If you’ve read {grow} with any consistency you’ll recognize Jon Buscall as one of the most vibrant intellectual voices in our community. Today Jon tackles the tough issue of monetizing a blog community in our next installment of Community Week:

So many people (including Mark!) have written about the SEO benefits of blogs that I’m not going to repeat that here.  But one thing that rarely comes up is how B2B blogs help businesses convert readers and traffic into sales. Or whether they actually don’t!

Repeat Visitors & Conversion Apathy

If you’ve drunk the business blogging Kool-Aid and worked hard over time to build a strong, vocal community on your blog you might well find that repeat visitors don’t convert into sales. Go on, check your stats!

Regular visitors are there for something else: the community, the discussion, or even the friendships that forms around a successful blog.

As a business blogger it can be worrying to see that even if you’re putting highly visible call-to-actions above the fold the stream of regular visitors to your site forget about your propositions.

Maybe it’s because:

• regular visitors get used to your site and go straight to the content
• you don’t vary the call-to-actions often enough so they become “invisible”
• you don’t maximize the content space you’ve got to pimp your services
• regular blog readers often read your site with a news aggregator like Google Reader or NewsFire.

Why I Love First-time, Unique Visitors

My own experience is that it’s easier to covert first (or second) time visitors into clients with a B2B blog.

Yup, without going into the nitty-gritty of my own site stats, the biggest groups that make enquiries about our services at Jontus Media are, in fact, first timers. They’ve googled something, clicked through to our site and, low and behold decided to contact us (and Oh, boy do I love it when that happens!).

Google Analytics tells us this, but so do our customers when we ask them.

Now this isn’t to say that we’ve got spectacular landing pages or catchy call-to-actions littered across our site; but it does seem to suggest that all that our effort to build a community might be wasted! That in fact, the trust and thought-leadership that regular b2b business blogging generates is spotted by a cursory glance.

Google Analytics tells us that it only takes first time visitors a matter of minutes (or seconds) to convert organic search traffic into sales.

Give Me More !

Now I’m not knocking first time conversions. But I do want more business from that 30 percent of visitors who come back to our website on a daily basis. Even if it’s just a percentage or two.

So when it comes to B2B blog strategy I’ve got a few suggestions for those of us in the B2B business blogosphere who aren’t converting repeat visitors to customers. And want some of it.

Ask Yourself:

• Are our call-to-actions strong enough?
• How is the site working to remind the community that this is a business and that services (or products) are for sale?
• Is the overall site design geared towards conversion?
• Could we refresh the site design more frequently to stop visitors getting blind to our call-to-actions?
• Could we be making more use of our RSS feed to generate leads?

Finally, just to throw the baby out with the bathwater, maybe I’m wrong. And as I write it occurs to me that quite, possibly I am. Maybe I’m going after the impossible. Hell, maybe I shouldn’t think of a B2B blog as a conversion channel for repeat visitors in the first place?

Perhaps a B2B blog could / should just be a means to a different end. A great way of funneling visitors to an email list, for example, to be used for direct marketing.

Or perhaps it’s a word-of-mouth tool to help spread the news that you’re a kick-ass company with creative, insightful, quirky, talented staff.

So go on, help me out here! What can we do to really make a B2B blog a conversion engine? Or are B2B blogs for entirely different things?

______

Jon Buscall is head of Jontus Media, a creative content & communications agency working out of Stockholm, Sweden. You can follow Jon on Twitter.

I pleased to present today an interview with William Robb, Director, Social Media Marketing for SAP.

SAP is the world’s largest provider of business software and the social media role is extremely complex. In addition to being a true B2B company, the many software users within these client companies act as consumers of the software and are essentially a B2C audience.  Although a global powerhouse, more than two-thirds of SAP customers are classified as small businesses and midsize enterprises (fewer than 2,500 employees).

If you want to see the social web serving communities in a powerful way, I’d encourage you to visit their site.  In my recent corporate blogging webinar, I cited SAP as best practice and the company is also a pioneer in user-driven training and support videos and the establishment of diverse and vibrant  user communities. Here’s Bill:

Bill, you hold a premier social media marketing position with one of the world’s largest companies. What’s your background and how did it prepare you for this role?

I worked at a full-service interactive agency for many years. We excelled in online direct marketing especially in B2B tech (Oracle & Sun were my main clients). I took a position at Cisco in 2005 in Global Demand Generation but while my colleagues were building traditional direct marketing programs, I was tasked with building the case that we could get greater return if our direct marketing was more customer-centric.

