Had the good fortune this week to attend the Fall Invitational held on behalf of the Ingram Micro VentureTech Network, since I will be handling a project for them over the coming months.

Sat in on a great session about the value of social media for high-tech channel companies and wanted to share a couple of the comments made during the session held by Matt Singley, senior director of social media strategy for M80, a firm that counts the likes of Microsoft as its clients. It is interesting to note that Singley is a former Ingram Micro VAR, so he “gets” the channel.

I’m not going to define social media, because I have already written about it several times in this very blog at these links (“Creating Channel Social Business Networks is Not a Trivial Investment” and “How Tweet It Is, Etc.”) But here are some of the observations I found most interesting:

• Among 100 Top companies, the brands that were MOST engaged with social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn recorded average growth of 18 percent over the past year while those that were LEAST engaged saw sales decline by about 6 percent.
• The clickthrough rate for paid search advertising increases by at least 50 percent for brands that engage in social media activities.
• Think less about B2B and more about B2P. After all, business is about relationships between people.
• It is not enough to listen anymore.
• If you’re going to blog, do it at least one to two times a week. (Ouch, I feel this one!) If you use Facebook, visit at least three to five times; if you’re going to tweet on Twitter, you need to do so at least three times a day.
• Remember ethics: If you are writing something on behalf of your company, so say. You need to disclosure context for your point of view. Another point: The Federal Trade Commission is going to start watching social media for unauthorized disclosures of corporate information come Dec. 1, 2009. So be careful that you’re not breaking any non-disclosure agreements when you write about something.

You can  download Matt’s VTN presentation at this link.

AND I highly recommend following Matt on Twitter (@mattsingley) or visiting his Web site (http://www.mattsingley.com/).

It being almost Halloween, Hewlett-Packard partners are weighing the latest changes to the PartnerONE program (which is updated pretty much on an annual basis). They’re really not so scary, that is unless you’re an HP partner that sells best-of-breed products that compete with some of HP’s individual product offerings.

That’s because with its latest changes, HP is continuing to emphasis the concept that Elite designations should be granted not on the basis of a partner’s ability to sell products, but on the basis of their ability to sell solutions. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, it just forces a change not only in the partner’s mindset but also in the way that channel account managers support said partner. Unfortunately, the latter still doesn’t always happen, because internally, vendors still tend to reward their field personnel based on product quotas. Understandable, but flawed.

Just a couple of examples. In order to be called a “Virtualization Elite” partner, you need to support BladeSystem Server and Storage products AND Virtualization AND (now) products from Lefthand Networks. Eventually, ProCurve networkings skills will be required to be “Data Center Elite.” (A clear attempt to unseat Cisco’s dominance.)

HP’s program has always been one of the forerunners in the high-tech industry. The fact that its partners are being rewarded more for their support of an architecture rather than a particular product is something that other vendors should study closely. But one area where I think that every vendor continues to miss the boat is in understanding the component of a given solution — business consulting insight, implement and support services, applications, bandwidth, etc. — that won’t necessarily generate tangible product margin for them directly. The more your team can encourage partners to continue evolving their own unique part of the solution — their point of differentiation from every other partner on the planet — the better the chances that they will drag more of your product along the way.

Think about it.

For a complete run-down on the changes to PartnerONE, here’s TechTarget’s analysis.

When was the last time your channels team reconsidered its product demonstration policy? Fact is, talking about solutions and their benefits as a theory with is one thing. Showing that they work in the field is another matter entirely. And as channel managers, you need to help your partners manage this process more effectively.

That’s the basis for a new solutions demonstration programs that’s being piloted by the enterprise mobility solutions channels team at Motorola. This blog I wrote for TechTarget details what’s entailed, and what Motorola hopes to achieve.

So, this program is only in pilot, but it suggest that some of the larger vendors out there — those developing so-called partner ecosystems to help push solutions using their products — might want to rethink how they allocate demonstration equipment. People want to use these things, in context, and I think that is probably especially true of mobile solutions.

Alternatively, it suggests channel management program teams need to get smarter about solution center buildouts on a regional basis.