Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

May 13, 2009 • 12:22 am 0

Are You Culturally Aligned for Social Media?

Let’s get back to basics. Now that the numbers are in and you’ve had a chance to get comfortable with using social media in your marketing efforts, what are you finding out about your corporate marketing culture?

Maybe you were testing the waters to see if social media really worked. Or, maybe you were expanding on initial efforts and were applying it in a more strategic manner within an integrated marketing mix. At this point, how you are using social media is starting to take shape and there are indications of if it works to create affinity with your community. It also has given a perspective of what it will take to continue and be successful extending social media marketing within your organization.

We have spent a lot of time looking at metrics to measure how effective social media marketing is to achieve reach, awareness, increased connections, and depth of interaction. The IAB has gone so far as to create a standardized list of metrics and definitions. This is good, and aligned to successful marketing goals. However, another aspect to consider is how the rest of the business is also committed to participating and embracing a new way to interaction with customer and the community. After all, social media marketing is about interaction, connection, and transparency. It can be solely a marketing function, but to really work, it must match the corporate culture and that may mean changing the way your company thinks and interactions with your customers.

Here’s a list of things to ask as you move into your next phase:

If you’ve recruited your company experts and evangelists to post articles for your blogs, are they committed to continuing their contribution?
Are your experts available and transparent in their discussions and follow-up with comments?
Are you able to integrate your new community successfully into your sales process?
Does your senior leadership team perceive the results from your social media marketing efforts as a benefit to the company AND they are willing to further invest?
Is sales finding value in the community to follow-up on leads provided?
Is sales utilizing information from conversations and participating themselves in your communities?
Has the use of social media become part of nurturing a customer relationship and not just the beginning of a customer relationship?
Have you been able to directly and clearly connect social media marketing efforts to business goals?
Does marketing still consider social media marketing new and exciting or is it now ubiquitous in overall marketing efforts?
Do negative comments and perceptions voiced within your communities still keep you up at night?
Does the voice you use in your social media marketing efforts coincide with the voice of your leadership team uses with customers?
Which online effort does your overall business think is more successful and beneficial: social media, the website, email marketing?
Is the website experience tightly integrated with your overall website and online presence or is it a separate experience and venue?
As the marketer, are you still trying to figure out if social media is effective or how you want to use it?
Does conversation and interaction amongst connections in your community happen parallel to business to customer conversations or is it integrated with your active participation?

Social media marketing requires a level of commitment that traditional marketing efforts did not require. If marketing is the only one responsible for shaping, contributing, and interacting with customers, then social media marketing will fail due to a lack of resources available and the inability to connect customer conversations and interactions throughout the relationship. Maintaining a silo within marketing disconnects the customer and in the end can create a wedge in the relationship. In order to be truly successful, social media needs to integrate with the overall business relationship. Is your company culture up to the task?

Filed under: CMO seat, social media, social media marketing, Internet marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Marketing strategy, social media, social media communities, social media marketing, social networks

April 7, 2009 • 4:09 pm 0

B2B Social Media: Breaking Out of the Noise

Paid search and SEO are the buzz to get your message out in internet marketing and thus social media marketing. However, my experience has been that this really doesn’t break through the noise.

As social media marketing is the preferred method for 2009, it has leapt out of novelty and into a noisy market. Everyone is on Twitter. Everyone is creating fan pages. Everyone has a blog. Everyone is on YouTube. Everyone! It is not easier today to get your message out than it was in 2008 when you had budget. In fact, it is harder. Social media made it harder.

The reality is that even if you use your social media marketing vehicles to push out content or have active communities, you can’t rely on a single tactic of social media confined to your B2B website and brand. You have to find your market and move up through various avenues to surround your market. Simply creating a more interactive website that is socially inclined and pointing to it through paid search and SEO will only get you so far. You need to act socially as well.

I started this blog at the end of January as a way to talk about my thoughts on marketing, which then seemed to morph into a discussion on social media marketing. I didn’t have any real objective other than trying to connect with others and expanding the conversation. But, I am an analytic marketer by nature and so I track everything I can to see how things are progressing. This past week I watched several things happen that created the tipping point I’d been wondering would happen. I achieved a Google page rank of 4 and when my technorati tool is working I see I have an authority of 14. Yahoo has almost 16,000 links to me and I’ve seen my Twitter followers organically increase – I don’t promote outside my blog. The result, deep reach in traffic from long tail search. Search traffic is above referral traffic for the first time ever and set a new steady state that equals my steady state of referrals. Naturally, I wanted to know why.

There are a lot of blogs out there that give SEO how-tos. I’ve read most of them and tried most everything in the last couple of months. They all talk about the necessity of heavy linking in you blog posts to grab the long tail. They talk about actively posting comments across other blogs that point back to you. They talk about reciprocating links. They say that where you have your tags on your sites and blogs make a difference. Your are encouraged to blog often. This might work for your company website. I say, it helps, but for social media, that isn’t it. I’ve done these things from the beginning. Linking still seems to be the trick but it is tied to social media participation rather than links that act like banners.

This is what I found…

The biggest way to break through the noise in social media marketing is to participate in social media.

Participate in non-company communities. Learn from your customers as much as you educate them.
Become a featured blogger. Become a thought leader.
Use Twitter to promote other’s content as much as you promote your own (RT). Pay it forward.
Blog often, but blog with relevance. If you have nothing to say, don’t say anything.
Don’t be snarky. Encourage and educate rather than berate.