One of the guiding principles was to put our customers in control of our marketing. I built Relationship Email Marketing program that was more personalized, targeted, and often 20 times more effective than our traditional efforts.

With that guiding principle in mind, it’s not difficult to figure out how I ended up in social media marketing when a small team was assembled in 2007. Brand listening, crowdsourcing, etc. are all manifestations of that same idea. It didn’t hurt that personally I was a (relatively) early adopter and active participant in the social web. It’s much easier to understand your customers’ experiences when you’re familiar with the environment yourself.

You could connect to so many possible constituents through the social web. Customers, obviously, but also developers, partners, suppliers. How do you focus your efforts?

I sit in Marketing so end customers are the priority but “customers” at a company like SAP can comprise a variety of audiences (from CxO’s to developers). Depending on the product, audience, and objectives, we might focus efforts in technical forums for developers or build a thought leadership blog for a business audience.

The lame but honest answer is: it depends. Partners are also hugely important in B2B tech. Marketing’s role is typically in partner enablement, but at Cisco I developed a partner influencer program for a product group as a way to help amplify their launches.

Measurement is always a hot topic when it comes to social media. How are you held accountable for results at SAP?

We’re in Corporate so we’re responsible for the SAP brand in social. Our team is ultimately accountable for risk management so we’re doing our job well when there are 0 crises (i.e. detecting problems early and making sure they are addressed).

Otherwise, our objectives tend to be at the top of the funnel so we look at a variety of brand metrics such as competitive share of conversation in key solution areas and brand sentiment as a proxy for customer satisfaction.

At a more tactical level, our team manages the SAP brand social sites (e.g. www.facebook.com/SAPSoftware) where we track the typical interaction levels and drive-to-SAP metrics. On that front, we’re launching a pilot with a social media management tool (Sprinklr) that allows us to aggregate metrics for all SAP social sites and social media interactions. I envision this opening the door for some new measures that we’ll track.

Our bigger task is to measure more of the business impact of social and we are working on a unified view of measurement across three of the major groups engaged in SAP social strategy internally (Marketing, PR, and Communities). Stay tuned.

What has you most excited about your job right now?

Social CRM has some fascinating implications for marketing, sales, and service. As a social marketer, I enjoy thinking about how we need to organize and build processes to support it especially across departments. It’s a challenging but very rewarding part of my job. Working for a company that’s a player in the SCRM space adds yet another dimension to my interest.

You told me you really liked my recent post on busting social media myths. What myth would YOU like to bust?

It’s very popular for Social Media Directors at various companies to say this: “If we do this right, I won’t have a job in a year or so.”

OK, I can appreciate the idealism—social media is so important in so many areas of the business (internal and external) that it’s just going to be part of everyone’s job and having a social media “silo” is counter-productive to that end.  My career in marketing has shadowed the rise of the web and its offspring (email, search, social, mobile). These have fragmented the marketing mix to a level that requires deep specialization. And they evolve at such speed that it’s hard even for specialized practitioners to keep up.

Many marcoms still struggle with the complexity of online & email yet we’re expecting them to be social media strategists in 12-18 months too. I just don’t see it. You can build social DNA into every employee (and the business itself) yet still require a team of social media specialists who have deep expertise in the discipline — not to mention a more critical eye for bad behavior. I think roles like mine are going to be necessary for the foreseeable future.

Bill can be found on Twitter at @BillRobbSAP and on LinkedIn.

The recession has culled the weak from the pack but it’s likely that your competition is still fierce.  Is there a way to attract and retain B2B customers without lowering your price? And is there a way to leverage the social web to keep your customers … even in the extreme case of a commodity market?

Holding onto customers in a buyer’s market is one of the most extraordinary challenges in business, especially if you’re selling a commodity (Commodity = purchasers view suppliers as identical on all factors but price, i.e. common coal, steel, or chemicals).

There is usually only one winner in a commodity market — the lowest cost supplier — except in periods of high demand when supply falls short.  But there are ways to lock-in customers even in ugly downturns.  One strategy I used throughout my career was to create a systematic plan to raise switching costs. By this I mean create obstacles — through valuable benefits — to prevent a customer from leaving you for the competition.

