About aaronpearson


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aaronpearson has written 41 articles so far, you can find them below.


There’s No Such Thing as B2B Social Media

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by on 23 July 2010 at 12:45 {4 comments}

A group of us here in the office have been having some discussions lately about our digital and social media capabilities in the B2B social media space.  If you work in an agency, you know how it goes – the big, splashy, sexy B2C stuff tends to get all the attention. After all, they have Ashton Kutcher. We have engineers, analysts and ROI models. We had a diverse group of pros in the room – a former technology analyst, several people from our financial services practice group, one from our tech practice group (me) and the head of our digital and social media team here – and so it’s not surprising that we started talking about what we even meant by B2B social media.

I came upon a realization that I think was shared by others there, that the concept is so broad as to be all but

Tower of Babel
Image via Wikipedia

meaningless. Maybe that’s self-evident but there are some consequences borne out of that realization.

What might come to mind when I say, “B2B social media”? Customer service? Social CRM? (social BPM, Social BI, etc. yikes!) Online lead generation? Online crisis management? Customer community development? Thought leadership? Brand building?  Influencer relations?  Corporate social responsibility?

You see where I’m going. If all of these areas indeed fall under the rubrick of B2B social media, then it doesn’t mean a whole lot. It also means it’s going to be difficult to avoid Tower of Babel misunderstandings, turf wars, ineffectiveness, and of course expert consultants with expertise in entirely the wrong areas for many B2B social media “initiatives.” After all, any B2B social media expert is unlikely to have deep expertise in more than 40% of those areas given their diversity.

Eventually, we will stop talking about social media and just go back to talking about media channels and communication programs that use a varying mix of them according to the business objectives to be achieved. In the meantime, two recommendations come immediately to mind as you sort out your B2B social media strategies.

Prioritize: We recommend as a best practice the formation of a social media council formed with a balance of people from across the organization with a stake in your company’s social media success. The first question that group should be asking itself is, “What really brought us together?” And you need to go deeper than, “We have to get our social media house in order.”  Agree on what you mean by that – what threat-oriented and growth oriented issues brought you here. Don’t “boil the ocean.”

Don’t Hire B2B Social Media Experts: You may then decide you need outside help, in the form of hires or relationships with consultants or agencies. You are not looking for a B2B social media expert. You are looking for something more specific: someone with expertise in one or more critical areas such as online crisis management, community building, blogger relations, search engine optimization and lead generation, community relations, etc.

You can all tell me if I’m off base. I’m interested in what you all think here.

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Research Firm Updates Business Technology Buyers Report: Social Media On the Rise

Filed under Discussion by on 3 June 2010 at 13:14 {one comment}

I’m a little slow on the uptake with this one but I wanted to flag Forrester’s report, “Social Technographics: Business Technology Buyers,” which came out about a month ago (April 28) and looks at the social media habits of business technology decision-makers. Good quantitative research into B2B social media usage is fairly thin. If you have access to the full report, it’s worth a review.  Also a summary from B2B Online here.

It shows, not surprisingly, that penetration of social media continues to increase. For instance, 46 percent of business technology decision-makers have joined a social networking site for business purposes, compared with 29 percent in last year’s study. Of those, a third are “Creators,” which means they engage in activities such as publishing a blog, uploading videos or writing and posting articles. Forty-five percent are “Critics,” posting reviews of products or services, commenting on others’ blogs, or contributing to forums or wikis. (Obviously, individuals could select more than one category.)

On the other hand, the report suggests that the sexy public social media services like Twitter or blogs may not be helping B2B tech companies much, compared to information sources like forums and wikis. Moreover, traditional sources of information – your website (note, I am using the new AP standard, people), sales person, tradeshows, etc. – rank higher in importance.

This is a pretty good study, as the group surveyed numbers more than 1,000 across four countries, although the weighting has shifted from a bit more than half the respondents representing IT vs. line of business to more than 70 percent coming from IT. On the other hand, as with all studies like this, you don’t want to over-read the conclusions.

For one thing, people are notoriously bad at evaluating their own behavior.  Evidence: The Economist recently reported on a UK study of television and video viewing habits and found the public badly understated the amount of time they watched live television and badly overstated their use of online video.

The other concern is that the wording of the question (“Which of the following sources of information impact your purchase decision-making process?”) will understate the impact of the earlier stages of the purchase process.

