June 18, 2009
BtoB Marketing's Response to Social Media: Have we Lost all Control and Impact?
Social Media for Business – Strategy First, Tactics Last
Amplify: Creating Positive Word of Mouth with Social Advertising
Paul Gillin, Social Media Consultant and Author of The New Influencers
If you’ve signed up for more than a couple of social networks, you’ve undoubtedly experienced the syndrome of seeing your mailbox clutter up each morning with notifications about messages, invitations or comments you’ve received from other members. This deluge can become so annoying that you may simply choose to relegate many of these notices to the black hole of your spam filter.
Welcome to the dirty world of the early social Web, a time of chaos and incompatibility that is stifling the real utility of these marvelous new networks.
If you’ve been around for a few years, you may remember a similar state of affairs from the pre-Web days. Back in the early days of electronic mail, users of CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy and other branded networks were unable to exchange e-mail with non-subscribers. Even after Internet e-mail had been broadly accepted, America Online clung to its members-only prohibition for some time in the foolhardy belief that it could force members to stay within the fold.
Today’s social networks suffer from some of the same limitations. Each has its own profiling system, internal messaging, collaboration systems and applications. Some aggregators like FriendFeed gather up member activity from multiple sites, but such services are mainly limited to collecting RSS feeds. There is no such thing as an integrated online profile.
This profusion of information smokestacks won’t last. Two competing standards – one from Facebook and the other from Google – are duking it out to create a standard single identity that travels with Web users. If you’ve signed in to Google and looked up your own name recently you’ve probably noticed that Google now prompts you to fill out a profile. This sketchy self-description is the beginnings of a broader reach by Google to make the entire Web into a social network.
In the socialized future, people’s identities will travel with them and their details shared selectively with others within their social network. Profiles will develop incredible richness as details of each person’s preferences, connections, memberships and activities are centralized. It will probably be a year or two before this concept begins to take shape. Regardless of whether Facebook or Google wins the standards war, the social network metaphor will become ubiquitous.
Social Colonies
Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang has called this next stage of evolution the "era of social colonization." Once every website takes on social network characteristics, the utility of the Web will change dramatically. We will increasingly rely upon the activities and recommendations of others to help us make decisions. Sites like Yelp, ThisNext and Kaboodle already provide a rudimentary form of this functionality, but they are limited by their closed nature.
One social bookmarking service I use – Diigo.com – provides a glimpse of what the social Web may look like. Diigo (and a similar service called WebNotes) enables members to highlight and comment upon Web pages or passages and share them with others in their network. Visitors can read and add to existing comments in the same way that editors annotate and build upon a draft document. Imagine if the capabilities were expanded to include star ratings, multimedia, discussions and other interactive features. That’s when the social Web really gets exciting.
The ripple effects of this shift should be dramatic. Imagine a future in which your company homepage becomes a giant group product review. Forrester’s Owyang foresees a future in which marketing becomes oriented around customer recommendations. There will be no choice. Companies may lose control of the messages on even their own websites as visitors share their own impressions.
Owyang also believes companies will have to customize their Web experiences as visitors selectively share information about their interests and preferences. This information will become a kind of currency. We will grant brands and institutions selective access to information about ourselves in exchange for discounts and specialized services. The shift from mass to custom will take a giant step forward.
Today’s social networks are no more representative of the Internet of the future than Prodigy was of the Web we know today. These will be incredibly exciting developments to watch. We just have to get past the necessary evil of a standards war in order to appreciate them.
Author Profile
Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and content marketing consultant specializing in technology and new media. He has been a technology journalist for 25 years. His award-winning book, The New Influencers, was published in 2007 and his most recent book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, was published in late 2008. His next book, The Joy of Geocaching, will be published late this year.
BtoB Marketing's Response to Social Media: Have we Lost all Control and Impact?
Michael Gerard, Vice President Research, CMO Advisory Service, IDC
For decades marketing has been desperately trying to connect with their customers in a controlled, one-way fashion. We had control of the brand, all marketing content as well as the traditional channels that were used to communicate with the market. And even on occasion, we cautiously exposed our executives and engineers to our customers while all the time holding our breath that they didn't say the "wrong thing" that would hurt our image, costing us millions of dollars in marketing investment and countless hours including nights and weekends executing our marketing strategy.