A process to retain customers

This process starts with getting out to your most valued customers and listening. And I mean REALLY listening. We would sometimes have half-day sessions to explore un-met and under-served customer needs that would …

• Improve their competitive position
• Enhance profitability or productivity
• Eliminate waste
• Lower risk
• Increase speed to market

One strategy that uncovered potential points of differentiation was to ask customers what they hated about their job. This always seemed to get people to open up about an idea we could implement to make their life easier!   Some other potential approaches to this challenge:

• Solve a customer problem (reporting, data-gathering, analysis/testing) that might add slightly to your cost, but establishes enough value to create a hurdle to switching
• Create a specialized service that would be difficult for competitors to match (we did a specialized truck-return recycling program, for example)
• Work actively with customers to influence specifications and terms that could advantage my company or disadvantage a competitor
• Focus retention efforts on most profitable customer locations
• Look at eCommerce integration options to enhance retention

Notice that all of these ideas go beyond the basics of price, quality and service. Those aren’t strategic initiatives. Those are competitive tablestakes these days.

When customers don’t play nice

This process of listening, reacting and renewal must be continual and integrated through an effective CRM system. But it doesn’t always work.

In the middle of all this great creative marketing work I just suggested is another dynamic. Purchasing may not want you to implement your ideas – even if there is an advantage – because it reduces their flexibility with suppliers.  They may even force you to hand over your innovations to competitors. I witnessed this in the automotive market in the 1990s.  This ended up hurting customers because when there is no reward for innovation, innovation ends.

Now what about the social web?

Is it possible to develop some distinct value through social media that could create a switching cost? My answer – probably not. The social web might be a tool to listen and tune-in to possible innovations and market needs but I don’t see how social networks can create sustainable switching costs in this part of the sales cycle. It’s free to everyone and easily duplicated by competitors.

However, I do think you can create PRIVATE information networks and communities that create distinct value. For example, one idea that worked really well was a private, unique market information hub for customers who remained in our top tier in revenue.

What are you doing to hold onto your best customers in tough economic conditions?  Can you think of any way to leverage the social web for DISTINCT value in a commodity market?

Here’s a chance for you to participate in a live social media experiment and receive an interesting piece of free research at the same time.

Our friend John Bottom, a regular contributor to the {grow} community, is giving a talk at the IDM B2B Conference in London. To demonstrate the viral power of great content, he’s conducting an experiment over the next 24 hours (May 18-19) that involves YOU!

In preparation for this event, John asked 150 senior marketers attending the conference: “What is the single biggest benefit of social media to your brand – and what is the single biggest obstacle to achieving it?”

He compiled the answers in a snappy little eBook you can download for free by clicking HERE.

In fact, downloading the eBook is the whole point of the experiment.  John wants to achieve 1,000 downloads in a single day.  It’s free, fun, and there is no obligation whatsoever. So please, go ahead and do it.  I’ll wait. : )

Thanks!

A link that is possibly even more interesting is this one – http://bit.ly/bJbrb5 – which provides live blog coverage of the experiment throughout the day (May 19 in case you’re a little behind in your blog reading!)

By the way, I really liked the content in this little eBook.  One participant said social media is a chance to demonstrate brand humanity (isn’t that a great term?). Sounds like a potential blog post for somebody.

Thanks for stopping by today and helping John out.  Oh yes, it would also be great if you could click the little green tweet button at the top of this blog post and ask your tribe to participate too.

Disclosure: I have no commercial or financial stake in this demonstration. I am simply helping out a friend I met through Twitter with an experiment I believe in.

Update: Results of the Great Content Marketing Experiment from John Bottom ->  http://bit.ly/bJbrb5

I’ve had the most fun over the last few weeks working with Billy Mitchell, Martine Hunter and the incredible professionals at MLT Creative in Atlanta preparing their company’s first major webinar.

They gave me the license to think through the implications of new research and trends on corporate blogging and it resulted in some really fresh — even controversial — myth-busting ideas.  For example, have you considered:

• Actively selling <gasp> through your blog in a way that your customers will love?
• Dismissing customer comments as a measure of blog success?
• Market-segmenting your blog?
• The two possible conditions for an active corporate blog community?
• Why “entertainment” should be a cornerstone of your blogging strategy?

If you missed this webinar, MLT has made the entire session available by clicking HERE.

But it gets better!  MLT has also provided a free eBook on Corporate Blogging (has some different information than the webinar) which is available HERE.

