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Social Media for B-to-B

2009-12-16T10:07:00.004-06:00

In my job I work with a wide variety of clients, including a few b-to-b businesses. One thing that has always puzzled me is how many people assume that social media either won't work or will have to work completely differently in a b-to-b context.

My view of the issue may be simplistic but I have learned that simpler is almost always better. Do b-to-b companies not have customers? Are those customers not people? Do those customers not have something in common? Social media is about connecting with people, sharing ideas and information that is valuable to those people, and building relationships. All things that b-to-b companies already do with their customers. There is no reason that social media can't work the same way for them. Maybe your audience won't be quite as large as say a Starbucks. But you can definitely strengthen relationships and drive business outcomes with the right strategy and execution.

A recent post by Mark Wallace on SmartBlog On Social Media summed it up pretty neatly. As Mark points out, there will always be differences in how each business uses social media. But the difference is not whether they are a b-to-b or b-to-c business.

Retweetable ads? We are missing the point.

2009-12-01T11:50:00.004-06:00

This is a very insightful article. The ability to make an ad portable via social media does not make the campaign social. The point is that a solid social media strategy is rooted in valuable content. As long as we slap "social" onto ads that come from an old school way of thinking, we are totally missing the point. Don't advertise to me, give me something of value. Then I will value your brand, product or service and do what you really want me to do, buy more of it.

Bob Garfield's 'Chaos Scenario'

2009-08-10T11:45:00.002-05:00

I heard this interview with Bob Garfield this weekend. I was nodding my head through the entire thing. Definitely worth a listen.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

2009-08-04T08:39:00.003-05:00

I saw the first version of this presentation by Marta Kagan a couple of months ago. Yesterday I came across this updated version. I think it is brilliant in it's simplicity, sense of humor and powerful statistics. If you are wondering what all the fuss is about social media, or are just trying to figure out if it is something you should get into, then this presentation will help.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

EyeWonder Takes Takeovers To Another Level. Really?

2009-07-10T07:57:00.004-05:00

EyeWonder Takes Takeovers To Another Level is the title of a MediaPost article I read the other day. EyeWonder, a rich media advertising provider, has developed a product that takes a screen shot of the page on which an ad is running, then manipulates it to reveal the advertisement. So you can make the page peel back, crumple up, or any other visual effect to reveal the creative.

Is this really a new level? To me, it seems like a glorified pop-up ad. The issue is not finding a better way to be disruptive, it is that advertisers need to find a way to make their ads facilitate the users goals. In an age where technologies allow consumers to opt-out of marketing messages it should be clear that the creators of those messages need to be building destinations, not disruption.

Admittedly this is more the responsibility of the advertisers not EyeWonder. And pushing the technology to allow more creative executions is a good thing. I just hope we use it for work that enhances the user experience, and not just interupts it like we have always done.

It aint easy being green. This might help.

2009-06-23T15:40:00.003-05:00

Ever wonder what is in the products you buy every day? Or if it was manufactured in a sweatshop? Or what it's impact is on the environment? GoodGuide is a Web site and iPhone app from the San Francisco company started by Dara O’Rourke, a professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley. According to the site, "GoodGuide provides the world's largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home." The site has rated over 70,000 products including food, toys, personal care and household products.

Making this ratings system available via the iPhone is a powerful way to put information in the consumer's hands at the time they are making a purchase decision. How would this impact your buying habits? Personally, I suspect it would cause me to switch a few brands. We will find out. I just downloaded the app and can't wait to use it.

For more info see this article in the New York Times, or visit GoodGuide.com.

'Food, Inc.': Attention Must Be Paid To Food Supply

2009-06-15T11:34:00.002-05:00

NPR recently did a story on the film Food, Inc. If you missed it, you can listen here. Steve Inskeep interviews the film's director Robert Kenner and food advocate and author Michael Pollan. You can also check out the Hungry For Change blog here (sponsored by the film).

Food, Inc

2009-06-05T11:24:00.003-05:00

Last year I read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. It is a great book and it did make me change the way I eat. I just saw this trailer for the movie Food, Inc. It looks like it will also be a very motivating piece. Can't wait to see it.

Here is another trailer.

Is Facebook changing our brains?

2009-05-12T17:20:00.003-05:00

In Social networking sites 'changing children's brains', Baroness Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, talks about potential physiological and behavioral impacts of social networks on developing children. It would be consistent with the other ill effects of our contemporary lifestyle. Video games have contributes to empty parks and overweight children. Email has contributed to the virtual death of the letter. And our constant push to overproduce at work has made family time a rare event.

Like it or not, life is not what it was a generation ago. But like everything else, you have to take the bad with the good. I am now in touch with people I would never talk to if it were not for Facebook. And I am happy to say I wrote a letter, with actual handwriting, a few weeks ago. The first one in several years.

