Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

April 15, 2009 • 7:27 am 3

Time to Aggregate Social Media

Let’s take a step back.  We are into the second quarter of 2009 and witnessing some of the highest adoption of social media tools ever.  For companies, it is time to start looking if social media is panning out like expected.  This could be a blog post on metrics and results, but I’m thinking that it may be time to look at how easy it is to manage social media across the vast number of tools and properties.  After all, isn’t part of marketing effectiveness efficiency?

Even in my own small and limited experience I have management problems.  There are a variety of tools and properties I utilize to connect with you: blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog communities, and a variety of analytic tools to track progress.  To be honest, it is a lot of work to manage all these tools.  No single venue provides everything and each offers a different twist on reaching and connecting with others.  The best way for me to manage everything is a big toolbar folder on my browser where I keep bookmarks for all the social media tools and communities I participate in.  Then I have other ways to manage content and connections within each community. In addition, I’m reusing content across multiple platforms duplicating steps.

This is all very inefficient.

Back in the day (wasn’t that only 3 years ago?) the best marketing solution out there was the CRM system.  Today that solution seems ancient and out dated.  Funny that a solution that is all about managing customer relationships is now almost a dinosaur in our social media marketing world.  Regardless, what is great about our CRM systems is that it can be a one stop shop for our customers lists, campaign activities, communication platform, and analytics platform.  In addition, it allows marketers to share program and campaign assets, communications and results with each other.  The biggest frustration is that after standardizing on CRM, I now have little use for it other than traditional marketing which is becoming less and less.  CRM has turned into more of a storage site than an solution.

However, I don’t think CRM is dead.  I think it offers a starting point to aggregate our social media marketing efforts.  Where it created efficiency in process, cataloguing, and communication, it can do the same to streamline our social media activities.  Salesforce.com has already integrated Twitter into its customer service platform.  Having the same ability to push blogs, microblogs, and participate in community discussions and forums would be a great next step.  Having the ability to also post interactive content like presentations and podcasts from a single point would also be better than having to go to YouTube, iTunes, and Slideshare as well as posting to my own website and corporate social network.

Maybe the answer isn’t completely held within the realm of CRM, but as a mainstay of marking, it certainly is a great starting point to help marketers participate socially with customers effectively and efficiently.  If it could consolidate participation and management of social media, reduction in redundancy and improvement in consolidated analytics would greatly improve ROI.

Filed under: b2b, customer relationship, marketing operations, marketing technology, social media, , , , , , , ,

March 25, 2009 • 1:28 pm 1

B2B Social Media is Not One-Size-Fits-All Part 1

Social media opens up a wide array of possibilities for marketers as well as cost savings.  However, how or if it is used for marketing will look entirely different depending on the company, industry, and products and solutions sold.  Social media marketing is not “one-size-fits-all”.

The hype of late has really told the story of social media marketing within the consumer arena.  The picture is quite different in business-to-business.  When Forrester talks about 50% of marketers increasing their spend in social media, take out business-to-consumer and you get a very different perspective.  Supporting this, agencies see the big push in social media spending is really still from consumer focused companies.

In a recent Q&A session on LinkedIn, I asked marketers what percentage of marketing spend was for social media marketing and what that number was last year.  So, even if everyone said they were increasing spend, this could provide a perspective on how committed they were.  One reply provided an article from from eMarketer and included a graphic on social network advertising spend.  To my surprise, the biggest increase of spend was not this year (2009) 17% but last year (2008) 46%. No wonder all the hype over the past year.

But, this still doesn’t show what is happening in B2B.  That came from responses from marketing and business development.  The B2B social media marketing spend answer: no marketing spend.  None. Zero. However, that doesn’t mean that no effort is spent on social media marketing.  Dani Lee, Director of Marketing at Copanion says, “(This) is partly due to the fact that our B2B SMB target audience has low adoption of social networking. However, from a time perspective, we definitely spend more time on social networking this year compared to almost no time last year. We drive content to our social networking sites with the goal of creating more engagement with our audience over various channels.”  Another contributor doesn’t see that social media makes sense in highly complex solution sales.

The big question is, what does social media marketing do for B2B?  Or, is there also a factor that social media marketing as it is defined today does not represent B2B marketing perspectives for marketing overall.

