Resources | B2B Voices

Book Review: Empowered Is More Than Empty Words

Filed under Resources by Aaron Pearson on 11 April 2011 at 21:02 {one comment}

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler’s New Book Is a Practical Guide for Unleashing Social Innovation by Employees

I have one more book review post for a while – this one being Empowered, by Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. This is a follow up to Bernoff and Charlene Li’s well-known book Groundswell, and was published late last year by Harvard Business Review Press.

Let’s get right to it: I highly recommend this book. It’s the best one I’ve read in a while. It dispenses with “social media will save the world” hype and gets on with the very real-world challenges of just how to go about encouraging social media-led innovation in your organization. In fact, it’s more a guidebook for supporting any kind of innovation involving technology in this era of “consumerized IT.”

Bernoff and Schadler introduce the concept of HEROes – Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives, who are the key to helping stay ahead of the competition and keep up with your customers in the social era. You can shut them down or you can nurture them along. Obviously, we hope you opt for the latter.

Most of the social media books out there focus on how to connect with customers successfully via social networks. As important as that may be, those efforts won’t scale at a larger company without the support of senior management and IT. The focus on those internal dynamics is what makes this book particularly valuable. That leads to what the authors call the HERO Compact. In short, they note:

“IT is responsible for supporting HEROes with technology innovation, giving leaders the tools to manage risk, and scaling up successful solutions.

Managers are responsible for making customer-focused innovation a priority, establishing the governance structures to support HEROes, and working with IT to manage the business risk of technology.

HEROes are responsible for knowing what customers need, experimenting with technologies that solve customer problems, and operating within the safety principles established by IT and managers.”

Helpfully, they then provide a Pledge in the HERO Compact for each of those three audiences (e.g. IT will focus on technology innovation as a core skill so they can counsel HEROes when they come with technology ideas, etc.).

My favorite story was how HERO Rob Sharpe of Black & Decker sales training turned to YouTube to transform training on their products into an engaging, collaborative experience in which training time has been cut in half and the salespeople themselves are submitting a lot of the videos. Interestingly, the IT staff has learned from Rob and is now employing online video for their own training.

If you find yourself in a larger company with inevitable organizational complexity and in any of those three HERO Compact roles, this book gives you some great material for ensuring you are effectively moving innovation forward – quickly, strategically and safely.

Getting Your Degree in “Business Acumen”

Filed under Discussion, Resources by Allan Schoenberg on 31 January 2011 at 06:24 {12 comments}

When I was teaching at DePaul and Loyola the most asked questions by undergraduate students were: “Should I get my master’s degree and when?” I’m all for earning an advanced degree, and you will earn it if you decide to get one.

From my own personal experience, I believe earning my master’s degree in Communications Management from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communication made me a better business person (my undergraduate degree is in economics from Central Michigan University). Yes, it was a communications degree, but the degree was filled with business, finance and economics courses. What I realized from the program at Syracuse was up until that point I thought of myself as a communications professional of the business; when I left I understood that I was a business professional who managed communication. Those are two very different perspectives.

But the inspiration for this post came from a story I read in Computerworld recently titled, Should IT Execs Get MBAs? Ironically, three years ago CIO magazine had a story with nearly the same title. For those of you still thinking about an advanced degree these are both worthwhile articles to read.

But there are many ways to stay on top of what’s happening in economics and business ahead of getting your master’s degree (or even if you have one). Here’s a list of useful blogs and publications you should add to your RSS feed:

WSJ Real Time Economics The WSJ keeps this blog simple and timely. For example, you’ll get a run down of reactions from economists based on a key economic release usually an hour or two after it’s been announced. This is a very macro economic blog and will give you an edge in your next staff meeting since you’ll better understand the big picture. You can follow them on Twitter @WSJ_Econ
The Big Picture Barry Ritholtz’s blog is tough to keep up with. He’s posting lots of great information about business, social media, politics and economics. He’s a must read for many topics and you can often see him on CNBC. Add him to your feed and you’ll feel smarter almost immediately. You can follow him on Twitter @ritholtz.
Business Pundit This is a great blog with a number of posts on the world of business. You’ll read book reviews, get an analysis of key events, and of course the regular piece of humor. Some of their posts are unique and I find interesting, such as where to find jobs in today’s economy.
Carpe Diem Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan and his daily posts are wonderful at how to understand key economic indicators. You can follow him on Twitter @Mark_J_Perry
Marginal Revolution The about section says it all — two economists discuss the world and news.
MBA Mondays Venture Capitalist Fred Smith started this blog to help individuals interested in starting their own business. What he does well is break down many of the concepts taught in business schools. You can follow him on Twitter @FredWilson
Howard Lindzon Howard has become a good friend over the past few years through our partnership with his company StockTwits. He’s always looking at social technologies and the impact they have on business — and usually with a side dose of humor. Here’s an interview I did with Howard via Twitter. You can follow him on Twitter @HowardLindzon
Infectious Greed Paul Kedrosky always seems to find interesting pieces of information that I love to read. He brings a smart viewpoint to many things in the news. He’s on Twitter at @PKedrosky

There are many other blogs I read daily, but the ones above are some of my favorites. In addition, I suggest you read key publications outside of the field of communication. Three publications that I find useful include The Economist, CIO and CFO magazines. I like these three since they help you better understand what’s currently on the minds of executives: global economics/politics, enterprise technology and finance.