Flickr via LawsonComm

Flickr from LawsonComm

I mentioned in my last post the concept of an “Awareness-to-Advocate Process Path” – the journey people take from being aware of a need to ultimately becoming a customer and advocate for your product or service and the different information sources they use along the way.  It generally starts with awareness of need, advances to understanding of product category that meets that need, then to a consideration set (i.e. a short list), ultimately to a selection, and if the customer has a positive experience, he or she ultimately becomes a brand advocate.

So where does Twitter have the most impact? Where do blogs have the most impact?  Given that they are good at making you aware of new issues, help you identify new experts, and perhaps make you aware of new brands, I’d say they are heavily weighted towards the front half of the Path. As a result, their influence may be less obvious.

It’s also worth noting that word of mouth was the most influential information source, which is consistently what every report I ever see shows. Let’s keep in mind that word of mouth is social media community-building gone inline – it can happen via email, Twitter or around a campfire. Prepare for them all. (hmm, camping trip as trade show…) Moreover, the best way for you to arm those word of mouth advocates will likely come from an inline blend of in-person events like conferences and digital connections like social media, even if they themselves influence future customers via traditional channels like phone calls, face-to-face meetings and email.

Finally, it goes without saying that IT people are different creates from line-of-business decision-makers and habits also vary by industry. It’s best to do your own research on your own target audience.

Measuring Outcomes in B2B Social Media – Part II: A Model

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by on 17 May 2010 at 06:56 {2 comments}

A few days ago, I blogged about the B2B roundtable we had here at Weber Shandwick Minneapolis, “Social Media and ROI: Dare We Talk About It?” And we did!

In that post, I summarized the first half of our message to attendees, which was that it was not a big deal to ignore ROI in our trial social media efforts of the past year because a small Investment required only a small Return. Now that we want to get serious and scale this, you better believe we need to talk about measuring real business outcomes.

But how do we do this?  A survey of our attendees showed most simply didn’t know where to start. Interestingly, Jim Estell blogs here that you can’t measure ROI for marketing at all, much less for social media, because it’s too complex. I’ll be the first to admit the proof of impact isn’t always definitive but if you’ve done the research to know your audience well, then this is certainly a do-able task in B2B because there is typically a defined purchase process where our efforts can have a clearer impact.

We have a measurement model for communications in general and it works for social media too.  (In other words, if you can measure business outcomes impact for any sort of marketing communications effort, you can certainly do it for social media. ) It’s called ARROW (see our little graphic).

ARROW Model for Communications Measurement

ARROW Model for Communications Measurement

A = Activities. These are the things we generate. In social media land, that includes blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos or simply the number of web properties we are maintaining.  They get at a measurement of effort. On their own, however, they are meaningless.

R1 = Reach. Essentially number of eyeballs of our target audience we are reaching. We may measure this by Twitter followers or Facebook “friends” or blog page views. Important, but are we changing how our target audiences thinks or behaves?

R2 = Relevance. We sometimes use the word Resonance too. We want to measure that a message got through to our audience and that it connected with them. Relevance measurements can include key messages in third-party blog posts or tweets, number of retweets, blog comments, increases in site traffic or click throughs on a corporate blog to resources on your web site. Still not a business outcome.

O = Outcomes. Ideally, this is when our audience enters the sales pipeline in some way by requesting information or registering on your web site (i.e. becomes a lead) or when you sell more stuff, or when the quality of your leads improve or when your sales cycle shortens.

W = Any of the measures above divided by cost.

Ultimately, the goal is to find a corrolation between reach/relevance measurements and business outcome measurements. We are looking at evidence that the reach and relevance measures are in fact creating a better environment in which to sell. Don’t stop at measuring ARR!

If, despite a significant investment in marketing communications or social media efforts, no corrolation can be found, then you are right to question whether your dollars are being put to good use. What we’re looking for in choosing our reach and relevance measurements is whether or not they are precursors to ROI. How do you know?  Well, you can take the trial and error route to see if there are any corrolations, or better, you can conduct some good audience research before launching a major social media campaign to define what I’m calling the Awareness-to-Advocate Process Path, the average compositive path a prospect takes from awareness of the product category or your brand to being an advocate for your brand. That research significantly helps mitigate your risk of making a big investment in a program that delivers no return.  You still must measure the result to determine the strength of the impact.  More on that in another post!

