By Kent Huffman.

June 15th, 2009

Kent Huffman is the CMO at BearCom Wireless. You can follow him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/KentHuffman

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Twitter. It’s all the rage in the social media world these days. But how can you best leverage it for tangible business-to-business marketing purposes? One way is to build your own community within Twitter.

Several months ago, I became interested in Twitter when a colleague told me about his positive experiences with the popular social media tool and insisted that I check it out. After signing up for an account and reading a few tweets, I immediately saw its potential as a community development tool. Being a long-time B2B marketer, I decided to build a group of folks interested in marketing who could inspire and help each other grow professionally by sharing ideas and information. But I didn’t know exactly how to go about creating that community.

I ultimately decided to treat it as I would any other important marketing initiative—by first developing a well-defined strategy and a set of related tactics. Over the next couple of months, I created and then tweaked the strategy and honed the tactics through trial and error. I then boiled everything down to a seven-step process that I’m sharing with you here in hopes that you can use it to develop your own B2B community on Twitter.

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I recently sat down with my friend, Pete Karinik, the founder of The CMO Club (www.thecmoclub.com), to have a frank discussion about crisis and how marketers should handle it. Here is what we’ve discussed.

1)    How is marketing of “services” different from marketing tangible products?

Selling ‘services’ was always a fascinating topic for many companies – product and services firms alike. The reason for that is simple – when you sell services, you sell value, and selling value is always more difficult than selling a tangible product, like the iPhone, an automobile, or a piece of clothing. Any services business, from a neighborhood beauty salon to a giant accounting firm, such as KPMG, knows that clients value quality, consistency, transparency (honesty), and innovation. I also think that at times of peril, meaning now, we have to look at selling the ‘basic idea’ – if you do your work well, and you are passionate about your clients, you will do fine. The other basic idea we often overlook is that when you are selling a ‘service’, you are selling a relationship with your client, and trust, not just an offering or an innovative idea. That relationship is built on numerous nuances, from a simple greeting to a major overhaul of the client’s financial system, and is backed by months and years of proven experience, trust and history. And that’s what defines your brand.

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