As for getting that degree, I always told my students the timing was their decision, but the answer to getting one was always a “yes” from me.

What about you? What do you read or find helpful that makes you a better business executive?

Book Review: UnMarketing

Filed under Resources by Aaron Pearson on 27 December 2010 at 22:45 {no comments}

It’s Sharpen the Saw Season, as Stephen Covey might say. Thus, my first ever book review. If things go well, three more are on the way this winter.

The subtitle of UnMarketing, by Scott Stratten, is “Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.” It’s not about social media marketing per se, but it does represent the new thinking about marketing and selling that is so epitomized by the way social media work. In other words, customers are in charge, not you, and your job is to make it easy for them to turn to you when they want to buy by establishing helpful, two-way relationships with them and forgetting the hard sell. There is particularly significant emphasis paid to customer service, both pre-sale and post-sale. Stratten pulls few punches, praising some companies by name and calling others onto the carpet.

End of the cold call, start of authentic relationships.

Who Should Read It: I would particularly recommend the book for small business owners, consultants and entrepreneurs – people who may have other jobs besides marketing and bring some perceptions about marketing that come from not being able to keep up on how the Web and social media in particular have changed consumers’ expectations of vendors. On the other hand, even sales and marketing professionals, especially in B2C, will benefit from some of the principles here.

What Really Works:

The Title. And by that I mean the overall concept. I’ve already talked up UnMarketing as a concept in a work discussion – it’s a great title and absolutely true. I like that it’s not a “Social Media Book,” but that social media is infused throughout. In the real world, as I’m always preaching, there isn’t online and offline, there’s only Inline – everything working seamlessly together.
Hierarchy of Buying. The author’s Hierarchy of Buying for service-based businesses is a useful organizing principle for UnMarketing. It puts cold calling on the bottom – “annoying 99 people in a row to potentially talk to someone who may hire you based on no trust and price alone” – and the power of current satisfied customers at the top, which is why current, happy customers, ergo great customer service is so important. I loved the anecdote about great service at Lush because it happened to me too.
Thought Leadership. While the tactical means to go about it isn’t as easy as the author implies for many industries and organizations (see below), I like the focus on establishing thought leadership as a means to build trust and a relationship with people well before they may be ready to buy.
Web Links: Many examples come with links to resources online – using bit.ly links to make it easier for those of us reading in tree format. Here’s a Domino’s Pizza franchise apologizing to a customer on video and here’s how an online billing outfit called FreshBooks makes fans.

What Doesn’t:

The book is written in the first person and all of the author’s examples are based on his own personal experience as a consumer, motivational speaker and social media activist. While the basic principles apply to anyone, when he gets tactical, especially in the second half of the book, I question the applicability of every approach.
Although he has some interesting anecdotes from big brands like Wal-Mart and Zappos.com, he assumes that “you” is usually “you” literally, not your company or brand and that you don’t have to manage any of the complexities of a larger organization. Again, the principles apply to almost anyone but the tactical details do not.
He starts selling himself more the farther into the book you get.

Bottom Line: If you are an entrepreneur starting a small business, read the whole book and you’ll have a leg up on the competition, unquestionably. If you work in sales, marketing, customer service or communications for a larger organization, I’d read the first few chapters and skim the rest.

`You can follow Stratten on Twitter at @unmarketing.

Almost Live from SocialTech 2010

Filed under Resources by Aaron Pearson on 25 October 2010 at 13:00 {no comments}

Well I’m on my way to SocialTech 2010 in San Jose, a conference put on by MarketingProfs. I promise a couple posts, possibly a video if the opportunity presents itself. The focus of the conference is B2B social media in the high tech industry, which is rather specific but the speaker line-up is good. While Guy Kawasaki, Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble are the headliners, I’m particularly interested in hear the thoughts of a few others down the list.

Laura Ramos, now at Xerox, drove Forrester’s Technographics research into B2B technology buyers (this year’s report here for subscribers). It was one of the more compelling pieces of research at the time that social media have an important place in B2B sales and marketing. She’s now vice president of industry marketing at Xerox managing verticals such as education, energy, financial services, high-tech and retail. Laura understands that there’s not going to be one marketing or communications tool – you need to recognize the role that each play in a buyer’s journey. She has a good blog at http://b2bmarketingpost.com/.

Laura will be joined on a panel with three others, including Michael Fauscette from IDC who, as group vice president for Software Business Solutions, oversees everything from ERP to cloud computing. One of the more interesting areas to me is the role of social media within the enterprise, which, it seems, still has a long ways to go. His latest blog post based on some new IDC research suggests there may be growing appreciation of the internal collaborative benefits of social tools.

