Business-to-Business Key Findings – Jan/Feb 2011

Who Uses Twitter		Complaints About Co-Workers
Online Bill Pay		Formula for a Great Corporate Blog
Employer Wellness Programs		B2B Marketing Predictions for 2011
Healthcare and the Aging Workplace

Who Uses Twitter

A recent Pew Research survey shows that 8% of online adults use Twitter, with 2% using it on a typical day. Some 74% of American adults are Internet users, which means that 6% of all American adults use Twitter.

Some of the groups notable for their relatively high levels of Twitter use include:

• Young adults: Internet users ages 18-29 are significantly more likely to use Twitter (14%) than are those ages 30-49 (7%); ages 50-64 (6%); and ages 65+ (4%).
• African-Americans and Latinos: Hispanics (18%) and African Americans (13%) are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are White internet users (5%).
• Urbanites: Urban residents (11%) are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers (5%). Some 8% of suburban dwellers use Twitter.

Online Bill Pay

So far, only a minority of Americans receive all of their household bills online. Online billing is most popular with the age group of 18-24-year-olds (45%). It is catching on as a standard practice with other age groups including 42% of 25-34-year-olds; 32% of 30-44-year-olds; 25% of 45-54-year-olds and 21% of those aged 55 and older.

One-third of Americans (32%) say they are in favor of companies automatically ceasing to send paper bills once they have viewed or paid a bill online, while 29% are neutral about this, and 39% are against it.

Employer Wellness Programs

Despite spending more on employee wellness programs in 2010, only 37% of U.S. employers say they measured their program’s effectiveness, according to Buck Consultants. Employers spent 35% more – about $220 – on each employee who participated in a wellness program in 2010 compared to 2009. Eleven percent of U.S. respondents spent more than $500 per employee per year on wellness incentive rewards, with the largest rewards reported at $3,000 per employee.

Employers’ say their goals for wellness programs are to reduce the cost of providing health care, improve worker productivity and reduce absenteeism. Of the 40% of U.S. employers who offered a program, 45% reported success in slowing health care cost increases, with a typical reduction of two to five percentage points per year.

Healthcare and the Aging Workplace

Each day during 2012, approximately 10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65 years old. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the number of older employees in the workforce will increase by at least 80% from 2010 to 2016. Aging adults typically face health issues like multiple chronic conditions, stress and depression, all of which can impact work performance and increase employer healthcare costs. In fact, the healthcare costs for someone 65 years old are typically about four times greater than those for a 40-year-old person.

Complaints about Co-Workers

Only 13% of workers say they do not come across any pet peeves with their cohorts during the workday. The complaints they do have are detailed in the chart below.

While more than one-quarter choose not to deal with the situation, some 29% speak with the offending party to try and resolve the issues; 10% vent to a co-worker; 9% go to the boss or supervisor; and 1% leave an anonymous note.

Workers’ Complaints About Their Co-Workers’ Habits, 2010

The poor time management category is further broken down into those who complain about co-workers who take long breaks for lunch to smoke or surf online (22%); abuse sick days (11%), host meetings without structure or an agenda (11%), hold meetings that start late or run over (10%), are distracted by using their handheld mobile device (10%), and miss deadlines (9%).

Formula for a Great Corporate Blog

A recent survey of Fortune 1,000 companies shows that nearly one-quarter had a corporate blog. The blog was most often written by the marketing department, followed by a social media or blog specialist. When asked what makes a blog great, respondents said that having an engaged community is by far the most important attribute. Engagement is defined as blog posts which receive comments and evoke a lively discussion as opposed to just pushing content onto readers. The chart below shows other highly rated traits.

Attributes that Make a Great Corporate Blog According to CMOs at U.S. Fortune 1,000 Companies, December 2010

B2B Marketing Predictions for 2011

According to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog, these are the top business-to-business predictions for the upcoming year:

• Marketing automation and automated lead nurturing will become a foundational B2B marketing activity as we are expected to accelerate deals through our funnels.
• Customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention re-emerge as key metrics B2B marketers will use to measure the performance of their holistic marketing programs.
• Attribution modeling will become a hot topic as digital marketers begin to understand and recognize the real cost of  the “last click” problem where results of marketing activities are tied to the last tactic a lead touched.
• Marketing and sales alignment continues to be the #1 issue impeding marketing’s ability to be perceived as a major driver of B2B business value.
• The quality versus quantity of leads debate will rage on. (Hint: you have to do both).
• The ROI of social media programs will continue to be challenged by some executives. Too many marketers and business executives still question the value of social media (mostly in private), while the rest of us catch on to what works.
• Inbound marketing spend will grab more share of the marketing budget but will stay far from a majority in most B2B companies.
• The shortage of digital marketing talent will create a seller’s market for online, search and social marketers.
• Display media experiences a resurgence as advanced targeting, re-targeting and behavioral methods allow marketers to demonstrate real value in display.
• The brand is back, baby! We will remember that results improve when we balance awareness activity on top of effective consideration techniques and pay-for-performance demand generation.
• Colleagues and managers will start to treat their fellow employees with a little more respect as the economy turns around. We will re-discover that happy employees create loyal and satisfied customers who in turn improve profit margins.
• From the fading influence of newspapers for world news to newsletters for company news, traditional communication including email will have a tough time competing with the amazing rise of mobile devices usage for web surfing, texting and micro-blogging for consumer attention.
• The iPad and possibly other tablets will start to make laptops look soooo 2000-singles as more and more move 100% of their digital work and personal lives to these devices.

Source: B2B Marketing Insider by Michael Brenner

Bullets

• Some 88% of employers offer financial education related to retirement. Only 28% offer basic financial education programs focusing on budgeting, debt reduction and credit management.
• Most customers of credit unions (57%) say they trust their financial institution, compared to 36% of big bank customers who trust their financial institutions. This may help explain why 10% of big bank customers switched to a credit union in 2009.
• People who read email via their mobile device or smartphone spend 15% more time reading email than do those who read on a personal computer.

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