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StumbleUponThis was originally posted on my friend Tommy Landry's blog, Return on Now, as a guest post on February 8, 2010.
Why is it that when it comes to conversation about social media, business-to-business (B2B) seems to draw the short stick every single time? As someone that does a lot of webcasts, blog posts and speaking gigs, the questions/comment that always comes up is, "what about B2B examples." Fortunately for me, I'm able to mention companies like BreakingPoint Systems and Hubspot that do a great job tapping into the power of social media but I often wish there were more examples (with public results) that I could discuss.
In thinking about this topic, one of the main reasons that B2B has taken a little longer to adopt social media into its marketing mix is that it's harder to do effectively. It's also feels risky because there is less control then there is in other channels. With that said, I personally believe that B2B companies stand to benefit the most from social media because they live and die based on the strength of their customer relationships. On top of that, many B2B companies actually know exactly know who their prospective customers are so seeking those folks out in a meaningful way and creating relationships with them can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Given that I'm a prescriptive kind of guy, I'd feel remiss if I didn't offer up some ways that companies can start thinking about putting social media into practice. There are obviously tons of ways but here are a few (including a diagram that provides more color commentary on item number three):
- Start listening. This is easier to do than you think. Set up a Google alert for your company's name, your competitors' names and keywords for your industry. If you're already doing this, consider hiring a "listening" service like Techrigy, Radian6 or Meltwater Buzz. This will help you find out where all the relevant conversations in your space are happening.
- Create a Twitter account for your business. However, resist the urge to put up links to press releases, product specs and links to press that are signing your business's praises (at least out of the gate). Instead, talk about things that people in your industry care about. For instance, if you create bill payment software, talk about the needs of small to medium sized businesses across the financial spectrum (payroll, credit, vendor managment, etc.) Link to reports and industry analysis. Point out other people's blog posts and magazine articles.
- Set up a blog. Before you do this though, make sure you have someone (ideally internal) that is willing to commit to posting at least 5-6 times/month. This can be someone on your marketing, product, or PR teams or even better, one of your executives. Think about creating an editorial calendar to help guide your topics. Most importantly, spend time looking at other industry related blogs -- in fact, you should spend at least a month doing this before you set up your own blog. Be sure to comment on those blogs (talk about the topic, not your company). This will help with getting to know the relevant "social" people in the space.
- Create an online community. Once you've gotten comfortable with items 1-3, start thinking about a online community. Ideally, this is for both customers and prospective customers. Some businesses feel more comfortable about creating private communities where customers can talk to one another. The key either way is to hire a great community manager and let them help you create relevant content via webinars, blog posts and conference calls (see diagram below). A community manager will also help you draw out your customers and insure that conversations stay relevant and productive.
- Measure, measure, measure. This is less difficult than you might imagine. This really should start with looking at your current goals i.e. new customers, greater retention, larger share of wallet, referrals, etc. Then make sure you benchmark e.g. look at your webstats and current KPI's before you launch your social efforts. Then look at how your moving the bar over time. A key place to look is at your web analytics to see what kind of traffic and engagement your Twitter feed and/or blog efforts are driving. Also, it doesn't hurt to survey customers and ask them if your efforts are impacting their loyalty to your company.
Aaron Strout's bio
As the head of marketing at Powered, Aaron focuses not only on day to day marketing activities but also provides a social voice for the company. In this role, Aaron continues with his speaking, blogging, podcasting and social networking activities with an eye toward creating awareness and lead generation for the company. Prior to joining Powered, Aaron was the Vice President of Social Media at Mzinga, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based provider of online communities and social networks for businesses. In this role, Aaron focused on tapping into the power of social media for business. In addition to his knowledge of the interactive and new media landscape, Aaron has more than 15 years of online marketing and advertising experience, with a strong background in integrated and online marketing. Before joining Mzinga, Aaron worked at Fidelity Investments in their retail division, with a focus on online and acquisition marketing. Aaron's work at Fidelity revolved around Web strategy & marketing, as well as the development of interactive and print campaigns, including direct mail, e-mail, banner & print ads, and event marketing. Aaron is a founding member and former president of (BIMA) and a member and former board member of the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX). Aaron was also recently elected an interim board member for the prestigious Social Media Club. He will be part of a team responsible for creating standards around social media and community.
