As Christmas is quickly approaching, you always tend to hear the phrase “It is better to give than to receive.” This cannot be more true for the Canyon family. This year, instead of doing the typical white elephant gift exchange, we decided to give back to the community. Each Canyonite bought a gift to donate to Toys For Tots. Did you know approximately 13 million American children live in poverty today?

Beyond giving back to the community, Canyon also likes to help Valley charities throughout the year. For a few years, we have been helping St. Joseph the Worker, an organization that assists homeless, low-income and other disadvantaged individuals with their efforts to become self-sufficient through permanent, full-time employment, with its marketing and communications efforts. Rather than just giving a homeless person money, St. Joseph the Worker helps them find a job and gets them off the streets by teaching them life skills.

If your office is looking to do something different this holiday season, just remember that it is truly better to give than receive.

So the question is…what are you doing this holiday season to give back?

Webinars provide a convenient, fast and cost-effective way for B2B marketers to reach prospective customers. So you might be wondering, what is the best way to coordinate and execute your own webinar series?

It may seem daunting at first, but it’s not! We’re currently working on a series of webinars for Loop Demand Gen, and we have found GoToWebinar® to be the most user-friendly site for our web events.

With GoToWebinar, you can set up your presentations online, send e-mail communications to drive attendance, handle registration, and present and engage with the audience live—all under one roof. The only thing you need to do is put together the presentation, the rest is automated. GoToWebinar does a great job of simplifying the process. It ensures that your audience receives e-mail reminders so no attendees slip through the cracks.

So what happens after the webinar? Archive your webinars online so that others can download and view the presentations. This will increase the power of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) once web crawlers locate content.

Go ahead and take a stab at it, I think you will be pleasantly surprised!

Networking through social events, social media sites and business associations is key to developing and maintaining business relationships.

Last week, the Arizona Technology Council and Business Marketing Association (BMA) joined forces to put on the Marketing Technology Summit in Phoenix. We participated in this event with our strategic partner, Loop Demand Gen.

This regional, summit-style event allowed Loop to network with marketing professionals in the tech industry, and learn more about their pain points. In comparison to a larger, all-out national tradeshow, the Marketing Technology Summit provided an inexpensive alternative and enabled us to showcase Loop’s services to a very targeted niche audience. Plus, we learned a thing or two by talking face-to-face with the attendees. There’s certainly demand for qualifying, nurturing, scoring and developing high-quality business leads.

Be sure to look out for the 2010 Marketing Technology Summit next year and remember, you can never network enough and you certainly never stop learning.

What trends have you noticed when attending networking events?

Focus groups are not a new topic for the b2b Fishbowl by any means—our Think Tank recently posted about this and other ways to uncover qualitative information. The fact is: the information you gather from a focus group is only as good as the individuals that are recruited. You can’t just recruit warm bodies to increase focus group attendance.

photo courtesy of ihtatho http://www.flickr.com/photos/ihtatho/627226315/

I have conducted many focus group recruitment campaigns for various b2b clients at Canyon. When taking on a new focus group recruitment campaign, I constantly remind myself that recruiting qualified individuals is crucial for success. The only way to get accurate, valuable input is to recruit the person that would be most familiar with the product/service.

Recruitment 101:

• Explain to the participant how they will benefit
• Attending a focus group should never be about incentives, but rather about what a person can learn and how they can contribute
• Be able to explain what a participant will learn by attending
• A participant will be providing valuable input on ways to improve customer service, products, services and marketing campaigns
• Play up to their ego and remind them that they will have an affect on the strategy behind a marketing program
• Assume the contact is NOT qualified for the focus group until they meet the requirements on the qualifying screener
• Last but not least, be honest!

If you want to learn more about focus groups and market research, download the “Find New Prospects with Market Research” white paper from our partners at Loop Demand Gen.

Happy recruiting!