Measuring Outcomes in B2B Social Media – It’s Time to Start

Filed under Discussion by on 10 May 2010 at 00:55 {7 comments}

About quarterly, we host a group of about 15 marketing and communications professionals at our Weber Shandwick Minneapolis office to discuss issues related to B2B digital and social media issues. We held our most recent one a couple weeks ago, “Social Media and ROI: Dare We Talk About It.” Yes, I’m just getting around to blogging about it now, but it’s worth highlighting.

Prior to the roundtable discussion, we asked them all to fill out a short, rather unscientific online survey just to give a sense of where they were at collectively regarding measurement – especially the ROI kind – and social media. Most of them participated.

For the record, the group represented a variety of industries – high-tech, executive education, advertising, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. Most of them are now employing social media of one kind or another – often with blogs or LinkedIn, with Twitter emerging. And the number one challenge they’re having with measurement? Where to start.

Nobody should feel bad about this. For most B2B companies – especially those who don’t use the Web as their primary sales channel (i.e. e-commerce) – the last year or so has been a period of experimentation and cultural adaptation to social media mores. It’s been very much about reassuring senior executives, corporate counsel, IT executives and many others that this transparent, two-way, personal and highly responsive way of communicating with stakeholders need not put brand equity at risk, threaten the company with lawsuits, destroy productivity or endanger intellectual property. Whew, with all that to worry about, it’s tough to focus on what social media CAN do!

So our message to our attendees, and to you, is this:  When you are in test and trial mode, you are generally investing few resources – whether people or hard costs. If there’s insignificant Investment, we don’t need to work very hard to justify Return. But that party is over. The saying goes that you should “measure what you treasure,” and realizing significant results from adding sophisticated digital and social media programs to the communications mix will cost money. It’s not fair to expect the company to just hand it over.

And I wouldn’t be satisfied with the “You don’t ask for ROI on the phone system, do you?” argument. That might fly in boom years, but it’s an invitation to get your budget slashed in a tough one. How many of you were installing sophisticated new phone systems in the last recession? Not many. And we know how damaging it can be to stop a social media program once we start one.

Up Next From Me:  “Getting Started.”  (hint: social media measurement isn’t fundamentally different than measuring outcomes for any other communications program)

The slides from our discussion are posted here.

Looking for the Method Behind Your Competitors’ Madness

Filed under Soap Box by on 5 April 2010 at 12:16 {no comments}

I recently finished an extensive social media analysis of a client’s competitors recently to help inform the client’s go-forward digital strategy. It was undeniably a valuable effort, an interesting look at who’s using Facebook, who’s using Twitter, who’s getting audiences to engage, who’s not.  Not only do I recommend it but the research gets even more interesting when you revisit it every six months or so.

In this case, I paid particular attention to the client’s largest competitor, a company’s that’s diving into social media aggressively – YouTube, bloggers, live tweeting, Facebook, everything. It’s clearly a well-orchestrated effort guided by a team of dedicated individuals that are also connecting the social media effort to a broader traditional media campaign. It was very effective in getting the client’s attention.

The other companies were tapping one or two social media channels, some with some apparent success – or at least they were generating a fair amount of activity.

But what do you do with this information?

I would offer that compared to competitive research around other components of the competition’s communications strategy (advertising, media relations, trade shows), you ought not to read too much into some of this competitive social media activity.

The fact is, there is a distinct chance that your competitors might be flying without a flight plan, hoping that by getting some social media initiatives off the ground, they’ll arrive somewhere of consequence. It may be tough to know the difference between a well-planned social media strategy and program with  no real strategy at all. So you may be looking for lessons that aren’t there. In fact, odds are your competitors are leaving gaps in their strategy that you can exploit – that may be the most valuable part of the effort.

The biggest issue I’m seeing right now with larger B2B companies is they are able to generate a lot of activity – blog posts, tweets, retweets of the tweets by the personal accounts of everyone on the communications team, Facebook wall posts, even videos. After all, it only takes enough time and/or money to generate activity. But a lot of them – I’d say most – are getting precious little audience engagement in return.  I’d learn from those mistakes, look for where there are glimmers of engagement, and then do better. Be creative on the backs of the failures of those that went before.