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As a caveat, my response is less about B2B social media integration and more about developing a culture telling their story on their terms, in a B2B setting. It is much easier said than done. Initially, the client's response? "No one in our category is doing this stuff, why should we?" And the response, of course, is, "Exactly. We can't afford not to, especially after search integrated social into the organic results mix."
For the past four months I've been working on my first social media marketing integration strategy and implementation for a B2B client- a professional services business compromised of fifteen people, most of whom are shareholders--an important distinction, to be sure, because everyone involved in the organization has a literal stake in the initiative. Lots of chiefs, few indians... at any point, any one of the shareholders could kill the initiative. I cannot stress enough that in any endeavor not unlike what I am describing, it is absolutely essential you continually set and reset expectations and create self-governing environments, otherwise there is a strong possibility that as the hired gun, you will get thrown under the buss. On the flip side, a well run project takes care of itself, and when successful, you provide an invaluable and often overlooked element to your client-- a real, tangible culture that drives the organization. Once the organization commits, as a best practice, I found it is absolute essential to drive social sharing internally before you do anything, especially before you set your sights on market-facing content creation. In this case, we set everyone up on Google Reader with a view to one subscription of general interest (unrelated to their professional trade) for every three trade-specific subscriptions (this is a post in and of itself.) A ratio, not a definitive number. Important distinction.
We then registered for a social CRM (batchbook), registered for a premium otherinbox account (to seamlessly aggregate inbound email and notices and to ensure we could create inboxes on the fly in an organized manner across the organization). I then asked my web developer to set up an intranet sandbox site that looked like a blog and forum. We then registered for ez.com (url shortener.tracking) and began using Yammer to facilitate internal conversation and sharing, subsequently acclimating the team to a news feed interface. We also "grew bigger ears" and placed listening outposts, alert notices, and inbound links to the current web property on the net. We then designated an admin for the sole purpose of monitoring, commenting on third party sites, reading and processing and basically culling the content to a cogent base. (I should add, the person tapped for this task has since been promoted (again, a post in and of itself.))
Once the momentum of regular usage carried the team into a pattern, comfort levels rose. We captured metrics and started measuring them against non-usage. Though the numbers were not great, the point of the activity was to give the shareholders and participants a new worldview--how their activity online and on the ground effected their visibility, awareness, credibility and leadership within their own microcosm. Keep in mind we pushed very little content at this point, save a handful of comments on competitors', partners', vendors' and current clients' social media (read: blog)/web properties.
I then tasked the strongest and the weakest member of the team to collaborate on the creation of an organizational social media policy. (again, a post in and of itself.) This helped us establish: voice, key words, evaluate comfort levels and skill sets before publishing, better evaluate who was open to engagement in the social space and add value where we found it. From this point, we basically established an editorial calendar commiserate with our lead-gen pipeline respective to our various target audiences.
The most surprising consequence was the cultural shift within organization: People that worked together for years soon realized that they had much more in common than "just work"; this showed in the conversation... everything from preferences in coffee to high concept professional practices and processes. And while this value may not be immediately self-evident to the organization's CFO, the President did agree with me that as we continue to create content we are essentially creating an institutional memory of the company, and with that comes a stored value. As things develop, should you be interested, I'll keep you updated. I hope you're well; looking forward to seeing you around SXSW extending the conversation.
They posted 12 rooms of furniture, granted items from the pictures to the first follower who tagged the picture!!
In the little video in the post, I could see the manager engaging with his community. Do you think this store's customer base is lacking? I would say their Social Media relationship created patrons which in turn gives great ROI which, for FaceBook was zip!!
Wouldn't take much of a survey to find out who is buying in the store because of the FB connection with "Gustav". Soft marketing built the brand and the sales volume there.
Using Social Media works well, only if someone from the B2B is paying attention to their followers and dialoguing with them.
I was quite taken with the example I listed. Companies pitching their deals without some kind of engagement, to their customer base will see poorer results for their time and effort.
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