allowing a vendor to create high quality promotional videos about the latest products and services. Resellers could then easily co-brand the video incorporating their logo or other content directly with the clip and embed it on their own website. We are looking at the possibilities so watch this space.

You will most likely have heard, Facebook has launched vanity URLs ( for example, facebook.com/yourcompanyname) for individuals and companies. This is an opportunity to increase your coverage online, but you must be quick or else someone will beat you to it. Even if at this moment in time you are not thinking about creating a Facebook group my advice would be to go ahead and register your vanity URL anyway. Most well known brands have made their move already, so don't delay.

What does this mean for the B2B sector? Well, although Facebook is thought of very much as a B2C social media tool, we would recommend registering your brand name anyway. Facebook is one of the most popular social media tools out there and this is something you cannot ignore. There is a lot of nice functionality in Facebook that could be utilised by a B2B company: letting people know about events, uploading video and pictures, engaging in debate etc. Don't rule it out just because it is used mainly as a social facilitator.

Update: It has since become apparent that Facebook set some prerequisites to the vanity URL for companies. Firstly they have decided you need 1000 fans or more to have a vanity URL on your fan page. Secondly, you must have had a page since 31 May 2009.

Another update: Good news for smaller companies: Facebook will lift the ban on 1000 minimum fans on June 28th.

This isn't a new subject, Josh Bernoff of Groundswell fame has spoken about it previously. But it is a subject that crops up when speaking to clients and potential clients. Is it right to pay bloggers to blog about your product or service? Josh Bernoff'asserts that is OK, as long as the blogger is transparent (a key concept when operating in social spaces) about the fact that they are being paid, and that they can speak freely about it, i.e. if they think it's pants they can say so!

I agree with what Josh says (he always has a balanced view of brands operating in social media and I can recommend following his work). But I would extend this question further to reflect an issue many companies are having right now: how do staff internally make the time (and hone the skills) to blog themselves? Is it right or wrong to have an agency help you write your blog?

This is more dangerous territory as it threatens to undermine the very core principle of social media: authenticity. Here at Bright, we understand that people are time pressured and also lack the confidence to blog. We help people make the time by hosting weekly calls where we talk about what's going on in the community and suggest articles for blogs. Then we help facilitate the blogs themselves. This means we get the staff members to write the bones of the article, and we, if needed, tweak or suggest ways to improve it.

We want to encourage as many brands as possible to engage with their audience using social media, so if we can help them blog successsfully by facilitating content with them then that's fine with us. The content comes from them and we help them get it right. A perfect balance.

I have been attending lots of events recently for marketing people who are interested in how social media strategy can help them achieve their B2B marketing objectives. They have been popular and have had great turnouts, but I still think social media is a cult, esoteric concept to most marketing people. There is still a long way to go to get past cynicism and internal 'poo-pooing' to the idea that social media is about more than Facebook! When I meet marketing folk at these dos they normally tell me that they want to learn more but they still seem tentative about how they can incorporate social media into their strategy. And if they feel like this can you imagine what their colleagues internally think! These keen but still unsure marketing people have often got a battle on their hands to get budget and backing to invest in this new area.

What people need is some simple and practical entry points (baby steps!) into this unchartered and exciting territory. Here's what I suggest:

1. Start using Twitter yourself first to get the hang of it before you set up your company on there(follow us if you like!). Have a play and see what it's all about - it's the only way to understand it. Don't worry about what to say, just say whatever pops into your head! You need to talk to have a conversation so just say something!

2. Start listening to what is going on out there in your target community. See what people are talking about on the specialist sites, what groups exist on social networking groups, what people are saying on blogs and forums. Have a weekly call internally to formalise this activitiy and task each person with the job of bringing at least one thing of interest to the table.

3. After the call, start brainstroming the type of things you might blog about, using the stuff you've come across as inspiration. Subjects should be of interest to your audience (obviously!), and be written by someone who cares about what they are writing about - this is key.

Once you've done these three things, you will be much more prepared to enter this arena, instead of getting stuck straight into it and feeling unsure about what lays ahead.

Let us know how you get on... Good luck!