In fact, in that study I recently completed, it was one of the smaller brands that had the most intriguing success. Whether purposefully or by luck (but what difference does it make?), this was the one and only brand that managed to accumulate piles of fan posts on their Facebook pages – heartfelt posts of their memories of this nostalgia brand that reinforced that company’s brand positioning beautifully. Facebook was the perfect channel for sharing recollections of their experiences with this brand. They were capturing a sentiment and helping advocates share their stories in a way other competitors could not because their brands stood for something else.  I liked that kind of sustainable differentiation.

Until social media grow up, creativity counts for a lot. That said, competitive research is imperative – if nothing else to tell you what NOT to do.

Weber Shandwick’s SocialPulse capabilities can handle almost any competitive research challenge. As an example, here’s a study we published on the Twitter habits of Fortune 100 companies.

Social Media Won’t Kill Your Brand – Just Be Strategic

Filed under Discussion by on 4 March 2010 at 21:07 {3 comments}
I wanted to respond to this video from Loren Feldman at 1938 Media, at least from a B2B marketing standpoint. It’s provocatively titled, “Social Media Will Kill Your Brand,” though that isn’t quite what he says.  His premise, however self-serving, actually seems to be that a) social media is only a tool, and b) if you’re driving traffic to Facebook or some other place, you’re not driving traffic to the web site your brand owns, and therefore you’re letting that social network control your brand.

To be sure, Loren is right that social media is overhyped. I suspected we’d see the social media bubble pop a little in 2010 and in fact early signs give me confidence in that prediction. He contends that these various social network channels are just tools.  This is unquestionably true. We have not found a silver bullet to neverending sales and marketing nirvana, to solve all our customer relations challenges, to connect with all potential buyers through the magical bonds of Internet conversation. Yet read the breathless tweets and blog posts of many social media experts, and you’d think it were not so. Suddenly, the 4 Ps of marketing – product, promotion, place and price – have been replaced, as I’ve read, simply by People. It’s kind of an interesting concept (and 4 Ps as a concept is simplistic itself) but it isn’t true.

There’s no silver bullet, my friends.  Especially in business-to-business marketing, accept that different communications sources, different tools, each play a role in moving someone from need awareness through brand awareness and interest, through purchase, and hopefully brand advocate. Twitter might play a role somewhere along that journey, but Twitter isn’t a marketing strategy. A blog isn’t a sales strategy.  You need to start with a strategic assessment of your market opportunity and your competitive position and creatively arrive at an approach that will help you capitalize on that opportunity, and it’s at least conceivable that there’s no social media component.

But I doubt it, and this is where the video rant goes too far.

The fact is that social media should probably find its way into most B2B marketing programs in some way or another. Loren says, “If you are focusing so much on social media, you are making a big, big mistake.”  Now how does he know?  Just because it’s not a silver bullet doesn’t mean social media can  be discounted as a potentially critical component of the communications mix.   

I’m kind of skeptical of Facebook for most B2B environments because Facebook has generally become a place for personal and consumer conversations (though anyone doing B2C should note a real sales corrolation in this Harvard Business Review study resulting from a Facebook site). But it’s not because Facebook destroys brands. New BPO analyst firm Horses for Sources was able to launch itself this week in part because of its powerful 9,000 member forum of BPO experts and executives called The BPO and Offshoring Best Practices Forum.  It’s hard to see how using social media to better listen to your customer needs will send your brand off course.

Twitter is a little different in that it isn’t really a destination and, in my opinion, shouldn’t really be compared to Facebook. It’s a network of people exchanging information via scores of user interfaces and devices. They may not want to go to your web site. But they’re also not so cynical that you can’t establish trusted relationships with them through social media channels.  In fact, taking Loren’s argument to its logical extreme – that you should only work to drive people to your web site – it’s therefore a waste of time to secure a New York Times feature story profiling one of your customers because the traffic goes to NYTimes.com.

Here’s the big issue the video misses, I think: You don’t really own your brand anyway. A colleague of mine reminded me that it’s really customers and employees who own the brand. It’s true, and they can build it up, reinforce it, grow it, or tear it apart and show it to be lacking in integrity or value. Coming up with a brand message doesn’t make it true. Making a cool web site doesn’t mean your customer service is any good. If your employees think your ad campaign is full of crap, their silent abstention from supporting your big mega marketing campaign online will be deafeningly obvious. But if it rings true to them and to your customers, they will heartily, voluntarily reinforce it. Without even asking.