Where social media marketing and advertising is focused on the consumer, the engagement is much more relaxed and, well, social.  In B2B, there is a lot of vested interest on both sides of the deal. Sending tweets to customers may not be the answer to relationship building.  There also may not be an audience to connect to through social networks and communities.  B2B is going to have to figure out what the conversation looks like from their perspective and map to social media outlets.  It all boils down to conversational preference.

You can watch the Q&A session on LinkedIn by going to http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/internet-marketing/MAR_ADP_INM/443710-575533?searchIdx=0&sik=1237987444226&goback=%2Easr_1_1237987444226

Also, if you would like to participate in a survey on budget and resource allocation, you can go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=9ccwmeJJoa_2f_2fcSl_2bwgr_2fDA_3d_3d

Part 2

Related Articles:

You Don’t Have to Get Social Media, You’re Doing It

Conversational Preference in B2B Social Media

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

March 19, 2009 • 1:57 pm 1

You Don’t Have to Get Social Media, You’re Doing It

My 9 year old daughter watches as I write blogs, check my stats, and ponder what others are saying and doing.  While writing this morning, she is peaking over my shoulder and says, “I really don’t get social media.”  I had to laugh because she is immersed in social media.

B2B social mediaShe doesn’t think about what she is doing as new, different, or leading.  She blogs to tell friends and family what she is up to.  She is obsessed with Webkinz and all the things she can do in Webkinz World (I recently found out she has a boyfriend there, YIKES!).  She is plugged in to her Ninetendo DS and sits with friends connecting through a game.  Her goal is to get a cell phone when she turns 10 so that she can text with friends – we’ll see.  She doesn’t have to get it.  She just does it.

You may think that as B2B marketers and salespeople you are lagging behind your B2C brethren. I think that is wrong.  The foundations of social networking and communities already exist within your websites, trade associations, and professional associations.  You have a captive media audience with your analysts.  You also have existing media assets that you determined work. And, believe it of not, you are already doing it.

Here’s an example of social media in action during 2001.  I worked for a computer software company that had it’s own solutions as well as a large partner network.  The dot com bubble burst and our event budget was significantly scaled back.  However, we still wanted to have interaction with customers as well as fulfill our partnership obligations through joint marketing and sales efforts. Our solution was to combine webinar, conferencing, and forum capabilities to create a virtual conference.  The virtual conference mimicked live conferences with tracks, product showcasing, break-out sessions, as well as pre-scheduled customer meetings for demos and solution discussions.  We promoted it the way we would our other conferences, but there was no charge for the event. The event was highly successful both in attendance, interaction, and initiating or closing business even as the technology platforms were in an early stages of capabilities and usage.

A hidden benefit to the virtual conference was we now had an extensive asset library.  Webinars, flash demos, white papers, and forums that could be converted to FAQs as well as kept open for further community building and interaction.  It also pushed us to test new technologies and work out some of the kinks before applying them within our overal website.

If you think about it, social media is really just a virtualized society.  It makes it faster, easier, and at times cheaper to connect with others that have simliar interests or commonalities.  The tools today, as opposed to 2001, are more intuitive and flexible making it faster and easier to get started.  So, the real effort is taking what you have in your assets, look at how you interact both online and offline, and recreate that in social media.

Additionally, you will need to evaluate how the conversation is different in a face to face setting vs. the content push that primarily happens today with direct marketing efforts.  What works with events and meetings is dialogue exchange.  Our websites and marketing as a whole have become more of a linear mechanism to bring people into the lead management process.  The social setting is about exchange.  I heard one person say that social media is really a vortex – kenetic, circling, accelerating to a mutual objective.

Don’t believe that you are behind in your ability to implement an effective social media strategy.  It doesn’t matter if you “don’t get it”.  In many ways, you are already doing it.  Now there is a lexicon for it.

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Filed under: b2b, marketing technology, networking, sales 2.0, social media, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 26, 2009 • 8:23 pm 0

Hijacking Social – The Clique Is Holding Us Back

Let’s be honest, if the geeks had their way, no one would be allowed on the web and we would still be passing notes through ftp.

Today, the internet has been taken over by the average person. MySpace and Facebook defined the social network. It is about the party. Are you invited? Are you part of the group? Are you popular? So, how many friends do you have following you anyway?

You know what is the same? The discussion of etiquette and the proper way to engage. Social media has rules. Social media is about fitting in to how it was “intended”. I think this notion of what social media is is holding us back. It might be about the conversation, but it can be so much more than that.

