We’re analyzing the results of our recent social media survey as we prepare for this month’s series of ITSMA briefings on social media. Working with our sponsor, social media consultancy Digital Influence Group, we’ll focus on two major themes: integrating social media with your overall marketing strategy and “activating” your marketing content with buyers and C-level executives through social media. We feel passionately about these two issues because we think there’s a danger of creating content-poor social media silos in our marketing organizations.

Bev Burgess, longtime authority on services marketing and the former managing director of ITSMA Europe, with her co-author Laurie Young who teaches on the executive education programme at Wharton, ask a compelling question: Why don’t we apply the same level of effort and rigor in developing services as we do to products?

Last month, we urged you to start thinking about transforming your marketing organization. This month, we wrote a report outlining the three steps in this transformation in detail. One of the elements of the transformation is lead management. If we’re going to transform marketing into a content engine, we need to support it with an automated, closed-loop process for tracking where all that content goes.

Our research shows that marketers are beginning to tackle some of the key areas of transformation in 2010.

Marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue are at an all-time low. We can’t spend another year doing more with less. We can’t continue waiting for good times to return so that we can go back to what we used to do. If marketing is to maintain relevance, we must transform. Read on to download a free PDF summary of the research and the strategic changes you need to make in 2010.

There is only one objective in social media and it is common across all companies—even across the infamous divide between B2B and B2C: Create learning networks.

Not only is developing new and more targeted thought leadership one of marketers’ top priorities for 2010, but it is also becoming more important to their marketing strategy.

We’re prepared to bet on the growth of these five trends in 2010. We’ll be discussing these and other ideas at our online briefing on January 26, New Routes to Marketing Innovation: ITSMA’s 2010 State of the Profession Address.

The goal of the effort was simple: Win bigger deals more often by focusing on the most important opportunities and by building longer-term relationships with a target group of 30–40 companies.

Looking back on services revenues for the past decade, we see a mirror image of the trends that occurred in the marketing function: a drastic drop at the beginning of the decade, followed by a gradual – though limited – recovery through 2006.

To fulfill an ever-increasing demand for marketing content, you need a process. The magazine publishing process is a good model because relevance to readers is the primary measure of its success.

In ITSMA’s recent survey, Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact, we found that marketing and sales not only don’t share the same metrics, they don’t even understand each other’s goals and metrics. We have an answer for that: shared leadership.

In terms of budget priorities in 2010, our recent ‘Market Pulse’ survey found some big winners and some big losers. Marketers who come out ahead will be those who go against the grain and invest in areas where their competitors aren’t investing. Here are some opportunities.

Despite a difficult economy, IT buyers are focused on innovation and globalization, according to ITSMA’s 2009 How Customers Choose Survey. Marketers need to be ready with trend- and idea-based thought leadership to stand apart from competitors when the recovery begins.

How should marketers position themselves for the recovery? We offered five imperatives for marketing during our Annual Marketing Conference in Boston, October 27-28.

When Lawson, an enterprise software company, was considering making major changes to its support offerings in 2007, the company’s executives knew they could not afford to make decisions based on what competitors were doing or on anecdotal evidence from customers and employees. Lawson needed reliable, objective research and a method for converting that research into insight and action.

We often hear about how we should innovate our way out of a recession. Well, the entrants in this year’s ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards proved it. Despite the rotten economy, we had more entries in 2009 than ever before. And the quality of the entries was excellent, proving that marketers are finding ways to deliver value in lean times. We have prepared case studies of our winners that ooze best practices.

As customers begin discussing your company more online, you need to build your digital reputation. To engage customers in discussion and gain their loyalty, you need more than a profit motive. Marketers need to help their companies articulate their moral purpose. Doing so will improve your company’s reputation and make your marketing more relevant and successful, says Larry Weber, chairman and CEO of W2 Group.

We need a new name for thought leadership: idea marketing. This term describes what we should be doing with thought leadership: selling a point of view – rather than a product or service – that educates the reader and builds a relationship. We also need a better source for ideas than marketing.

We have to take some responsibility for salespeople not making the transition to “consultative selling.” It’s not a DNA thing; it’s an information thing. We need to give salespeople the information they need to create the consultative relationship. We need to help salespeople create an information dependency among customers.

“Solutions” may be a hated buzzword, but ITSMA research shows that more than ever, customers want real solutions to their business problems. We at ITSMA have been working with our Solutions Council for more than a year to develop a useful framework for helping companies understand how to organize themselves to deliver true solutions more effectively.

How often have you seen salespeople take your carefully developed marketing materials and massacre them in PowerPoint? Xerox dealt with this problem by creating a sales enablement tool that helps salespeople learn about their customers’ business issues while also maintaining a more consistent brand image.

Many marketers treat research like a fragile object. They hand it over to customers virtually untouched, without taking the opportunity to demonstrate their companies’ powers of thinking and analysis. That’s not how IBM handles research. It wrestles the data to exhaustion and puts it into practice through programs such as the Innovation Jam.

As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how and why we gather information from prospects. Social media is proving to be a valuable lead generator, but not if we keep trying to pull prospects’ mothers’ maiden names out of them every time they come to our Websites.

Eight out of 10 ITSMA member companies say that they are responding to the current economic uncertainty with this action: modifying value propositions. But this quest is complicated by the long sales cycle in B2B. Indeed, the sales cycle is so long that marketers need three different types of value propositions to span the various stages of the buying process.