So let’s get over our breathless excitement over social media as marketing messiah, fine. But make no mistake, we can listen to customers and other stakeholders better than ever before, faster, less expensively. Customers can unleash their own power as advocates – or badvocates – far easier than ever before. That’s not something email marketing or Google Adwords campaigns can do.

Listening & Responding to Customers: Industries That Have Struggled Are Making Strides

Filed under Other Voices Interview, Uncategorized by on 28 January 2010 at 12:42 {9 comments}

A Q&A With Jeannie Walters, Founder, 360Connext

Jeannie Walters’s Chicago-based consulting firm specializes in the cornerstones of customer experience, including customer engagement, employee engagement and connections like social media. Before starting 360Connext, she spent 12 years at Vox, a customer experience consulting firm, eventually as President and Partner. Walters specializes in helping companies achieve more loyalty from employees, customers and prospects through improved experiences at every level.

Jeannie Walters, Founder, 360Connext

Jeannie Walters, Founder, 360Connext

I spent some time last week talking with her about the profound impact improved customer engagement can have in B2B, both in terms of strengthening existing business relationships and in unleashing those customers as word-of-mouth advocates for your brand.

Aaron: Talk a little about what you learned at Vox that reflects your priorities now at 360Connext.

Jeannie: A main focus for me has been around the customer experience, and typically no one person owns that function so it touches a lot of areas. Employee engagement is one of the easiest ways you can influence customer experience so that’s a big focus for me right now. For example there are a lot of companies right now that have laid off employees and you need to keep those remaining employees focused on the mission. The other area that’s really coming to life is social media to connect directly with customers, and that goes to both content and communication. But most customer initiatives don’t typically work, because it has to become a part of the organization’s culture.

Aaron: Changing culture is a very long-term process, right?

Jeannie: It is, but one step people can take is to really understand what your customer experience is right now. I’ve worked with large companies like Allstate and AIG and that’s a daunting effort. So you need to take it one piece at a time. For instance, look just at your social media strategy. Or just look at conversion rates online. Then take those learnings and apply them to the next piece and the next piece. Don’t expect a CRM system to be a magic bullet to [fully understand the customer experience].

Now my focus is more on midsized companies because in a lot of ways, you can move things a lot quicker, make changes easier. Oftentimes, midsized companies are still run by the original leader. They are often more passionate about the customer experience too.

Aaron: How do you engage employees in customer experience initiatives? It’s not just about the marketing and sales people, right?

Jeannie: The problem is we often focus on the salesperson relationship but often after the deal those people move on. So companies need to focus on retention as much as acquisition. All the money and resources go to acquisition or selling – making the sale. …

A lot of the [employee engagement problem] relates to hiring the right people and making sure they’re the type of people that solve problems and are service-oriented. Because if you get feedback from customers, you need people who are really prepared to respond.

Aaron: So what are some of the best practices in being responsive to customers?

Jeannie: Be very public about feedback and use it. There are some SaaS [Software as a Service] companies that do a great job of that. They say, “Customers, we heard from you and so we’re doing x, y and z” with our software. The other thing is kind of empowering employees to solve problems. Call centers are often incented to spend less time on the phone and that’s terrible.

Aaron: I’ve actually heard of call center workers purposely faking connection problems to rack up a bunch of short calls.

Jeannie: Yes it’s better for them if they hang up.

Aaron: Of course, it can be hard to find the resources for solving that caller’s problem right then and there, especially with complex products.

Jeannie: So you need to be realistic, about whether we can call you back for instance. At the end of the day, humans are reasonable. The rub comes in when the expectation comes a certain way and is not delivered. Cell phone companies are finally figuring out that service is what they do and getting much better at call center service.

Aaron: Talk about customer events. Do people use them well?

Jeannie: Social media has done a lot to promote events better and to help companies understand what customers are looking for. People want substance, and especially with complicated products, they want to understand how to make this work better for me, and another customer can help them understand that best. SaaS companies have also done a great job here by bringing together their power users to help [these other customers] and that’s had a lot more influence on the experience.

Aaron: It’s interesting that you keep bringing up SaaS companies – these are companies that realize they are service companies, not software companies, so it seems natural that they would really be focused on listening to and responding to the customer, true?

