Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

June 5, 2010 • 3:14 pm 0

Social Media, Program or Vehicle for B2B?

Social media is only one way to connect to customer and should be treated as a vehicle, not a program.  There, I said it.  I know it is heresy, but it is the truth.

I was talking with a lot of colleagues and friends in the 30 something range and found that social media for them was more effort than it produced.  They were too busy to tweet.  They didn’t get much value from Facebook other than keeping up with a small group of friends they couldn’t see all the time.  The rest of the time Facebook was annoying and they didn’t frequent it, and now the privacy issues made it even less desireable.  LinkedIn was mostly a way to maintain a contact database with professional colleagues.  YouTube was entertainment.  What they did use religiously was email and texting.  Two things I got out of this were:

1) These 30 somethings were successful professionals with decision make authority and spending capacity both personally and professionally.  Social media has only limited value to them.

2) Social media was hype and comprised only a portion of their communication and social time.  It did not fundamentally change the way they were communicating with friends and colleagues.

One of the things I see companies and marketers do when they get the social media bug is to approach social media as a separate program.  This really misses the point.  Marketers have a multitude of communication vehicles available and instead of thinking about the best way to converse with customers, they think about what is the best new shiny method they can use and focus all their energy there.  Teams are even split by vehicle (social media, email, search, web, online display, etc) making marketers experts in a narrow band of communication.  What’s the point in that?  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be thought of as a great marketer building relationships and business.  I don’t want to be known only for my ability to communicate in 140 characters.

We all know the social media avenues available to us so why over analyze at this point.  Most of us have used them personally and its either become our sole means of touching the world or, on the other hand, we are burnt out or driven out by the social media outlets and the ‘why did I friend this person?’.  In many ways, social media just is and we don’t think about it much anymore.  This is where marketing needs to be.  We shouldn’t think about social media anymore, we should just use it.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Who are my customers?
  • How do my customers learn about what I provide?
  • Where do my customers go to learn about what I provide?
  • What vehicle provides the best venue to show my value?
  • What level of trust do my customers have with my product and brand?

Notice that there is not one mention of social media or any other marketing vehicle.  It is all about how to market your company and product the best way to get people interested and to purchase.  Social media may just be that venue either as a leading component, an aspect, or not at all.  It may also depend on the research and decision cycle of the customer for your product.  The key is how you position.

The way to make social media work is through discipline and integration with our existing communication vehicles.  Treating it as its own separate effort will not get you the biggest benefits and return on investment and effort you could.  You need a varied tool kit for marketing that includes social media in it.  It provides lift, it doesn’t provide all.

Filed under: b2b, marketing/advertising, social media, social media marketing, , , ,

October 1, 2009 • 12:00 am 0

Credibility Of Your Blog

Browsing through my Google reader for posts on everything on web analytics, social media, and business intelligence, it dawned on me the filtering process I go through before I click a link. or if I do click, if I even read the post.  It got me thinking about blog credibility and how it can and cannot work for you.  First, it is important to see the context of my blog reading.  I read blogs to educate myself on how to take things to the next level.  That said, I filter based on one simple observation: business or professional.

If I am looking for information on how to extend the value of web analytics, take a strategic approach with social media, or better design and implement business intelligence solutions I put more credibility in the insight from practitioners than a company.  So, when I see URLs that are from known businesses or have a business name in them, I don’t click through.  If there is ambiguity and I click through and get to a businesses blog, I don’t read the article.

To be fair, when I’m at the stage that I would like to find a service provider or interact with or hear comments from  other professionals using solutions and services I want to purchase or am using, then blogs from businesses have value and credibility for me.  However, I am already familiar with the brand/provider and directly visit the website and blog.

This goes back to the debate on integrating your blogs with your business websites or having them stand on their own.  I flip flop on this issue as there is huge SEO benefit from blog and website integration, but going back to my filtering behavior, it can have an unintended affect of not getting the most out of your thought leadership and branding effort.  Establishing a blog and determining how you want to implement it is highly tied to what you are trying to accomplish and how that fits into the behavior and needs or your audience.

