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.

I think the answer is, “Yes, but…”

Direct marketing and bottom of the funnel mindset is what most B2B marketers work in as they have been more closely ties to sales goals.  Where sales won’t accept a lead without knowing who it is and the appropriate contact information at a minimum, it has to be collected at every opportunity.  Without this information, marketing also doesn’t have an adequate single view of the customer to profile and segment reliably.  In this context, data quality is critical as it determines if a lead is passed, how to pass the lead, and align the lead to existing opportunities or account profiles.  Name, company, location, phone, and email are the cornerstone to this.

Social media is not outreach, it is in-reach.  It isn’t lead generation, it is relationship generation.  You don’t collect details on your connections and contacts.  You cultivate engagement and conversation.  Without the need to maintain a list of connections in your CRM and the ability to leverage social media organizers like HootSuite to communicate to your community, contact information is somewhat irrelevant.

So, where is data quality necessary?  Having a single customer view that is inclusive of social media profiles and engagement. At some point, us B2B marketers do need to move relationships out of the 2.0 world and into face to face engagements, particularly for complex sales.  At this transition point, the social media profile becomes an invaluable part of the customer view.  Just as CRM captures order transactions, direct marketing interactions, and sale interactions, it also needs to show social media interactions.  Why? The social media interaction is probably more telling of your relationship with your customers than traditional interactions.

The catch? Linking a limited profile from LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to a standard contact profile in CRM can be problematic.  Your CRM system may not have the ability or capability enabled to link the 2.0 world with your customer data. You may not have a social media platform that is capturing what is needed to integrate your customer data between online and CRM.  Or, it does, but integration needs to be established.  Those are just a few examples.

Ultimately, data quality will matter for social media as B2B marketers mature in their use and linkage of 2.0 activities to best practices for lead creation, nurture, and pipeline generation.  We live for now in customer relationship silos, but the real advantage and benefit of social media to show ROI for marketing will be improved integration and profile management across the entire relationship.  As soon as integration is introduced, just as in the past, data quality plays a critical role.

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.

It seemed pretty logical until I had a conversation with some colleagues about what the sales engagement looks like. The customer experience with social media is marketing to sales, not a starting point with sales. Disconnects can and will occur in the engagement with sales if the customer feels a distinct pass off and turn in the conversation from dialogue to promotion.

In the social media realm, it is a dialogue with the customer, not a one sided conversation with the provider doing all the talking. The conversation needs to continue in a more intimate and specific manner when Sales engages. The crux of Marketing and Sales alignment now has to be tighter than ever so as not to interrupt the conversation and continue to build credibility and value in the relationship. Failing to do so can disrupt and lend itself to disengagement.

A you bring on new products, solutions, and services, have you considered your conversation from the first Tweet or blog comment, to getting down to the business of solving your customer’s need?

That’s what I’ve been toying with of late for our b2b marketing efforts.  When I’ve bounced this off my fellow marketers they either look at me like I’m crazy, or nod their heads pretending to agree but, they think I’m crazy.

I’m looking at ways to engage the market along their buying process, not my sales engagement model.  Sometimes, people that gather information just aren’t ready to speak with a telemarketer or sales person. Why ruin the beginnings of a great relationship with a hard sell?

So, now I’m looking at our online marketing efforts (ppc and display) and thinking about killing landing pages.  Not in all cases, they are still useful for those that are ready to talk.  But, for campaigns that are aimed as top of the funnel engagement, why bother?

Here is my thinking, if I’m working a campaign that is top of the funnel, why not leverage a portal page design within my company’s website that are content rich with lots of interaction points, including bottom of the funnel captures.  How about designing the entry point to my products, solutions, and services areas so that they have landing page qualities positioning content options based on the visitor need – education, evaluation, community.  I should be doing this anyway, so why not leverage within the context of my online advertising efforts?

If done right,

• visitors have options to engage with my company to build and deepen the relationship with us, increasing the chances they remain a customer or eventually buy our solutions and services
• retargeting efforts for bottom of the funnel investment should improve in effectiveness and efficiency
• I can track visitor behavior and improve my lead scoring providing higher quality leads to sales

The other reason I’m considering moving forward with this is that it provides a more integrated and consistent approach to communicating and interacting with the market.  It forces online advertising to better assimilate and integrate with marketing campaigns, improving overall effectiveness.  It also creates a seamlessness between online ads, social media, and the website.

The biggest push back I’m getting is from inside sales who think I’m going to dry up their lead queue.  I think that is nonsense.  If anything, it should not only increase the quality that is passed, but by building relationships vs. going in for the kill we have the opportunity not to loose leads in our process.  By thinking about the buying process overall, online advertising becomes richer in its ability to attract and interact across a wider audience increasing lead volume and producing a larger and more long term pool of customers for near and long term sales.

Have you tried this out in your b2b online marketing strategy?  Did it work?  Or, am I really crazy?

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.

Compare online media to television media.  TV is not free as consumers have to pay for the connection on average of $600 per year and as high as $2000 depending on the service.  Fees are pushed back to service providers from the content network of about 3¢ to 25¢ per subscriber which is included in this subscription service.  Google on the other hand acts as a service provider like a cable tv company and pays nothing.  In fact, it makes money off servicing advertisers both in delivery of advertising though PPC  and through Doublclick by placing ads on content provider sites such as News Corp’s.  MSN/Bing and Yahoo! are the same.

Now you can say that News Corp makes money by selling placements on their websites but as we see, this doesn’t pay the bills.  Revenue from subscriptions dwindles and isn’t re-cooped through fee collected from Google or any other search engine or advertising network.  They can add more placement space but this diminishes the experience and dissuades visitors in the long run that can actually hurt their advertising revenue stream with reduced visitation.

There are a few ways to alleviate the issue:

• Google and other search engines pay fees to content networks.  However, how do you distinguish a News Corp from a blogger?  At least in tv there are limited number of content creators.  The web has millions.
• Internet service providers collect fees in their subscriptions related to “premium” content and manage access to sites similarly to cable or satellite services.  Although today, ISPs are not necessarily set up or have the infrastructure to do so.
• Google is looking at limiting search results to content on sites like those of News Corp.  This will only go so far and may actually hurt ad revenue in the long run.
• Content providers can add code to block search engines but again, this can hurt ad sales by blocking ad networks and PPC.
• News sites can turn their websites into paid sites to recoup subscriptions.  While sites like the Wall St. Journal, Harvard Business Review, and others do this, revenue is modest and may not ultimately sustain the industry.

Balancing fairness of access to asset content is not an easy proposition.  On one hand the access to news consumers have today is a huge benefit.  On the other, quality news content costs money to produce.  I may not buy a paper or magazine to get my news anymore, but I still highly value quality unbiased information.  I will pay for my news, but news should be widely available to keep us educated and informed.

Tough call.  For now, I’ll rely on Google “pirating” content.  What else is there to do?