Now that you are using social media in marketing, try participating to get that extra boost and break through the noise.

Filed under: b2b, networking, social media, Google, Internet marketing, marketing, online communities, PageRank, paid search, Search engine optimization, social media, social media marketing, social networking, Twitter

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

Filed under: b2b, customer relationship, marketing technology, networking, sales 2.0, social media, b2b, busines-to-business, Business, Forrester Research, Internet marketing, LinkedIn, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, marketing budget, marketing resources, social media, social media resources, Social network service, social networking

March 11, 2009 • 2:38 pm 0

Are Decision Makers Coming to Your Social Media Network?

Are you thinking about your social media profile management strategy?

SEO measures for your B2B social media network is a fantastic way to measure potential influence in your market. It’s the quiet ones that visit you wonder about.

I have a theory that it is the quite ones in the room that really make the decisions. They don’t speak until it is in their interest to do so. They guard their words and time because they know it is valuable. They take it all in, analyzing the the situation across all perspectives. They are the ones that when they do speak, it is with weight and importance. If you consider that social media networks are about engagement, it goes without saying that of the 99% of those that visit and only read, there is a percentage of those that are your most important customer contacts.

What is great about today’s Email marketing, Web Analytics, and CRM is that it is established enough that you can clearly track the majority of customer contact profiles at various stages of engagement. If they are in your database and they enter your website, cookies show what they looked at, how long they stayed, and brings them into your lead cycle. The contact hasn’t had to do anything but visit in some cases. Email going out has ids embedded that tie profiles together, populate cookies, and it is stored for future use.

When it comes to your social media network or ones that you participate in, what do you know about your customer? In many cases there may not be any more information than who actually responds and engages in comments and discussions. It’s the 99% you miss. But, if they are entered into the network, they have profiles. If they land on a blog post, their cookie still resides in their computer. The key is how to harness their network ids and your cookies to feed back into your CRM system.

We think of ROI on social media in terms of metrics – link backs, engagement, etc. There is still the issue that you don’t truly get at those visitors that are the silent majority and exude a huge influence over the decision to choose you as their solution provide in these metrics. Engaged members may help open doors, they just may not be the ones that determine if you are the one for them.

You may be getting a lot of traffic to your social media properties. You may be getting a lot of link love and commenting. The real understanding of what is working and what is not, is knowing who is coming to your social media properties. If you are trying to sell multi-million dollar technology solutions and you get end-users and managers engaging and no executives, how are these participants transferring your message and knowledge to decision makers. Are they? Are they getting it right?

The tenet of marketing is proper targeting and engagement with the right customer contacts, not just the volume. To do so, you need to consider how you are tracking and tying that back to your internal customer databases.

Related Article: Social Media Profile Management

Filed under: social media, b2b, Business, business-to-business, crm, Customer relationship management, Internet marketing, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, roi, Search engine optimization, SMM, social media, Web Analytics

March 4, 2009 • 6:10 pm 0

Metrics and ROI: Bonfire of the Vanities

“Is social media effective?”

“How do you measure ROI in social marketing?”

“What KPIs do you use for social media?”

Sounds familiar, right?

Inevitably, when you see someone talk about how to measure social marketing effectiveness you have someone focusing on hits, page rank, sharing, links, and the like. Then, another voice comes in saying that is is about the business outcome, metrics should tie to business objectives. A third pipes in that you can’t really measure marketing to revenue, it’s too fuzzy.

This was evident in a post from Chris Brogan – Moving Needles. He mentions several things to look at and what they indicate. Then, someone commented that social media is a tool and that KPIs that exist today are still valid for social media. What the needle measures never changes.

Well, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong. It depends on what your role is in monitoring social marketing effectiveness. Are you the direct marketer, PR person, the web manager, a program director, or a marketing executive? The difficulty in all this is that everyone has a different way that they measure their own effectiveness. Each is silo-ed. In fact, many times it is the function that defines what the metric is for success rather than CMOs driving the scorecard and dashboard.

Successful measurement of social media, as with any marketing tool, is the ability to take tactical metrics, see how they link to KPIs, show how KPIs drive business outcomes, and then be able to predict how changes in strategy and tactics fuel the cycle again. Simply showing the end result of marketing effort contribution to business outcome is great for marketing executives. But, marketing managers, web teams, and specialists need more detail to manage the tactics that drive business outcomes.

As it pertains to social marketing, I think it is opening up things that should be measured as part of web marketing that hasn’t been looked at before. Web marketing has always been internally focused on website hits, traffic patterns, and how visitors enter the lead funnel. Social marketing is opening up an understanding of how word-of-mouth influences website visits and brand interaction. So, it goes without saying that things like trackbacks, linking, conversation, and bookmarking are important to watch. What we need to figure out is how do these new metrics fit into our dashboard framework to measure impact on desired business outcomes. What is also important is that some of these metrics may be better to use when looking at our traditional web mediums.

So, while I agree and continually evangelize the need to have marketing executive dashboards that ensure marketing is aligned to business objectives, de-emphasizing web stats that contribute to outcomes won’t help manage effort and resources.

Related articles:

Social Media Metrics: ROI or Just Numbers

Conversational Preference in B2B Social Media

Web Metrics Don’t Cut it for Social Media