Given what you want to accomplish will determine how you utilize blogging in your marketing tactics.

Goal:  Thought leadership

The primary use of blogs, this offers challenges.  As I’ve described in my own blog filtering behavior, assessing expertise and leadership is done in two stages: (1) general education (2) vendor assessment.  The issue I see is that blogs on corporate sites try to take on a conversational tone and pretend to be non-selling, but this isn’t really accomplished.  Having the brand attached brings out cynicism in the reader.  Now, if you have subject matter expertise in your workforce, posting on community networks or through non-branded blog sites may offer a less “sell” type of approach.  Take networks like SocialMediaToday, here you have venues where subject matter experts in leading agencies, marketing organizations, and boutique services organizations provide relevant and thought provoking points of view.  Most recognize the underlying point of blogging is to generate buzz and build personal or business brand.  But, there is a subtlety here.  Blogger personalities become recognized and through little more than a click you get the connection.  At the end of the day you spread a perspective shaping the community’s thought without the stigma of selling.  The goal is to see how the market is aligned to your position and are your subject matter experts generating relationships that can lead to higher consideration of your point of view and company.

Goal:  Conversion

In this scenario corporate blogs are kings.  You don’t want to disassociate and can approach posts similarly to how you approach white paper development or press releases.  On your site, it is all about you and while the tone can be conversational, putting a sales spin on is not unexpected and is actually required.  Trying to be too soft in conversations won’t lend to conversion.  You need to not only re-establish thought leadership but provide prospective customers with a purpose of considering your products and services or actually clicking through to a sale.  The perspective that social media should be a party, on your website, forget it.  That isn’t to say that the marketing fluff you used in press releases for SEO and positioning statements for solution descriptions should be used.  The point is to still keep posts informative, relevant, and convince customers that you are their best choice at a more detailed and credible perspective.  Blogs for conversion are all about lifting sales either directly through e-commerce activities or priming the marketing funnel with more qualified leads.

Goal:  Customer Relationships

Similar to conversion, stay on relevant topics and be supportive of the after sale relationship.  Position case studies in posts to describe how to get the most out of your solutions.  Create interactive discussions for problem solving or new solution ideas.  Bring forth ideas to generate interest in new areas you may be moving into.  Leverage your blog in a forum format and become a member of your customer’s team.  This is where your focus is on engagement to improve satisfaction, likeliness to purchase from you again, and generate evangelists and advocacy in the market.

Filed under: b2b, blogging, customer relationship, social media, social media marketing

September 22, 2009 • 1:41 am 0

There Is Revenue in Social Media

social media revenueRight now the value of a social network is tied to ad dollars.  Facebook allows you to place ads.  LinkedIn charges for job postings.  Blogs have ad text and banners.  Ad dollars is what is making social media go round.  The notion that social media is about the party is no longer the case.  It may not be as obvious or it may be very obvious, but Twitter, Facebook pages, LinkedIn contacts, and blogs all have agendas and it is about making money in some shape or form.  On the internet, free to the user has generally been the norm.  I’m not convinced it has to be.

One of the first social media venues was online games.  In 2007, online gaming reached $8.6B.  People pay monthly fees to access, entertain themselves, and interact with others.  They derive value from the experience and equate that with what is in their wallet.  It is one of the biggest growth areas on the internet. Another interactive experience that in some ways is also social is e-learning.  Here, the market hit $17.5B during 2007 in the US alone.   By the way, B2B companies are already tapping into this with their training offerings.  Contrast these markets with social networks like Facebook that is free and a membership the size of the US, and you realize the revenue potential and loss.  Granted, global internet advertising had reached $45B in 2007 according to the Kelsey Group.  So it is understandable that getting a piece of the internet advertising pie seems easier and more appealing.  Google built an empire on this.  Combine that with the fact that the internet is ‘free’ to the user and you know how to follow the money trail. I say, this is short sighted.  The ROI for ad spend will be less than what you can get from a direct revenue model.  The other aspect, you aren’t Google and your business model is about selling your products, not advertising another company’s offerings.

