In my quest to get more out of social media than just followers and a soapbox platform, I am looking at what content my network follows, reads, and shares more closely.  In my last post I talked about the analysis of hashtags in tweets, and how that could help me better understand the personas of my network.

Now I am looking at what else I can gather and what I could do with this.  In particular, I am interested in the content being shared: blogs, web pages, video, etc.  The titles tags, description meta tags, and urls all have keywords that tell a lot about interest areas and build a richer persona.  This step got me thinking, could I tighten alignment to my network by optimizing…?

• My paid search to reflect keyword tendencies in shared content
• My display placement based on sites aligned to my market offers
• The SEO on my own website

Right now, SEM allows anonymity which creates challenges when you want to focus digital marketing efforts on existing customers or known prospects.  My paid search and media plans look at broad behavior, demographics, and firmographics but specifics on their web patters at the individual level is sketchy.  However, if I align my followers to my customer list and profile their specific personas compared to the broader market, I get much closer to a targeted campaign.  This makes my digital efforts more closely resemble my direct marketing efforts – smaller targets, highly relevant content shared, higher conversion.

Another reason to think about  b2b social media beyond influence marketing and make it work to drive revenue and customer relationships.

For the sake of argument, I am not including a company’s internal customer portal that is like a private social network and really just an updated user forum.  I am talking about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  These are the properties that are measurable for an overall perspective of market impact and not just customer experience.  Take Klout, Social Mention, Radian6, and the various Twitter tools, and it is all about who influences who and the sentiment buzz.  Great for PR, not so great when you have to measure social media to revenue.

I did an analysis of my immediate Twitter network with the help of my engineering husband.  I wanted to see engagement level and topics of interest and determine the influence factor of my friends.

First, my network is divided between marketers interested in B2B social media (no surprise there) and those that are focused on data management (where I spend my marketing time).  I have a rarely even spit between these groups.

• Between the two groups, my data management connections are most prolific in posting, by 8:1.5.  Makes sense since this group consists of consultants, companies, and industry analysts/media.
• The marketing connections appear to retweet more frequently by profile.  Although retweets in general are low and infrequent.
• Hashtag analysis showed a higher tweet count related to events in data management, where marketing was more interested in general marketing terms such as social media and marketing.
• Replies account for about 1/3 of my network activity and mostly in my data management group.

So what?  Well, as a marketer, I already knew who my influencers were without having to go do Twitter analysis or run a social media report. I also had a pretty good idea without the report that they gravitate and communicate highly at events – that is where they spend most of their time.

The interesting thing was for the marketing group this was more organically grown and appears to be made up of those that lurk over engage.  However, this doesn’t bother me and probably wouldn’t if I was marketing to this group.  What I do know about them is what topics interest them based on their hashtag use.  I also can watch the growth of my following to see if what I say socially matters to the market.  I don’t expect advocacy as they aren’t inclined to do that anyway.  So, for a circle in my social media world that is made up of “groupies”, influence matters little to me.

What do I care about?  Who else do marketers listen to and what is being said.  I can make some guesses at a high level – there are the key social media gurus out there that we all listen to.  There are also ways to understand my followers’ network and analyze this.

In the end, as a B2B marketer wanting to connect to my customers, what my followers follow and potentially share, tells me more about how to engage with them than the influence and sentiment analysis.

Interestingly, most marketers only have a high level understanding of the real persona those connected to them through social media.  Relegated to a PR mesurement, anonymity is the norm; influence (Klout) and perception are the KPIs.  And, to be honest, I wonder if a high level understanding of the social media persona is really understood – let alone connected to a B2B marketers prime target audience.

If you are like many, the most you get to show for your social media effort is a warm and fuzzy around your brand.  To be honest, the B2B CEO doesn’t care about overall brand perception in the market, he or she cares about the targeted set of buyers that connect with your value proposition.  If that is 10% of the market, then you better have 8% – 10% market share, 80% footprint with the customer, and a net promotor score of highly likely with over 60% of your customer base.  That is the goal in the mind of the B2B CEO, realistic or not.  At a minimum, it is what resonates and is understandable in the corner office.

For B2B marketing, brand awareness and perception just isn’t good enough.  On top of that, those metrics you track in social media don’t connect to the demand creation activities.  Corporate communications and demand creation remain silos within the marketing organization as they always have.  ROI of corporate communications remains a perceived high cost factor in the marketing budget with little connection to revenue generation, except anecdotally.

The reality is that the majority of your followers, friends, and network overall are silent.  Any social media measurement means nothing when assessing your influence on your marketing buying processes.  Structured around influence and reach, the only thing today’s current measurements really tell you are who can you leverage to SHOUT OUT your message?  The only ones that care about this are your PR agency as this is what they are paid to do.  Your marketing department is responsible for generating revenue directly and indirectly.