There were so many questions at the end of the webinar that it will take 15 consecutive blog posts to answer them all. To see answers from see really interesting blog-related questions, visit the MLT blog over the next two weeks or so.

Many of the ideas in the webinar are against the grain of social media convention, but I think represent a realistic assessment of the role of blogging in the corporate world today.  I’d love to hear your take on what I’ve presented!

Check out this quote from Patrick CraneVP Marketing, LinkedIn

“We started the LinkedIn Blog almost three years ago when we were a 60 person company.  Now we are a 600 person company … Promoting your blog front and center is a massively efficient way to promote your business and achieve multiple nosiness objectives — launch products, hire talent, proactively address issues your company faces, tap the evangelism of your customers … Management was dubious in the beginning, but Kay Luo our PR lead pushed it through. Nobody doubts the power of our blog now. In fact they depend upon it.”

It seems like every day I see research, testimonies and case studies like this supporting the idea that blogs are not only creating new business benefits for corporations, they’re rapidly filling an information need for customers throughout the sales cycle.

Yet, many companies have been sluggish to climb on board.  At others, the intiative may be misunderstood, with only half-hearted management support. And despite the fanfare of Twitter, Facebook and their much-hyped cousins, meaningful guidance on establishing and nurturing a blog in a corporate setting has been incredibly rare.  

Clearly the time is right to re-think the role of the company blog and figure out how to unleash its potential.

If you’re a blogger, thinking about blogging, or struggling with blogging, I’d like to alert you to an exceptional opportunity.  Billy Mitchell, a frequent contributor to the {grow} community and leader of MLT Creative in Atlanta, asked me to spend some time studying the opportunities and challenges of the business blog.  The results will be presented in a free webinar and the release of an accompanying eBook Wednesday, April 14.  This unique one-hour event plows  new ground for corporate bloggers, examining questions like:

• Positioning a company blog as a point of competitive differentiation
• Dealing with company politics and blogging 
• The myth of community building
• Using your blog to “sell me softly”

I’m really proud of how this presentation developed in terms of the uniqueness of the information and the quality of the materials.   This will be a fascinating, fast-paced event jammed with new ideas. I hope you can attend this event with me and join this timely discussion about unleashing your blog. Click HERE to learn more!

illustration: colunas.globoesporte.com/

Planning on using the social web to market to B2B decision-makers?  According to just-released research from London’s Base One Group, you might consider the age of your target audience.

In a comprehensive study of 503 UK B2B purchasing decision-makers, those under 30 years of age were twice as likely to be fans of the social web and use it actively as an information-gathering tool.

The report does a nice job breaking out the information channels used by B2B decision makers by demographics and industry, but also by the stage in the decision-making process.

For example, decision-makers under 30 counted on blogs, Twitter and Facebook at the exploratory stage of a supplier search about 30% of the time compared to about 6% for those over 30 years of age.  The one exception was LinkedIn, where both age groups found equal utility.

Important implication of this –  the upcoming generation of professionals is relying heavily on new media as an information gathering tool.

Blogs rule?

Another thought-provoking nugget in the study, is that when B2B procurement decision-makers were finding potential new suppliers, Twitter and blogs were considered as a more influential source of supplier information than any other information channel, including word of mouth, seminars and industry publications.

However, the most popular sources of information across all ages remains decidedly “old school:” web searches, supplier websites, seminars, and the industrial press.  

In fact, when asked how their information gathering behavior had changed, procurement professionals cited the greatest increased use of web searches (up for  64% of respondents) and supplier websites (up for 61%). Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter experienced 6% and 10% net increases respectively, and LinkedIn saw growth of 19%. Online videos/webinars/podcasts were also a strong source of information with an increase in usage of 36%, consistent with other B2B research that has been featured on {grow}.

Base One Group commissioned the new research in association with B2B Marketing Magazine.  The study had a diverse industry profile including manufacturing, business services, financial, public administration and healthcare. About 50% of the respondents had 1,000 employees or more.

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“Why don’t I get comments on my blog?”

This is one of the most common blog-related questions I receive.  My recent post on re-thinking community engagement — especially on B2B blogs — received a lot of attention.  In addition to a vibrant comment section, I received emails, DM’s and phone calls with more ideas from the majority of folks who are meaningfully connected with companies and blogs, but don’t engage in a traditional sense.   I wanted to pass on some new  ideas on why comments may not be the best measure of “engagement,” especially for B2B companies, courtesy of the {grow} community:

Comparisons to traditional consumer behavior

Brian O’Kane and I had a lengthy Skype call on a range of topics, including the fact that most people just don’t feel comfortable commenting … on anything.