Jeannie: Absolutely true. Also, look at banks and how they used to be known for abusing small business clients. They took your business for granted and then realized people have more choices. Some banks have been strugging with family-run businesses because the clientele is dying off and they didn’t reach out to the next generation. I had a client who found their business customers had a relationship with their banker. So if the banker moved on, so did the business. In response, the bank started creating small business-focused events – forums for small business customers. AmEx Open Forum is an example of that. If you are an AmEx busines customer and carry an Open card, you get access to other entrepreneuers like yourself. The part of the pendulum swing that we’re in is exclusive memberships. I predict we’ll see more of that. People want to find the right people a little easier.

5 Ways to Combine Traditional & Social Media in B2B

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by on 3 December 2009 at 13:20 {5 comments}

I continue to be disturbed by the frequency with which social media is treated as this isolated specialty area, with the result inevitably being that social media messaging and strategy is cut-off from other marketing communications programs, leading to redundancy, mixed messages, wasted money and blown opportunities. I can’t speak for consumer products companies but in B2B I can only implore you to never go this route.

Instead, as I’ve preached before, our point of view is that a B2B purchase decision is an “inline” journey – that prospects using a mix of offline and online sources of information and influence to ultimately become a buyer and hopefully an advocate. As University of Pennsylvania sociologist Keith Hampton said in an article about the myth of urban isolation, “Online and offline life are inherently connected.”

handSo here are 5 thought starters on just how to do that:
1. Bring Offline Conversations Online. You’ll get more return on your investment in live gatherings of customers, prospects or influencers if you encourage online conversations to run in parallel. They will help engage people in live attendance more intensively, provide important contextual information (such as online videos or collateral that complement live presentations), and pull in a lot of people who otherwise couldn’t attend.
2. Be an Inline Thought Leader. Most B2B public relations campaigns have a strong thought leadershp component because when you’re making an expensive, complex purchase, you’re more likely to do so with a vendor with demonstrated expertise, not just because they’re running a “buy one, get one free” sale. Make sure your online thought leadership efforts are thematically in sync. One of our consulting firm clients targeting banks did this by complementing news releases and bylined articles (traditional PR tools) with online video interviews of subject matter experts and a Twitter presence that linked to both their own and third-party content that was topically consistent.
3. Activate Your Intelligence Network. Leveraging social media doesn’t just mean trying to connect with current and potential customers. It can also include creating an internal network or a partner network designed to facilitate intelligence gathering about competitors, sales trends or sales and marketing best practices. Tools like Yammer, Delicious, iGoogle and Radian6 can help and even more sophisticated ones are coming onto the market.
4. Ignite Advocates. Word of mouth remains the No. 1 source of influence in B2B, according to most of the research I see from Forrester and others. A lot of that is happening through pretty traditional channels – face-to-face, phone and email mostly. You can arm your advocates for those conversations by sharing information specifically designed to help them tell your story, via Twitter perhaps, or even a password-protected online advocacy toolkit.
5. Work With the Media – and Be the Media. We’re still going to be pitching stories and working with media and bloggers, but we can self-publish good content ourselves too and the evidence is that good content will be embraced even if it comes from a vendor. For example, a vice president at one of my former clients covered their industry trade show with video and regular blog posts, and was included in an industry trade round-up story as one of the individuals “covering” the event. It gave a big boost to his blog traffic. As journalist A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is guranteed only to those who own one.” Now you can.

Toro Pioneers Influencer Relations to Grow Commercial Business

Filed under Case Study by on 30 October 2009 at 10:06 {2 comments}

“We like to joke that we make tall grass short,” says Michael Happe, vice president and general manager of the Commercial Division at Toro Co.

In fact, caring for turf is a lot more complicated than that – and critically important – when you’re a golf course or a stadium. These commercial customers seem to recognize that and reward Toro with about a 10 percent premium for many of Toro’s products because they appreciate the ways Toro can help make their turf just a little bit better and deliver better TCO. Happe told members of the Business Marketing Association here in Minneapolis this week that such customer loyalty has ultimately been created through strong multidimensional relationships built over many decades.

Clearly, “social networking” predates Twitter and Facebook.

Toro equipment at St. Andrews - courtesy Toro Co.

Toro equipment at St. Andrews - courtesy Toro Co.

Happe considers People to be the “mysterious fifth P” of marketing but it’s clear that it’s not just a trite saying. I was actually rather fascinated to learn the degree to which Toro leverages influencer networks to grow their business. My firm, Weber Shandwick, has partnered with Community Analytics to help clients quickly identify influencers that matter, but Toro has nurtured its own

network over a long period of time, and it’s delivered business results.