It reminds me of a time when I was a product marketer in the semiconductor industry. I would visit customers quite frequently with our lead engineer. In one meeting this engineer exposed our greatest product flaw to one of our key customers. As I cringed in my seat, I expected the ROI from millions of dollars of investment into the brand value of this product to be instantly destroyed not to mention the lifetime value of this customer as they quickly switched to our competitors' products. To my surprise, the candor expressed by this sincere engineer did not doom our company's success at all. In fact, it was a key factor in gaining credibility with our customer, including serving as the basis for a joint discussion and future research to solve these problems in a collaborative fashion. This new problem-solving process served as a key differentiator for our products in a very commoditized market.
What's the connection? Imagine 100s or even 1,000s of your engineers, developers and/or product managers interacting directly with your customers through their own blogs, contribution to other blogs, interaction through Twitter or countless other social media applications. Sound familiar to anyone?... How do we stop this PR nightmare?... How do we control them?... How do we ensure that they stay on-message with our brand?... How can we review every bit of content that they put on the Internet? The simple answer is that we "don't" try to control them.
Not to say that we should hang up our marketing hat and make wine in Napa Valley. In this new social media model we need to devise new ways of helping our organization to best represent the company while keeping the needs of the customer at the forefront of our communications; and even better leveraging this new found connection to the customer. Some ideas include:
- Increase your resources dedicated to internal communication. We've always said that everyone needs to be a salesperson. With the new social media model, we all have to be marketers as well, more than ever before. [CMO Advisory Service clients should refer to a recent publication entitled Intel Launches a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Training Program for its Global Marketing and Sales Staff, IDC doc. #218416].
- Ensure that specific marketing staff are accountable for your company's social media strategy.
- Don't "control" the social media strategy, "guide" it (e.g., evangelize, train, share best practices).
- Provide the infrastructure for your social media "ambassadors" to communicate and interact with your markets (e.g., social media applications/platforms, basic guidelines for communications).
- Integrate social media across the organization's existing efforts.
- Develop private communities for customers to provide a self-serving environment for peer-to-peer interaction, as well as providing a great source of voice of the customer for product improvement and new product development.
- Establish public communities on your web site to share insight into new solutions for customers' challenges; and contribute to other communities (no one will go to your party if you don't go to theirs).
- Integrate on-line and in-person social networking strategies (e.g., facilitate collaboration for an in-person event amongst prospects and clients before (on-line), during (in-person) and after (on-line) the event.
- Include social media as part of the overall marketing mix [CMO Advisory Service clients should refer to a recent marketing mix study entitled 2009 CMO Tech Marketing Barometer, IDC Doc. #217640]
- Ensure that your social media strategy aligns with your customers' needs. For example, relevant content from independent sources continues to be the greatest magnet for attracting our customers' attention. Ensure that your communities remain on target to your customers' needs.
- Don't forget performance measurement. Sample metrics for measuring the impact of social media include: customer satisfaction and retention, marketing reach and engagement (e.g., click-thrus, time spent on-site, more qualitative insight such as types of conversations).
Taking a more strategic perspective to leverage the power of new social media channels without stifling their potential will enable marketing to significantly increase its impact on the organization.
Author Profile
Michael Gerard is the VP, Research for IDC’s Executive Advisory Group (CMO Advisory Practice and the Sales Advisory Practice). His Technology Marketing Blog is available at http://www.techmarketingblog.blogspot.com/.
About the IDC CMO Advisory Service
The CMO Advisory Service provides senior marketing executives and their operations counterparts with critical research and insights to plan program and people investments, prepare marketing operations, mobilize resources, and measure results. Subscribers to the Service are invited to join the Marketing Operations Leadership Board which meets three times per year. Board meetings provide marketing operations (MO) managers with the tools, research, and peer-to-peer access to develop successful operations and improve efficiencies within their marketing organizations. To learn more, visit http://www.idc.com/eagroup/cmo.jsp.
Social Media for Business – Strategy First, Tactics Last
Elyse Tager, Founder and Principal, Elymedia, LLC
Twitter, Flickr, Facebook – It’s very tempting to jump in and start playing with all these fun tools. Twitter is great fun – the challenge of keeping a post to only 140 characters. Facebook is all about photos, games, fun and sharing, right? But social media plays an important role for businesses. But it is critical that a clear objective or objectives, be decided upon before embarking.