“Conventional businesses have no way of knowing how many engaged customers they have,” he said. “Think about traditional brands.  A very tiny percentage of people would actually write in to express their loyalty or displeasure with a brand yet they know they have thousands or millions of loyal consumers.  We somehow expect a higher degree of personal interaction with social media .  Because you blog or make a comment, you may expect people to comment too. But consumer behavior is still the same — most people are just happy to read and enjoy and be engaged that way. For me, I would be less concerned about the intensity of the level of engagement and more focused on the long-term business objectives.”

Engagement outside of the blog

In my post last week, I mentioned GE as a gold standard of corporate blogging but they rarely attract a reader comment.  GE’s Community Manager Megan Parker provided her take on why:

“For GE reports, we have an active and interested audience, and they tend to show us their enthusiasm or concern, as the case may be, when one of our stories really strikes a chord. We don’t have an expectation that people will comment daily or even routinely, but we do make the option to comment available every day. We’re currently fielding a survey about GEreports.com to understand what we’re doing well and not so well now that GER is about 18 months old (barely a toddler).

“We also do not look at GE Reports as just one site but more as a news and information “system” with key extensions on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, email and RSS.  So the commenting, interacting, downloading and sharing extends beyond the orbit of GER.com and out into this constellation of sites from GE.”

Emotional connection without sharing

Josh Kashorek told me he has been reading {grow} for about a year but had never commented.  “I still feel engaged with {grow} while I’m merely a listener, ” he said. “I think it boils down to a combination of authenticity, and time. I know that sounds a bit cliche but I don’t think having an authentic voice is so much about standing out as it is about allowing readers build their own connections. The more you show me who you really are the more ways I can find that we are similar and the more similarities I find the more engaged I become. For example, we both have a strong focus on business/capitalism. This gets me more engaged because many in the social media space are still talking only about puppies and unicorns.”

Technology and policy hurdles

Jeremy Victor called me to say the post had him thinking and offered a very practical reason why comments are few and far between on B2B blogs: “Studies show that more than half of company employees aren’t even allowed to access the social web from their computers at work and  even if they can, they may not be allowed, or enabled, to comment.” So you need to consider your core audience — do they even have the ability to make a comment?

I would also add that competitive considerations may prevent many people from commenting on a company’s public blog site.

The empty restaurant

Brian compared one psychological aspect of commenting to walking into an empty restaurant.  Some would be more inclined to only take a seat if other people are there. Commenting in an empty comment section might be similar. You don’t want to be the only one putting your neck out.  It’s easier to add a comment when somebody else has been there.

… and the crowded restaurant

“Another reason I don’t comment is if I see too many comments, ” Brian said.  “I saw one of your blogs had 53 comments.  I figured if I commented, nobody will ever see it.”

These interactions, and your generous comments on the post last week, have helped change the way I look at engagement, especially on corporate blogs.  Like many of you, I’ve been guilty of falling into the “it’s all about the conversation” myth without stepping back and looking at practical business realities, traditional consumer behaviors, and other ways people can feel connected to a blog without the tangible presence of engagement.

What do you think?  Does this change your view of the social media “conversation?”

Illustration: Ciudadano Poeta

Every company is getting into blogging it seems but somany people seem to be struggling with it   What would you guess the biggest problem is?

Not enough content?

Not enough budget and/or resources?

Poor writing skills?

No, not usually.  These are the obvious aspects of the care and feeding of a blog but many organizations overlook the ORGANIZATIONAL requirements to successfully execute a blogging strategy. Your company has to have the right culture to sustain a blog. 