It is time we get better at understanding of the Social Media Buyer Persona of our customers, not the Shouters.  The reality is that many times in B2B the social media influencers are the vendors and consultants, not the buyers.  If we really want to know our buyers we need to understand what they read, what they share, and what they do to step into engagement.  It is more than the tag on the link to the blog or marketing campaign landing page.  We need to extend beyond our controlled digital environment and link to the digital environment that our customers interact with to understand.  We aren’t there yet.

The buying process is currently beyond what we track today.  It is time to think about how to connect the anonymous social media and digital environment to our B2B marketing waterfall.

Certainly the venue will dictate a bit of what you actually post.  But, the B2B marketer will break the rules when possible.  We’ve got so much to say!  Don’t you want to know how smart we are and what great things our company provides?

Here are things I think about when creating content:

• If you can’t use a single word to describe what you want to say, move on.  My word for this post, “Size”
• If it takes longer than a minute to read what you write, people get bored and stop reading
• If it needs to be read more than once, its only good if what you said was amazing (most of the time it is not…sorry)
• If you need to think too hard about what to say, you are trying too hard
• If you post multiple tweets in order to get your point across, it should have been a blog, email, or phone conversation

Social media isn’t complicated, there is no need to make it so. Live in Twitter for a while, it teaches you brevity and spontaneity.  Embrace the medium rather than fit it into what is comfortable to you.  And lastly, enjoy it.  Marketing is so much more fun when you break from the confines of structure and dogma.  Have a digital conversation.

What helps you get your content just right?

I am no expert.  By far, this is my most vexing question to date.  What I have done is really to start looking at what other companies seem to do, talk to fellow marketers, and try to figure out what works to build a vibrant community.  Here is what I’ve seen and taken away in my quest.

Entry level marketers and interns have typically been tasked to take on the social media effort.  In B2B, this can be a real challenge and barrier to realizing value from your initiative.  There is significant finesse, knowledge, and networking ability that is required.  Simply putting your brand, subject matter expertise, and yes, promotion out there is not for the inexperienced.

You can leverage a PR agency.  However, do they really know your business?  They do a great job of triangulating your message with experts and media.  They may even be there to ghost write.  This approach can get your effort up and running more effectively.  Over time, it is costly and slows the conversation.  Conversation is not sustained or maybe not achieved at all because of the bureaucracy to produce and eventually turns the social media effort into direct marketing and promotion or worse yet, the promotion and branding of external experts, not you.

You may have created a social media or blogging bureau and established a set of social media guidelines.  Subject matter experts are tasked with writing blogs and tweeting.  How is this working for you?  Do you have the steady stream of content?  Many times it is difficult to get people to commit to contributing if they are busy (I admit to this trap) or don’t see the value and return.

My conclusion is that what B2B companies need to start thinking about is how to be the Digital Conversationalist. Don’t just pay this lip service.  The best social media efforts are balanced between thought leadership and a vibrant customer driven community.

Here is my Digital Conversationalist job description:

This person is already versed and experienced in what you offer, is a good writer, but can also “pass the beer test” with a wide audience in your customer base.  This person can work the digital room and get discussion going.  They can balance thought provoking contribution with the ability to ask questions and get responses.  They utilize and test social media tools to illicit the most and best discussions.  They can turn lemons into lemonade, addressing discordant views and complaints in ways that promote your brand and give you insight you didn’t have.  A Digital Conversationalist knows they are only part of the conversation and not the center of attention.

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.

What about the promise of social media?  This is where the customers are, online.  This is where and how you need to engage with them.  Blog, create fan pages, converse on Twitter.  Brick-and-mortar is dead as is TV, print, and all other traditional marketing efforts.

The fact is, if you want to grow and maintain your business, you need to offer multiple communication and connection points to your customer.  You need to be where customers are regardless if it is digital or tangible.  Some of your connection points are highly scalable, some are more intimate.  Each serves a purpose in your marketing arsenal.  Each can compliment each other.

I don’t know that Microsoft stores will be successful in the long run.  Gateway, Dell, and other technology companies have tried the brick and mortar model and failed or at least haven’t done well.  I think it depends on how Microsoft defines success of the stores.  If the over-riding strategy is truly to create customer connections over stellar store sales, then the storefront may well prove its usefulness and ROI.  Staying on that course though will be challenging when sales may be low and operating costs are not balanced out.  If sales are important, the coming holiday season may be an indicator if Microsoft made the wise investment.

