Welcome to the visual social web. Photos, images and infographics now generate more user engagement, sharing activity and traffic than a tweet, blog post or other written content. According to ROI Research, social media users prefer pictures over jokes, status updates, or other types of content, and they are also more likely to engage with posts from brands when the status update involves a picture.

Content may be king, but today, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Does this trend toward visual social networking really apply to tech marketers and the business-to-business market in general? What are the savviest tech companies doing on platforms like Pinterest or Instagram—and what can you learn from them?

In this white paper, we’ll take a look at the visual social media revolution and how it applies to tech marketing—and offer 5 tips on how your brand can boost its connection with customers by going visual.

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Visual Social Media
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InformationWeek gauges IT project priorities in the enterprise, and gives tech marketers an idea of their prospects and customers’ mindset for the rest of the year. This year’s study shows that technology professionals want to deliver business value, but have a hard time breaking out of the vicious circle of underfunding and playing catch-up. The good news is that more than 39% of survey respondents are reporting an IT budget increase for this year, and say the increase will be between 10% and 14%.

We heard from 513 business technology professionals in our InformationWeek 2013 IT Spending Priorities Survey. All participants are involved with setting, managing, or have a working knowledge of at least some part of their organizations’ IT budgets. Our new report includes insight and data on:

• 2013 IT Budget
• 2013 Business Technology Priorities
• Centralized vs. Business Unit Technology Spending
• Scrutiny of IT Project Spending
• 2013 IT Initiatives
• Top IT Projects for 2013

Download the full report today and see where your technologies fall on the priority and spending list.

2013 IT Spending Priorities Report
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Not anymore.  If tech buyers aren’t even picking up the phone or sending you an email until late into the decision making process, more sales reps isn’t the answer.  What is?  Integrating more top of the funnel brand tactics into your overall marketing strategy.  The leads will follow. 

Focusing on top of the funnel marketing is a bit contrary to where many marketers have spent their time over the past few years, managing campaign after campaign chasing leads.  Its time to supplement those campaigns with programs that also “pull” leads in.

What approaches are marketers using to address top of the funnel marketing?  According to a recent BtoB survey report, the top five channels best at achieving brand awareness as rated by b2b marketers are:

1. Corporate website
2. Display advertising
3. Social media
4. In-person events
5. Email

Seems like most marketers agree that the one-two punch of their corporate website accompanied by advertising in environments their prospects are using and engaging with are the most impactful channels when it comes to brand awareness.      

Marketers need to get much more effective with branding and gaining significant awareness as tech buying triggers happen.  Your brand has to be among the few select that decision makers contact after their initial research has been done.  Research on their own, mind you. 

 It’s like the lottery: “you got to be in it, to win it.”

“Risk is the key element around planning successful careers,” said Wal-Mart CIO Karenann Terrell.

Thus began one of the most candid, practical career-advice discussions from women in the tech field and the executives responsible for developing and retaining that talent.

The panel was the highlight of an event this past week organized by the Michigan Council for Women in Technology. It was sponsored by Detroit’s Big Three automakers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, and featured a discussion with the CIOs of those three companies. InformationWeek’s Chris Murphy served as emcee, and Laurianne McLaughlin as a discussion leader. After reading their coverage of the event, I found myself wishing I was there. 

While the event was specifically aimed toward women in tech, the invaluable advice and insight dished out easily applies to both men and women. Chris recaps much of the discussion for us in his column; but here are a few of my favorites:

• Work-life balance “is a myth created to make us feel a bit guilty,” said Cisco senior VP Sheila Jordan. It’s unrealistic. Has any parent of a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old felt in balance every day, whether they’re working or not? So Jordan strives for work-life integration, blending work as part of her life so there isn’t a sense that working is depriving a personal life.
• It’s OK to give up what you’re great at. Too often, women stay in roles where they’ve thrived instead of taking a risk on a role where they’re no longer the expert. IBM senior VP Bridget van Kralingen trained as a psychologist, so she faced this fear when she was asked to move from doing organizational development to managing large-scale reengineering and cost-reduction consulting jobs. “When you get really good at something, it’s hard to give it up,” she said. “… What I’ve seen in many women’s careers is they hang onto something too long in order to be expert.” IBM addresses this by pushing people to do what it calls “lily-padding” — moving people to a lateral area outside their expertise.
• Take credit for what you do. “There’s a strange dynamic of credit deflection that takes place with women,” Wal-Mart CIO Karenann Terrell said. “There’s a feeling of dirtiness that exists with women about taking credit even when directly asked about it,” she said. That deflection can lead managers to conclude that maybe those women didn’t do more than facilitate. Boeing CIO Kim Hammonds warned women against keeping their heads down while doing a job and then not telling the story of what they and their teams achieved.
• Push for the flexibility you need.  Hammonds said about half of Boeing’s IT workforce works virtually in some way and noted that employees’ needs change over time. “Men and women are going to go through life phases — sicknesses, elderly parents, children — so allowing that flexibility is very important,” she said. “And they’ll be better performers if you stick by them in that time of need.”

Such great advice from executives we can all look up to.  To read Chris’ entire column, click here. To read Laurie’s coverage, click here.