The value in social media for the user is not unlike that of online gaming or e-learning.  There is opportunity to be had by putting a dollar figure on the experience.  Social Networks are micro communities and associations that provide a value.  There is a place for these communities to be fee based and to continue to be true to the experience.  Other’s have implemented a for fee experience and are successful:  Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek.  Associations give access to their members and communities as part of the annual membership fee.  This has allowed these venues to maintain integrity and continue to provide information and experiences to subscribers.

B2B is looking for ways to generate value and revenue from social media.  Simply looking at it in terms of the Marketing Funnel and lead conversion is only a part of the potential.  Leveraging the interactive and informational quality of an experience and you have the potential to have direct revenue generation.  There is also the opportunity for new forms of revenue generation evolved from information service providers like LexisNexis and Elsevier.  They sell full or limited access to high value content and community networks.  Services may aggregate memberships in trade associations and sell full or limited access to online forums and content.  Meeting services can act as conduits to extend trade show seminars and key notes into virtual experiences people pay to access.  In each of these 3rd party offerings companies derive direct revenue while building credibility and relationships.  Afterall, customers pay to attend events, if there is enough value, they’ll pay for access.

B2B needs to start thinking out of the box in tying social media to direct revenue generation.  Social media experiences have value in more ways than an advertising vehicle.  With the right value proposition, customers will pay for access.  It is all in how you create and package it.  Now that is marketing!

Filed under: b2b, CMO seat, networking, social media, , , ,

September 7, 2009 • 10:47 pm 7

B2B Social Media: Got Your Toe Wet, Now It’s Time to Swim

You tweet, blog, have a Facebook page, and created a Ning community.  That’s great.  Nice first step.  Now what?

The great thing about social media is that the barrier to entry is not the platform any longer.  You have the ability to test drive ideas within or outside your online current environment before committing. That just didn’t exist as you built your web presence in the past.  In some cases you can shift existing resources as you phase out old interactive practices, although I wouldn’t bank on this as social media is more content intensive and requires consistent monitoring and responding to increase and maintain value. To take your interactive customer experience to the next level, it will require pulling the learnings you’ve had with Twitter, blogs, social networks, and social bookmarking and begin to sector out those that truly worked to drive sales, reduce churn, and contributed to market influence and leadership.

Many times, we’ve created our social media experience parallel to our overall web strategy.  Marketing campaigns still drive traffic to product and solution offers in landing pages or on a website, or they specifically focus on growing a community.  The website is still a place to become educated about the company, products and solutions, and there may be a link to a social network that has blogs and discussions.  The problem is that your website strategy and your social media strategy now need to become integrated.  You’ve built your communities, now what do you want out of them?  You need to drive qualified leads and incorporate successful practices into an integrated interactive strategy.  Remove the website and social media silo.

Here’s how:

Content Conversion: A key staple of web content and marketing content overall is the white paper and case study.  Marketers covet this content and leverage it as a call to action in direct marketing campaigns.  Typically in PDF format users are required to register to download.  It is used so much because it works well to get qualified leads into the funnel.  However, the missing link is the SEO factor.  In PDF format you don’t have the keyword rich content to attract paid and natural search visitation.  You don’t have the ability to build upon SEO through conversations, linking and authority.  It is time to open up the white paper and case study to a blog format leveraging the reach you get with social media at the same time continuing to require registration to comment, bookmark, or RSS subscription on the content.