Golf is Toro’s biggest business and they’ve been serving it since courses motorized horse-pulled reel motors in the 1920’s. Through the decades, the company has invested a tremendous amount of effort creating advocates from individuals that have never bought their products.

These influencers are people like golf course architects, irrigation designers, consultants, universities and associations. Toro has a corporate accounts person who spends nearly all of his time just on these influencers. They are an integral part of the Voice of the Customer process, with their own Toro-sponsored events, meetings and networking opportunities. As a result, when customers call trusted advisors for advice, inevitably these people tell them they can trust Toro.

Influencer relations for Toro is also about unleashing Toro experts to do more than selling. Some of the most important business development employees at Toro don’t sell equipment. Like Dr. Jim Watson, who became a go-to guy for Toro for nearly six decades whenever customers had turf problems. He helped the Chicago Parks Department solve an emergency turf issue at Soldier Field in the early ‘90s when they needed to lay new sod over sand without roots, two weeks before the first Chicago Bears game of the year. He advised the Chicago Parks Department that they could get through the season by cutting the sod several inches thick so it would stay in place during football play despite the lack of roots.

Or John Singleton, a Toro employee who for decades became the go-to-guy for irrigation issues for golf architects like Robert Trent Jones, and put this comprehensive service ahead of selling. They were successful because of their relationships.

Channel partners, ad agencies, market researchers – the way Toro engages with all these groups reflects the high value they put on deep, interdependent relationships.

Today, Toro has a leading share in the golf industry. The recession has been difficult and they’ve had to cut back on some of these efforts to make it through, but Toro’s CEO has been with the company for 32 years, knows what sustainable success requires, and has instilled it in the culture of the company. It’s a good reminder of the limits of quarter-to-quarter business management.

Use Storytelling to Draw In Customers

Filed under Uncategorized by on 2 October 2009 at 10:18 {no comments}

storytellingI realize that a business purchase is supposed to be a rational decision driven by the need to maximize net present value or achieve a high internal rate of return or return on investment or whatever. Sure, it’s just economics.

It’s not really that simple. For one thing, everyone has their numbers, so as a buyer, what gets my attention? Try telling stories.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist. How exciting do you suppose a lecure from Dr. Taylor would be on the mental and physiological effect of a left hemisphere brain hemorrhage?

You might be surprised. Watch this TED video.

It’s about 15 minutes long and you won’t want to turn it off.

Let’s take a look at why that is. First, it turns out that the subject having the hemorrhage is none other than Dr. Taylor. Our expert is suddenly vulnerable, a regular human being, not just a super-genius scientist, so we can relate to her. There’s very little jargon in her language (“A blood vessel exploded in my brain.”). There’s tension. A life is on the line. There’s even humor. Our hero pulls through and we learn something from the experience. Wow, awesome stuff.

If Dr. Taylor can make neurological disorders come to life for you, surely, surely you can find a way to make your software/business service/manufacturing system compelling.

I spent part of an afternoon this week watching some customer case study videos remarking on how hard it is for us in practice to employ storytelling techniques. Too often the formula is like this: 1. Business challenge. 2. Selected Vendor X for various reasons. 3. Implementation went well. 4. Business benefits.

That’s a very sensible, rational way to make a grounded business argument to invest in your product or service. But it’s dreadfully boring and won’t get anyone’s attention. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
1. Make a person the hero of your story, not an institution. It’s hard to feel like a multinational corporation is just like you. But that CIO or finance manager or supply chain manager is a human being. He or she has good days and bad days, loves the job sometimes and dreads it at other times. We can empathize.
2. Remember the setting details. It may not seem all that relevant when you’re collecting the information for your story, but noting the little things – like what the weather was like or what they ate for lunch or how people were behaving – can help pull readers into the story.
3. Tell the bad, then the good. You can’t jump right to the glorious solution. You have to make people worried at first that the bad guys might actually win. Just how grim was the situation? Suddenly, your solution looks like a glorious dawn after a horrible night and your audience will find themselves wanting to be a hero just like your customer was.

There’s certainly art to this, not just science, but principles of storytelling have stood the test of time and can be used not just by communications professionals but also by marketing and sales teams. In fact, we’ve trained scores of folks on how to get the most out of storytelling. Give it a try yourself, or give me a buzz if you need help.

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