Social media is a marketing vehicle. Like any other marketing activity, it requires an objective, a well thought through strategy and last – the tactics to implement that strategy. Each organization might have multiple objectives that could employ social media. A few examples that apply well to social media are:
- Customer relations/customer service
- Crisis management
- Corporate reputation management
- Event management
- Lead generation/promotion/sales
- Internal communication
- Issues/advocacy/fundraising
- PR/pitching
Each media has its own culture and should be used keeping that in mind. LinkedIn is the most purely business oriented. Twitter, in my mind, tends to be the most demanding of authenticity. Because of its "real time" nature, followers are more tuned into timeliness and value of the content of Tweets and will tell you, and the world, if they don’t like what you have posted. With all of these sites, be very careful with the promotion/sales/lead-gen aspects. That concept is counter-intuitive to the social media context. Are you adding value with your products or services? Talk about that – don’t hard sell.
To just touch on best strategies for the major sites:
Twitter: Used for branding or reputation management, though leadership, events. The fact that it is short in format requires pithy, well targeted posts. The immediacy (think IM) is great for customer service, crises management and releasing timely PR oriented info.
LinkedIn: Very business oriented. The tone is usually not playful, and best used to form trade-related groups to share value and information for networking/leads/sales and events.
Facebook: A Facebook Page for business can be informative and playful. Examine your strategy and the positioning you want to take, and the voice you want to establish.
YouTube: Video only is great for demos, chronicling events, corporate branding. Many corporations are using video to show their lighter more humorous side. But product demos with a serious tone are perfect as well.
Flickr: if photos are part of your story, be sure to post them here, and tag them well.
A few more tips:
Profiles: Whether personal profiles or business, be sure to present the image you want to portray. These are branding opportunities, and many are combed by search engines, so keep your primary keywords and keyword phrases in the first few lines.
Update schedule: Be sure to maintain an ongoing and frequent updated schedule. Well-aged content does not speak well for a company or brand. Make it relevant, timely and post often.
Authenticity: The true difference between a social media strategy and your typical MarComm strategy is the lack of "corporate speak." Be sure, whatever your objectives, that your voice is from a real person speaking candid, real thoughts – not carefully crafted copy.
Engage: Social media is about creating community and entering into dialog, with your clients, prospects, fans and critics. Don’t let the conversation be pushed from your company to the outside world. Comment on blogs, invite comments on your content, respond to Tweets, keep the conversation going to establish and maintain your voice and credibility.
As you are putting together Q3 marketing plans, consider the place that social media will play. It should be some part of almost every company's strategy.
Author Profile
Elyse Tager is founder and principal of Elymedia, an online and traditional media agency that has worked with many of the world's most recognizable brands, from Microsoft to PowerBar. With 20 years of executive marketing experience in direct response and 10 years of Internet marketing experience, Elyse has gained a thorough understanding of both types of media and how they interact. This depth of experience and knowledge has benefited her clients as they strategize marketing objectives in both on- and offline worlds. Contact her at info@elymedia.com.
Amplify: Creating Positive Word of Mouth with Social Advertising
Amplify by IDG is a new suite of offerings enabling marketers to spark dialogue about their products within IDG communities (note: IDG is Network World’s parent company). As part of a strategic partnership with Social Media.com, IDG aims to unite marketers with products that make advertising social.
IDG’s Amplify services enable marketers to execute social marketing campaigns that can grow and generate word-of-mouth messages across multiple IDG media brands and within social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The ad units utilize three types of online relationships: friend-to-friend, peer-to-peer, and community-based. Marketers can stimulate conversations, obtain important feedback, and be closely aligned with a topic or event. IDG Amplify-based campaigns can also extend advertisers’ social marketing programs, enhance a brand’s equity through positive word of mouth, and deepen a consumer’s interaction with the brands and conversations they care about. IDG has developed tools to measure these interactions including audience engagement, viral distribution, and participants’ sentiments about topics and brands.
"IDG’s Amplify services take advantage of three key trends: IT advertisers increasing their spending on social media by 20% in 2009; staying agile by partnering with emerging market specialists; and providing the metrics that fuel advertisers’ heightened focus on ROI and analytics," said Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst at information industry research and advisory firm, Outsell, Inc.
In a survey of IT buyers (http://tinyurl.com/dcyc3g), 50 percent of the respondents said they participated in at least two social networking activities a month. Two-thirds of the decision makers spent slightly more than one hour per week on professional networking sites such as LinkedIn while almost half spent just under one hour per week on Facebook. The online survey attracted more than 300 responses last November.
"The buyer research matches the growing interest in social media among marketers," said Matthew Yorke, senior vice president, Sales and Marketing, IDG Communications. Yorke added: "We have credible, trusted media sites where the conversations can begin and spread. Paid media brings people to a place while social media prompts interaction that leads to accumulated value over time."
For more information on Amplify, including a demo, please visit the IDG Knowledge Hub.