Trackbacks: Creating thought leadership and product/solution leadership has always been tightly controlled on our websites.  It is all about what we want you to know.  We’ll through in an industry analyst study that showcases our solution or our perspective to create credibility and plop a sidebar banner in to get to the content.  Although, the content is usually a PDF contained in our CMS system.  There are a number of customer networks and media/analyst networks that have blogs and discussions on our business.  We even have created our own.  It is time to integrate those discussions into our website content through trackbacks.  This allows page content to stay fresh maintaining and improving SEO over time as well as allowing forums for customers researching more avenues to learn about what we have to offer.

Social Bookmarking: Leverage social bookmarking within your website to allow visitors to bring people to your website.  This will do a couple of things.  First, if you want people to bookmark you’ll be forced to produce highly relevant and valuable content on your site moving past the online brochure.  Second, allowing your content to go viral will expand your reach.

Content Commenting: Let people comment or create discussions.  Having customers provide ratings or feedback can be good in helping customers make decisions.  Even if a comment is not glowing but is constructive, it may provide insight for customers to consider when choosing.  You may want to populate comments from support or customer forums that show how the solution solved a problem or configurations necessary for specific customer environments.  Then, open it up to visitors to ask questions or drill into the forum discussions.  This is a cornerstone in online retail and is a proven factor driving conversion.

Forums: Normally a behind the scenes venue in your customer portal or industry networks, take that same venue and apply it in your website experience.  Allow visitors to discussion their needs for a solution and what they are experiencing in their business.  Rather than keeping this separate, by integrating into your website experience it encourages engagement connection with you, your customers, and other prospects.  It could be a similar format as LinkedIn groups or Twitter Twibes.

The point of all this is that stand alone widgets, networks, and branded social media venues in the long run won’t serve your business well.  An integrated and seamless approach will add value to your website experience and improve customer conversion by linking to your marketing funnel strategies.

Filed under: b2b, customer relationship, sales 2.0, social media, social media marketing, , , , , , , ,

September 2, 2009 • 1:17 am 0

B2B Social Media: The Silent Majority Opportunity

B2B Customer Silent MajorityThere is a huge silent majority out there.  Are you speaking to them?  I think you should.

This has been an issue with social media in B2B that I keep coming back to.  There are those of us that produce content, those that comment, those that share, and those that just are there on the fringe – the silent majority.  As marketers, free press (engagement) is typically measured more in actions and thus the measure of social media success.  But, what has me thinking is, are those that are most vocal and interactive really representative of my market or who I want to convert?  I know that they have influence by their ability to advocate the brand and spread my message.  Though, it makes me wonder if my message is really being shared in the manner that I would intend.  Ah, the loss of control.

But, I digress…

There is a part of me that thinks social media and how we measure effectiveness may be a bit flawed.  Taking a step back and looking at the B2B decision process, social media is not proving to be a big conversion component at the bottom of the funnel.  It is really a thought leadership component.  As such, while I certainly want to engage those visiting say in a blog or community, I think that the silent majority may actually be my real customer.  I’m not even determining how I’m influencing them or who they are in how social media effectiveness is measured today.

Here’s why I care about the silent majority.  They are the ones that are probably in a serious research phase as they assess their business and ways to improve it.  They are the ones that don’t have other motives outside of becoming more knowledgeable.  It may not be in their best interest to publicly communicate their opinions or questions as it could expose their strategy to competitors, thus they are closer to considering next steps.  They share content rarely, but when they do it is highly relevant to their purpose.  I think the silent majority is actually the closest to being converted, and we don’t even track them well.

Initial thoughts are that we should look at members/subscribers and content sharers that are active in visitation but less so in direct engagement – taking a bottom up analysis rather than top down.  This may point towards more qualified leads to engage in direct marketing activities and other traditional conversion tactics.  We might want to look overall at our social media and begin to track metrics that point towards research behavior that resembles behavior of those ready to engage in the sales process in order to determine potential effect on marketing conversion.  Thus, giving a window on our social media’s effect on conversion.

What do you think?  What is your strategy for the silent majority?

Filed under: b2b, customer relationship, sales 2.0, social media marketing, , , , ,

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