World-Class Social Practices for B2B Companies

One of the themes of my writing about social business in 2011 has been that it is time to move beyond experimenting (though don’t STOP experimenting) to pursue social business endeavors that are meant to drive real business value. You can imagine what that means for 2012.  It means if you are not doing this by now, you are probably falling behind your competitors.

So it’s worth keeping an eye out for what those competitors are doing, especially the best ones.  Weber Shandwick recently conducted a study in conjunction with Forbes Insights to identify what makes brands social – and how. What was particularly noteworthy about the online survey (which was fielded this spring) was its global scope – 1,897 senior executives from larger companies across 50 countries in North America, Europe, Afria, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Executives were selected because their roles put them on the front lines of “brand sociability.”

From this, we were able to highlight what the industry leaders’ practices were compared to the average respondent. We called it the 9 Drivers of World-Class Sociability. You can read a full white paper on it here (and check out the infographic at the end), but I thought I’d pull out three of the drivers that have more resonance to B2B companies:

1. It’s Not the Medium, and It’s More Than the Message. It’s natural for us to get started in social and digital channels being enamored with the channels themselves. Do we need a corporate blog? Or Twitter? Should we try to build a LinkedIn community?  But the use of social channels has become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer notable whether you are using them but HOW you are using them. The message part speaks to the fact that one of the keys to that how is to focus on original content specifically for social channels. Forty-five percent of world-class companies do this, compared to only 28% of global companies in general. This is not necessarily easy or cheap but it is unquestionably the way you break through. I keep coming back to Cisco’s The Network as the B2B gold standard. They have editors as employees and a team of top journalists contributing articles to the site. They can pitch story ideas just like freelancers pitch magazines.

2. Listen More Than You Talk. And there is one audience in particular you should listen especially closely to – your customers. Social media can be great for this. World-class companies are 77 percent more likely to constantly monitor or research their fan pages to determine what their customers want from them than other global companies, and are nearly twice as likely to have changed a product or service based on specific recommendations from social network fans. If you are a B2B company with a big brand presence, like Oracle in enterprise tech or Intuit in SMB, you might be able to do much of that listening in public social channels. On the other hand, you can also construct an online community for your customers so they can better connect with each other and you can harvest product and service ideas more intensively. FICO has done this for some of its enterprise offering quite effectively leveraging a cloud platform, providing a user-conference feel all year round. But ask your customers first where they go to exchange ideas and information before embarking on such a project. It’s much easier to go where your customers already are.

3. Count What Matters – Meaningful Engagement. Business-to-business marketers know it’s about effectively reaching the right high-value customers and building deep relationships with them, and not about reaching a million poorly targeted people. After that trade show, you don’t treat every lead the same. It’s no different on social channels. It’s one thing to get someone to follow you. It’s another thing entirely for them to engage with you in a way that demonstrates either brand loyalty if they are an existing customer or readiness to buy if they are a prospect. We need to focus a lot more on these folks. And keep in mind that metrics can be very misleading because a highly respected influencer writing a positive blog post is a lot more valuable to you than a similar post from someone with little credibility.

Of course, that’s not an excuse to avoid metrics but emphasize those that point to engagement and ultimately ROI. World-class companies, for instance, are much more likely to use the number of contributors to their online communities as a key metric, not just page views. They are more likely to look for ways to measure revenue contribution, sales conversion, reduced call volume and other metrics that point more closely to ROI. The average global company still relies primarily on page views.

Enjoy the infographic.

Based on a study by Weber Shandwick and Forbes Insight