This article on the B2B Marketing website states that Twitter has become the most popular social platform for senior marketing professionals. Whilst it makes me happy, it also makes me think "Hmmm, why is it that people are more comfortable Tweeting than using other social tools?". A few reasons I can think of:

- Twitter is easy
- Twitter is free
- Twitter is quick
- Twitter is set up in minutes
- Twitter is fast becoming a household name (ride the wave)

As opposed to blogging, creating groups on social networks etc, Twitter is very appealing to marketeers due to its accessibility and instant results. The fact that it is senior profs rather than marketeers in general is, I think, indicative that they are confident enough to convey opinion. The problem many marketing departments have with social media is that they do not trust their employees to speak on behalf of their company, but if the CEO or Head of Marketing is doing the Tweeting, then that's a different matter. These people often make the best figureheads of social activity for this reason: confidence. So, let's hear more from the horses' mouths!

What's next? How do these social-technology-embracing marketeers and senior professionals refine their Twitter campaigns? At the minute a very spammy trend for reciprocal following is occuring (this reminds me of the equally spammy reciprocal links days of SEO). My advice: don't succumb to this approach; only follow people you are genuinely interested in.

I've heard plenty of people say "Email is dead" over the past year or so, often in relation to the exponential growth in the use of social media. Normally such rhetoric is making a statement about the fact that people are interacting with brands in a new, more personal, touchy-feely way and therefore don't respond to the old fashioned model of Brand > Customer communication using an official and authoratitive voice. Whilst I agree that the way brands speak to their customers is changing (we are the first to encourage more open channels of dialogue using social media!), I don't agree that email is dead. Email can go hand in hand with social media.

The fact is that people do still rely on email for essential information from companies they are interested in hearing from. The reason I think open rates are down is that people's inboxes are just too full of emails from companies. As we spend more money and time online (and as a result subscribe to more emails, knowingly or not) we are being inundated with email. If you are anything like me you have thousands of unopened emails in your inbox from brands that I simply cannot be bothered to unsubscribe from. (I don't know why these companies just don't unsubscribe me after a certain time of not opening any of their emails?)

What if you continue offering emails, but supplement these emails with other ways of delivering your news, offers, updates (or whatever else you put in your emails)? Use your email as a roundup, a regular (weekly?) communication that acts as a kind of 'best of'. Then deliver your time sensitive messages using RSS feeds; your more editorial, chatty messages using a blog; your response-required communications via Twitter. Of course, include all this in your round up email too so no-one misses out.

No-one here will ever suggest you bin your email marketing communication. What we will suggest is that you evolve your email marketing strategy by integrating your email and your social media efforts.

Are you interested in how to integrate social media into your marketing strategy? 'Yes' I hear you exclaim! Well you're in luck; we've just published a Straightforward Guide to Social Media for IT Channel Marketeers. Even if you are not an IT channel marketeer you will find the insight, tips and advice in this straight talking guide helpful (especially if you are work in technology). Email Rachel to receive your free guide today.

I found a trip to this year’s Channel Expo at the NEC extremely useful for assessing how the credit crunch is biting the IT and Telecoms industry. In particular Tiffani Bova, from Gartner, gave us all some excellent insight into the priorities of CIOs. As you may expect in the current environment, cutting costs is the big priority for 70% of the CIOs researched back at the start of the year, but I think it’s a little worrying that only 50% said that growing sales revenues was important and that was the lowest answer. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see whether those few companies come out of the recession the strongest?

Tiffani’s slide on how CIOs intend to build value from their existing infrastructure was extremely useful particularly the growing interest in collaboration and virtualization. We are interested in these subjects from two perspectives – 1) helping clients move their business towards cloud computing with a stronger interface online and 2) putting some of the theories into practice for the communication services we offer. We want to move away from a project by project costing model into providing recurring services that help our customers generate leads and convert business online.

I am also interested in developing the idea of a completely virtual organisation and the presentation just spurned me on to consider it a little more deeply … imagine really low (read ‘no’) office overheads and totally outsourced services and a completely mobile dynamic workforce, who meet only when they need to and spend the whole time constructively meeting customers, working in peace, networking with peers in the real world and the virtual and developing their own skills! But I need to develop that idea quite a bit further before I can start convincing people it’s the way forward for communications agencies! More to come on that subject from me soon!