Restore Products

2009-04-23T09:48:00.003-05:00

This is a really cool company trying to do it's part to reduce plastic bottles in the environment. They were selected by BusinessWeek to be a finalist in a campaign to highlight businesses trying to solve societal problems. Check out the site. Buy the products. Use less plastic. And vote for them in the BusinessWeek campaign before April 26th. Just follow this link.

restoreproducts.com

Slow but sure

2009-04-08T08:54:00.004-05:00

Sometimes it feels like client adoption of a digital mindset will never happen. It helps to remember that not everyone is as savvy or trusting of digital, especially social media. It is, after all, a relatively new development. A colleague shared an Ad Age article with me this morning that helps put it in perspective. In How Embracing Digital Can Change Corporate Culture executives from Pizza Hut, Best Buy and Delta talk about their experiences implementing a more digital approach and the benefits they are seeing from it. Changing corporate culture can be a slow process. Proving the benefits of a digital approach will help you get there.

Alex Steffen

2009-03-02T17:17:00.003-06:00

I have been watching video of some of the talks at TED lately. While all of these talks are inspiring, Alex Steffen's talk caught my attention. Alex is the Executive Editor at Worldchanging.

Fuel

2009-02-17T10:42:00.003-06:00

This looks like it will be interesting. Controversial for sure but interesting none the less.

Here is the site for updates if you are interested.

Social media dos and don'ts

2009-02-16T09:20:00.002-06:00

Read an excellent post today on the Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing. Very solid assessment. Loved the way they summed it all up at the end.

"If nothing else, remember that social media is about the C’s: Conversation, Connections, Community, Consumer, Control, Creative, Collaboration and Content. Do: listen, be transparent about your intentions, “Give to Get” and have a plan. Don’t: Be fake, interruptive and focus only on short term sales."

Twitter Bowl?

2009-02-05T09:13:00.003-06:00

Although Twitter can be a great tool for customer research, sometimes it is just fun. Take a look at what The New York Times did with Twitter Chatter During the Super Bowl.

Does social media have a place in B-to-B?

2009-01-30T10:28:00.002-06:00

This is a common question. People think of social media as a leisure time activity and in that context it is difficult to see it's application in a B-to-B situation. The reality is that social media is all about communities of people organizing and supporting each other around areas of common interest. The customers of a B-t0-B company inherently have common interest and therefore social media is a great way to communicate with them.

Paul Gillin takes on this subject in his post B-to-B Social Media: Yes, You Can!. Paul is an insightful voice in the social media world and worth following.

Connecting the dots

2009-01-24T13:38:00.007-06:00

I got home from work last night and had a few minutes to kill before dinner. I decided to go online and check out a friends delicious profile to see what he found interesting this week. The first link I clicked on was for an entry in The Official Google Blog titled Back to the energy future. The post told the story of President Jimmy Carter's installation of a solar powered water heating system on the roof of the White House and President Ronald Reagan's subsequent removal of the panels.

A link in the post took me to the site for A Road Not Taken, a movie about the story where I watched the trailer that you see in my last post here. Because the video is housed on YouTube, I was able to easily include it in this blog.

Although there were many steps in this process, it all happened in a few minutes. This is another example of how powerful and organic online word-of-mouth marketing can be. Without delicious I would not have seen Google's blog post. Without the video on YouTube I would not have been able to easily share it here on this blog. This cycle plays out thousands of times every day. The trick is to figure out how it all fits into your companies communication strategy.

A Road Not Taken

2009-01-23T20:16:00.003-06:00

We started down the right road once before. Now we seem to be heading in that direction again. Let's make sure we keep it up this time.

More on Twitter

2008-12-26T15:16:00.002-06:00

As I pointed out in the last post, using social media for marketing is less about the big idea and more about really engaging your customers on their terms. In his latest post, David Meerman Scott made a similar point.

David expressed concern about companies that "just prattle on about their products and services all day". I could not agree with him more. The first step in any social media effort should be to listen to the conversation. Then you can begin to add to it in a meaningful way. Companies who use these platforms in a self-serving manner will at a minimum be ignored by the people they are trying to reach and could potentially cause damage to their brand.

David Meerman Scott wrote the book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, one of the best books I read last year. You can follow him on Twitter too.

Twitter insight

2008-12-24T13:21:00.006-06:00

Last week I gave a presentation to one of our clients on what social media is and how it is being used by businesses. Part of this presentation was a slide on best practices. I had to cite myself as an example of what not to do for my neglect of this blog over the last few weeks. I apologize for being absent.

In the process of gathering examples for this presentation, I came across a rather interesting insight from @zappos. The online retailer had tweeted "I think lots of marketers have trouble understanding Twitter b/c they try to be interesting rather than try to be interested." This is an important insight because it perfectly sums up the leap in thinking that businesses and marketers have to make before they will truly be successful in social media.

Having worked in agencies for quite a while now I can tell you that there is a lot of energy put into figuring out the "big idea". The reality of social media is that listening to your customer and responding in a way that is valuable to them is the big idea. There is for sure a place for conceptually driven marketing communications and they often can be a powerful component of a social media campaign. But if you are simply creating cool content and not talking to your customers in a two-way conversation, it is not social.

The momentum grows

2008-12-02T09:24:00.002-06:00

If you are familiar with their Social Technographics construct, you know that they break online adults into the categories of Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. For more on this see Forrester's presentation on Social Technographics Defined. Overlapping the demographic of the audience you are talking to with these categories to gauge participation levels is a valuable technique for determining where and how to engage in social media. Try it for yourself using Forrester's social Technology Profile Tool.