63% of marketers said they will increase their online brand advertising budgets this year, with 20% saying those budgets will grow by 20% or more. Marketers project that brand ad spending will increase faster than direct performance-based response spending.  The survey sees marketers embracing digital media for marketing strategies aimed at addressing brand perception and awareness.

The return to brand marketing is long overdue – especially in the technology space.  With technologies becoming more plug-and-play – e.g. cloud, BYOD, etc. – decisions are made faster than ever before. In fact, the timeline for technology buying decisions has accelerated to the point that the buying decision is essentially made before a formal purchase process can occur. If marketers wait until the formal IT purchase process starts, odds are, they’re too late. Vendors are often eliminated by decision makers even before a sales person is contacted, which means tech marketers need to make more of an impact on buyers through brand marketing to get into the consideration set.

Make sure your brand, and its products and solutions, are ‘there’ when the buying conversation starts.  It’s time to think beyond just lead generation, and focus on brand generation through sound digital strategy and approach.

Access the CMO Council’s study here; the research was based on an online survey of 615 marketers, agency executives and publishing representatives that took place in January and February of 2013.

Industry research shows that technology professionals value peer-to-peer content and networking, and the traditional media approach is not meeting those needs. UBM Tech’s events are proven to generate strong customer engagement, delivering relevant content, education opportunities and peer-to-peer sharing. Now, UBM Tech’s online communities are following suit, providing relevant, expertly curated content along with user-generated content and peer-to-peer engagement opportunities by migrating all of its media brands to its proprietary, award-winning DeusM community platform. With this move, UBM Tech will provide integrated, continuous access to live and online communities 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

“Traditional BtoB media has changed dramatically in recent years. A lot of what worked in the past is no longer viable,” said Paul Miller, CEO UBM Tech. “UBM Tech is deploying a model that is truly relevant to today’s technology professionals. It meets the needs of our communities with rich and authentic engagement opportunities and provides significant growth opportunities for customers and for our own business.”

The UBM Tech DeusM-driven community platform provides engagement, interaction and conversation, combining the user-driven features of social communities with the high quality, expertly curated content UBM Tech audiences have come to expect. UBM Tech’s online communities extend the networking, content sharing and information gathering opportunities its live event attendees value to a year-round experience.  Integrating live event and online communities based on shared interest in specialized topics not only results in stronger, more unified communities, it paves the way for continued profitable growth for UBM Tech by driving increased participation across both settings.

A recent example illustrating success is the integration of the 2013 Game Developers Conference (GDC), the world’s largest and longest-running event serving game development professionals, with Gamasutra.com, a vibrant community of over 1 million unique site visitors each month, generating an average 3.5 million page views per month.  UBM Tech’s content directors for this topic cross-promoted relevant content across Gamasutra.com, the GDC website and the event itself. The result was record-setting attendance of more than 23,000 professionals and more than 350 exhibitors. Gamasutra.com was also the second largest referrer to the GDC event website, and doubled the viewership of GDC-related content over the event site alone. This successful model will now be applied across all UBM Tech event and online brands.

UBM Tech is also investing significantly in several growth areas, specifically around data analytics capabilities. UBM Tech’s Customer Insights Team will utilize these tools to build a better understanding of the needs of our communities, allowing us to foster deeper relationships with our customers by providing them with the right products and services at the right time.

UBM Tech will also focus on growing owned media events and content marketing services driven by market trends and customer demand. Two established owned-media examples of multi-platform programs produced for UBM Tech’s valued customers though the company’s Partner Solutions group are Signum (ARM Holdings) and Smart Enterprise (CA Technologies).

As a result of these investments, certain legacy areas of the business that no longer resonate with the market or meet the needs of the communities will be eliminated. UBM Tech will cease to provide print publications as of July 1, 2013. InformationWeek will continue online, where it’s strong brand and loyal audiences will benefit from the new community model for greater engagement. UBM Tech will discontinue the Test and Measurement World and Advanced Trading brands and will close four smaller conferences and events.

These changes do not impact the UBM Channel business which is going through a separate strategic review.

Not if you’re marketing backup technologies, and certainly not according to 500+ respondents in InformationWeek’s latest Backup Technologies research survey.  60% use two, three or even more different backup applications, and the percentage of encrypting all media has jumped 15 points since 2011.

As data protection technology advances from simply backing up to tape to more sophisticated technologies, enterprises can reduce the time and effort required to back up
their servers while significantly improving their recovery processes, and therefore user satisfaction. That said, it looks like IT pros are scrambling to keep up with fast-evolving production IT architectures and security and business demands.  Can your products and services help them? Let’s hope so: only 27% are extremely confident in their ability to get the business up and running again in a reasonable timeframe after a major disaster that takes out the main data center.

In this report, we explore the state of data backups today and interest in emerging technologies.  Research charts include:

• How satisfied are IT pros with their current backup system
  
• Current and future uses of backup technologies
• Confidence in recovery capabilities
• Data protection challenges
• Virtual server backup methods

Download the full report today and get vital information that can help you best market your backup technologies.

2013 State of Backup Technologies
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