CNN reports that an $11,000 indie movie ‘Paranormal Activity’ grossed $7.1M this past weekend and landed in the top 5 with a limited distribution across 200 theaters.  They did it through word of mouth marketing efforts heavily leveraging YouTube and Twitter.

By: Trendistic

What is most interesting about this is that the call to action was not a coupon or offer.  Buzz drove attendance.  In addition, as the first attenders watched the film, buzz peaked and carried through to quick conversion.

Now, I also tried to get data on YouTube trends but was only able to grab total visitations, which as of this morning were 1.9M.  However, search stats on Google showed a similar trend as Twitter so I’ll make a leap assumption that YouTube views were probably following a similar curve.

The reason I’m honing in on this so much is that awareness marketing has really taken a back seat as lead generation and direct revenue models have become the rage.  We look at social media marketing and can’t accurately measure the grey area of word of mouth to revenue generation.  So, we adapt social media to fit our tried and true direct marketing efforts – ie. using Twitter to mail out coupon codes.  The reality is that social media does have a place in our revenue generation mix close the point of sale.  It just takes us into a realm outside our comfort zone.

As you consider social media in your marketing mix, consider tests that introduce word of mouth marketing efforts close to the point of sale.  You may learn the trick to leveraging SMM in your specific revenue generation mix.

As marketers, we know that display is the hidden lift behind search and conversion. We even realize that social media, beyond the hype, has as much if not more value than the a creative placement. It is intuitive. And, to be honest, executives get it as well – they just don’t know why they have to pay so much for it.  Yet, I still get the questions I got the other day, “How do we defend our display budget?  Is there really ROI in social media?”

Here’s the thing, if as online marketers we are in doubt, a definitive ‘NO’ is going to come down from above.   Research conducted by such reputable firms as ComScore Networks and eMarketer isn’t enough to change minds.  It wasn’t enough to convince the marketers across the table from me.  They wanted to know if display and social media spend was working to the advantage of our other clients.  If so, how did we know?

The current approach has been pick a few tactics, launch, and measure.  Results come in and they are lack luster; we chalk this up to not working and move on.  Why the test didn’t work is not always assessed.  The results tell it all.  Not really.  The results only tell us the outcome of the test.  It does not tell us the validity of the test.  This is the beginning of defining attribution to our display and social media tactics.

The Reality:

Not all campaigns and applications are made equal.  The trick with display and social media tactics is that you know what you want them to do for you.  What is the goal, awareness, drive to site, engagement, or conversion, or all four?  Once that is determined, what is the role of display and social media in attaining these goals – direct or supportive?

The Application:

It pays at this point to think out of the box.  Social media as commonly thought of – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. – is only an aspect of social media.  What makes social media work is the communication, proliferation, engagement, and connection it drives.  The venue of a network or blog is only a placement, the components that facilitate the experience of the venue are the engines.  Display as well is more than a billboard. Approaching display like you would an email campaign with a targeting strategy, crisp copy and creative, and a strong call to action is the key to making display work.

Next, taking into account how these tactics support the goals will define measures and metrics.  Saying that click through rate for display and social media are indicators of conversion is only a small portion of the value.  As seen, click through rates are dropping dramatically for display and marketers have yet to directly connect social media interactions with conversion.  It is not to say that conversions can’t or won’t happen.  It is just that the likelihood is much lower.  So, you need to measure how awareness and perception contribute to conversion.  And this is the crux of the matter.

Test, Test, Test Again:

The test at this point should be more clear.  You know what you will launch and why.  You have a perspective of how to measure performance and its link to goals.  It is time to develop the test plan.  Here are a list of things to keep in mind when developing the test plan:

1)  Know your baseline.  This is more than having a control.  A control segment assumes you have tested a baseline.  Don’t assume that several weeks prior or even a few months of data is representative.  You will need to measure a baseline of performance over a period that allows for seasonality, marketing cycles, and market forces.

2) Consider how long your display and social media campaigns need to be in market to be able to measure impact.  You need to attain a threshold of measurable sample and you need to take into account the length of time required for exposure.  You may reach a sample that is significant but if it was attained in a week and a display or social media standard is 3-4 weeks in market for impact to be felt, you don’t have a viable test.

3)  Start simple and progress to advanced.  Applying a simple in market – out of market approach can get you headed in the right direction and give you what you need.  As you begin to exhaust simple testing methods, this is when attribution analysis can kick-in and allow you to apply complex strategies.

4)  Got results?  Test again.  This is an iterative process.

5)  Those results you got, leverage them elsewhere.  Insights you gain from one set of tactics or a campaign can seed an expansion of activities.  Then, test assumptions in the new application.

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.