This past October Forrester released a report on The Growth of Social Technology Adoption. This report updated the 2007 Technographics data with new 2008 data. The growth is very dramatic. The report showed that one in four US online adults is active in social media. Spectators (those who consume social media content in some form but may not necessarily create content) increased from 48% to 69%. A large part of that growth is coming from older people. Even among 45 to 54 year olds only 28% are inactive according to Josh Bernoff in his blog post on the new data.

So even though you knew this social media thing was something that you would have to get into at some point, maybe after it had a chance to develop a bit more and someone figured out how to leverage it for business, the news is that today is that day. Your customers at there now and if you are not you are losing the race. It is really that simple.

Staying young

2008-11-28T16:04:00.002-06:00

I was discussing the video from my previous post, Why we can't keep up, with a co-worker and as we were speculating on the impact of our ever accelerating and fragmenting world, he commented that it just proves that you have to stay young. Now, I'm not that old, but I am old enough to know that I can't (and don't really want to) stay young. But the more we discussed it, the more I realized, we had taken the same thing from the video but used different words to describe it. My colleague refers to it as staying young and I refer to it as staying passionate.

The net is that in a world as fast paced and information overloaded as this one, you really cannot keep up. You have to become really good at filtering. And when you filter your information, you will automatically filter out what you do not care about and concentrate on what you have a passionate interest for. In the information rich world we live in today, we have a vast number of highly specialized resources to go to to feed our passions.

As a marketer, this is good news. In the old days (not really that long ago) you could reach a massive audience by leveraging a relatively few media venues to deliver your message. Now, it has become more difficult to reach that massive audience because they have scattered themselves across the ever increasing number and types of media out there.

So why is this good news? Because now you don't necessarily have to reach that massive audience. You can have just as big an impact on your bottom line by reaching a highly targeted audience with a highly relevant message. Plus it is easier and cheaper to do it by tapping into the communities of specialized interest that exist today. If you can reach ten people and sell to four of them it's better than reaching a thousand and selling to two.

Then, as the social part of social media kicks in, the benefit is amplified. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace (and many others) were built to enable people to connect with each other and share information. That is why those people are there. Say you connect with ten people online who like your brand, product or message enough to tell their friends. And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on. The message is now that much more credible, because it comes from a peer and not a company, and can reach an exponentially larger audience. That is why it has to be a relevant and valuable message. You have to ask yourself "is this something I would pass on to a friend?".

This is what excites me about my job, the opportunity to create really meaningful connections between brands and their customers. It is no longer about the message. It's not about the big idea. It's all about creating relationships, adding value, solving problems and listening when your customers tell you what your brand is to them.

So, at first I was a bit depressed after watching the Did You Know video. It can be overwhelming. But you don't have to keep up. Just follow your passions and you will get all the information you need.

My obsession with Groundswell explained

2008-11-22T14:22:00.001-06:00

Those of you who know me know I spend a lot of time talking about the book Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li. I wanted to use this post to explain why I think this is an important book.

If your work is helping clients plan and implement digital marketing programs than you have undoubtedly heard someone say something like "We need to start a blog because our competitor just started one." or "Our CEO read an article about a company that achieved great ROI with a viral video, can you do that for us?" It wasn't until attending a webinar where Josh Bernoff outlined the POST process that I was able to combat this kind of thinking.

POST, if you have not read the book, stands for People, Objectives, Strategies and Technology. Following this process ensures that your solutions will be grounded in the answers to the critical questions a) who is my audience and how are they currently using social media? and b) what are the objectives I am trying to achieve with this initiative. Josh outlines this process in his post, The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy.

I have found that using this construct to explain a strategic approach to social media has not only helped to make the work we do more targeted but also to more efficiently educate clients about social media and execute more work.

Groundswell is full of great case studies and presents and easy-to-read, clear perspective on the hows and whys of social media. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it.

Why we can't keep up

2008-11-20T10:19:00.001-06:00

I got this video in an email today. As if we needed evidence that the world is changing at an ever increasing pace. Very interesting.

Ever hear of T. Boone Pickens?

2008-11-19T16:08:00.000-06:00

In case you don't know, T. Boone Pickens is an oil man with a plan to break US dependence on foreign oil, "Pickens Plan". He has launched a media campaign to build a groundswell of public support for his plan that includes a great deal of social media. The campaign has signed up over 1.3 million supporters and their social network, currently has 181,276 members. You can keep up with progress on pickensplan.com, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

I love this because it combines two of my interests, social media and renewable energy. With the proliferation of easy, cheap, do-it-yourself social platforms like Ning, and the success of campaigns like Pickens Plan and Obama '08, the writing is on the wall for the marketers of today.

Now, being a powerful brand is about listening to your customers, engaging them in a meaningful conversation and nurturing a strong relationship. This can pay big dividends as customers become fans and fans become advocates. Then, like T. Boone Pickens, you have a lot of people out there telling the world they should support your brand.