Here are some examples of social media being beyond a personal conversation.

yawnloglogoReadWriteWeb provided a review on a new social app called Yawnlog. People log their sleeping patterns and dreams and then can share them with their friends.  Maybe a nice widget addition to Facebook.  But, a real product?  Here’s the thing.  The value isn’t that you can track this and share with you friends.  It’s the potential for trials and longitudinal studies.  The application has more value for science than a gadget that I’ll use with my friends and discuss what my dream meant.

LouisGray.com talked about what Twitter is really about (see article), listening, not friend following.

“Even if you are a rabid information junkie, the constant updates from Twitter can be too much for anybody to absorb, even with a few hundred connections. To believe that I am seeing all of a friend’s updates with 6,000 connections, or that Scoble can see the updates from ten times that many, is clearly impossible. So while a small population of Twitter is using the service to follow individual’s updates, a huge number are instead using it to broadcast updates, monitor keywords, and occasionally, send direct messages to people or reply in public. Twitter is simply too much to handle as conversations are lost, people’s updates can be of any type, and the limitations of the service, including the much-discussed 140 character boundary, make it a poor foundation for exchanging ideas in a crowd.”

So, when we talk about Twitter as a social network, how can you say that when you can’t really exchange ideas through conversation.  It is bill-boarding.

I think there ia also something to the fact that in the end, 99% of people out there are watchers, not participants.  Maybe they participate in their micro networks in Facebook with real friends, but there are only a handful of people out there that are part of the social.  That leaves open a huge opportunity for social media to fill beyond “Whoever Has the Most Friends Wins” theme.  Increasingly, and you see this particularly with Twitter, that social is pushing past the confines of personal conversation.  As with the web, the value is in the topics of conversations – the information.

Let’s start considering that maybe the power of social media isn’t that it is social but that it is about linking people, experience, and ideas to move forward in a non-cyber world.  Since when did a clique do anything but hold someone back?

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Filed under: brainstorm, marketing technology, networking, social media, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 17, 2009 • 8:29 am 3

Latin America Poised for Social Media Explosion

Mobile devices are clearly a key component of social media.  So, to understand the trend and opportunity it pays to look at what mobile and network vendors are thinking.  According to a recent study, Cisco believes that mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 150% between 2008 and 2013 outpacing overall mobile traffic (131% CAGR in the same period).  Leading the way in growth, Latin America.

cisco-cagr-reg

Findings from the Cisco VNI Mobile Forecast:

  • Global mobile traffic will exceed two exabytes per month by 2013.
  • Global mobile data traffic reached one exabyte per month in half the time that fixed data traffic did.
  • Nearly 64 percent of the world’s mobile traffic will be video by 2013.
  • Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 150 percent between 2008 and 2013.
  • Mobile broadband handsets with higher than 3G speeds and laptop air or data cards will constitute more than 80 percent of global mobile traffic by 2013.
  • Latin America will have the strongest mobile growth at 166 percent CAGR, followed by the Asia-Pacific region at 146 percent.
  • Asia-Pacific will account for one-third of all mobile data traffic by 2013.

*An exabyte is equal to: 1 billion gigabytes; 1,000 petabytes; 250 million DVDs

While the smallest market except for Central/Eastern Europe, it shows the impact video will have as Latin America develops further.  If you consider how mobile video has been an indicator of social media adoption, this is important.

Another player poised in this market is Microsoft.  In a recently announced partnership with Telefónica, Microsoft will offer its Windows Live Services expanding its reach across 12 countries further penetrating Argentina and Chili.  Through a partnership with Vivo, Microsoft already has reach within Brazil.

Lastly, Opera released its mobile report in August highlighting Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela as the large consumers of mobile web usage.

Select highlights for Latin America:

  • Brazil leads the way in mobile Web usage in Latin America, followed closely by Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina.
  • Orkut, metroFLOG and hi5 are the most prevalent social-networking sites in Latin America, although Facebook is the fourth-most-popular site in Venezuela.
  • Local domains are few and far between in the top 10. Brazil leads all Latin American countries with two, while most have one or no local domains in the top 10.

Opera also shows a significant rise in social network participation.

analytics20-social-networks-latin-america-social-network-site-users-nov-06-jan0812

So how big is this?  Consider that an ITU census of mobile lines in Latin America is 388 million.

This looks like a perfect storm and opportunity for marketers looking to reach customers in Latin America.  Similar to other emerging markets, mobile devices may be the key to connect.

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Filed under: marketing technology, networking, social media, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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