If your company blog is floundering, keep reading. You might see something familiar!  Some signs that you company may not be built to blog:

• Corporate culture mis-match — You need to build your strategy around the realistic capabilities of your company culture.  As grandma used to say, you have to deal with what is, not what you wish for.  If your CEO simply is not going to blog, deal with it.  If he is not going to tweet, forget it.  Move on.  That doesn’t mean you can’t be successful, you just have to adjust. Your culture is your culture. Your blog isn’t going to change it.  But your blog can probably conform to your situation and still have an impact.
• Lack of executive sponsorship– On a related topic, if you’re counting on a “grassroots” effort to establish a company blog, you’re setting yourself up for problems.  To be successful in the long-term, you must have support from the top. Why? That’s the person with the purse strings and resources. That’s the person setting the strategy.  And if a blog doesn’t fit in the picture, you’re vulnerable. If you need to sell your boss on the concept, you might start here.
• Lack of executive engagement — To really build community, you need your executives to be involved in the planning of content and engagement of your audience.  Some executives will relish this opportunity. Others will hate it. If your boss is in the second group, you need to lower expectations. I’m not saying executives actually have to blog … but they have to be involved.
• Unwieldy politics. Every organization has politics.  But when everybody is trying to own a piece of your blog, watch out. If you find that Legal, HR and the janitorial staff demands to approve your blog, it might be a sign that your company is just not built to blog. Remember, the beauty of the social web is an ability to react.  Pages and pages of blogging and content guidelines might be a sign of trouble.
• Unrealistic expectations — … and her brother “impatience.”  It takes time to connect and build an audience.  If your boss is making your employment contingent on the number of blog comments you get, it might be time to leave : )

Any of this sound familiar?  What are your experiences with corporate culture and blogging success?

Illustration: toothpastefordinner.com

I’ve been invited to be a presenter on an upcoming B2B Blogging webinar (announcement forthcoming!) so I’ve been studying many company blogs that I regard as best practices.  As I moved from site to site, I noticed something surprising.  There were very few comments.  In fact, there were virtually none.  It was kind of an “a-ha moment.”

As an example, I would direct your attention to General Electric, a gold standard for corporate blogging.  Their site is a glorious mix of art, entertainment, news and inspiration. GE combines beautiful writing, graphics and video to tell their story in a compelling way. And there are no comments anywhere.

Does the fact that there is no engagement on this forum mean GE is failing?  If one of the largest and best-managed companies in the world can’t create a community through their blog, how do we hold out hope for our own clients and company blogs?

As I’ve stewed on this issue, I’ve determined that we need to re-think the whole notion of engagement on company blogs.  In fact, we need to forget about it in most cases.  There are two reasons why.

Nobody’s home

I am blessed with a vibrant, intellectual, caring community on {grow}.  It’s not unusual for me to receive more comments in a day than GE and many corporate blogs receive in a year.  I believe the distinguishing factor is that there is a face to the {grow} community. You know me as a person and once you bump around a bit, you start to know the other community members too.

Company blogs are usually written by a team of people.  There are notable benefits to this approach:

• Diversity of views and topics
• Spread out the workload
• Consistency of coverage even during vacations and attrition

So I’m not criticizing this blogging strategy.  But the downside is that there is no personality to connect to. People are unlikely to form a community around an anonymous team of people.  If you’re employing this approach, I think it’s a long-shot to expect meaningful engagement.

Example of an exception: Randy’s Journal, the personal Boeing blog of Marketing VP Randy Tinseth. Real guy. Real community.

Let’s look at the numbers

A recent study by Compendium shows that 92% of B2C companies claim that 60% or more of their blog traffic are first-time visitors and a vast majority of the time, more than 80% are newcomers every day.

The numbers for B2B are a little better with 64% of companies claiming that 60% or more of their visitors have never been there before on any given day.

In other words, visitors to a company’s blog are not a core group of loyal community members. It’s a constant churn of people who have never been there before … and may never be there again.

Re-thinking the meaning of engagement

For those who have been chanting the “it’s all about community” mantra, there are some pretty shocking — but also exciting — implications to this:

1) Except in very few cases, engagement as measured by subscriptions, return visitors and comments may not be a realistic or desirable goal for your company blog.

2) The data show that corporate blogs act as superb targets for search engines. We already knew that but perhaps it’s time to codify that and respond with an appropriate social media sales strategy. You probably have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of strangers buzzing by your blog every day. Stop trying to engage them.  Just get them to pause.

3) The B2B data show that prospects are almost twice as likely to stick around a B2B blog than a B2C blog. This is great news for the B2B marketer. The B2B sales cycle is long and buyers need lots of information to make decisions. While visitors may not be engaging, they do seem to be reading and coming back for more.

If you’ve made your living touting the engagement benefits of corporate blogging, you’re probably either reaching for your oxygen mask or your flame-thrower.  In any event, I’d like to hear from you in the comment section. What do you think of this re-framing of the objectives of a corporate blog?