I’ve spoken with Laura and Michael before, but haven’t met Brian Ellefritz, senior director of social media marketing at SAP. However, I’ve known about that company’s influencer relations efforts for a long time, since I spent several years managing an ERP account here at Weber Shandwick. SAP seemed to understand early on the needs of bloggers and other influencers, how their interests were similar and different to either traditional media or industry analysts, how ultimately they were opinion leaders for their customers and that’s really all that mattered. Hope to learn more about how they’ve advanced since then.

If you’re there, tweet me.

Channeling Your Inner CIO

Filed under Application, Discussion, Resources by Allan Schoenberg on 27 April 2010 at 10:27 {no comments}

Ever since I was introduced to CIO magazine several years ago I was immediately drawn to the similarities faced by both CIOs and chief communicators. Perhaps it’s just me, but I read CIO magazine not necessarily for the IT information (which I also enjoy), but with every article I substitute CIO with CCO or CMO. Go ahead and try it. Here’s one that recently caught my eye: From the CEO: 5 Questions CIOs Need to Answer.

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I’ve taken those five items and listed them here, but with viewpoint of someone in communications:

1. Do we understand what we broke, and what is our plan to fix it?

If you have the perfect communications team than you can skip this point. If not, keep reading. Most discussions with CEOs revolve around helping the business and with communications that’s no different. CEOs always challenge us to improve, to be better than the competition and to find solutions to win customers. This also can apply to your company’s reputation. How do your customers view you positively and where can you improve? These are issues CEOs look to us to fix.

2. How do we get full potential from discretionary spending?

How often do you review your budget and make changes? Are you maximizing that discretionary spending? And where can you improve your budget in order to help the organization achieve its business goals. In today’s economy in particular, CEOs want to ensure every department across the enterprise is getting the best return on investment. Are you?

3. How will we drive unnecessary complexity out of IT?

This point obviously speaks to complexities of software and hardware, but this still applies to communicators. Where is complexity in your department? Are you sharing metrics? Are you maximizing events? Is social media a cross-department effort? We all have complexities that we can tear out of our marketing and communication systems, but finding them and fixing them takes time and effort.

4. How will we take better advantage of “good enough” solutions?

Yes, your news release is good enough — you saw the stories. Your web site too since people are visiting. And I’m sure your advertising is good enough as well. But you’re competitive, right? What will you do to take the risks to really make your brand stand out? We all have a lot of “standard” communication tools available to us, and no where is this more evident than with social media. We all have these “free” tools but where are you excelling?

5. How do we make outsourcing more strategic?

That new agency you hired — are you tapping into their best resources? Do you go with size and depth of the big agency or lean and nimble from the small agency? These are key decisions we all need to make as the playing field becomes more competitive for us. If your agency isn’t constantly challenging you to do the right/best thing, actively reviewing your activities and asking you tough questions than maybe it’s time you need a more strategic partner.

I am a huge supporter of working as close as possible with your IT team (my earlier post on working with InfoSec) and I encourage you to work more closely with them as well. I think you will be surprised at the number of similarities. There’s an entire list of email newsletters available at CIO and I would encourage you to sign up and read CIO Leader and CIO Insider, but read them from a communicators perspective. I think you’ll find yourself thinking differently and developing some new ideas for implementing your strategy.

Let us know your thoughts. And if you happen to pass your CIO in the hall offer to take him/her to lunch. They can probably learn a lot from you as well.

Show me the CNNMoney!

Filed under Discussion, Resources, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 31 March 2010 at 11:47 {no comments}

Yes, I’m riding the coattails of Jerry Maguire, but when it comes to marketing and communication sometimes we really do need to show management the money. After all, they’re running a business and we need to help them do that — whether that’s driving revenue or building our reputation (Shannon Paul has a great post on this topic Social Media and the C-Level). One growing area where all of us in B2B communications continue to learn is in the area of social media, and sometimes I think we forget that showing good examples doesn’t mean we have to create them.

I blogged on B2B Voices last year about the value of StockTwits as an investor relations tool. Well, once again the team over there has given another example of how to show the value of Twitter to monitor what is being said. Last month the company partnered with CNN Money to integrate a real time stock conversation widget powered by StockTwits. Check it out for yourself - CNN Money Real Time Tweets.

There are some key takeaways from this if you are at an agency working for a publicly traded company or work for a B2B company this is a listed company:

1. You should create an account at StockTwits and learn how to use the platform. As a side note, I often find the StockTwits platform more reliable than Twitter or Tweetdeck.

2. Send the CNNMoney link to your investor relations team. While they may not be using Twitter or may think that StockTwits is a fad they should see the value in CNN Money as a key source for the impact of Twitter and real-time conversations. It may spark an interest from them and give you a way to leverage an internal relationship to promote your efforts. I mentioned why getting internal buy-in for social media is important last year.

3. Keep looking for outside sources and third parties to build into your communication plan. We have a great relationship with StockTwits and continue to work with them to meet our objectives. Who are you using?

What are your thoughts? Do you use StockTwits? Have you partnered with outside resources? Tell us your stories.

Finally, a comprehensive B2B social media study

Filed under Discussion, Resources by Allan Schoenberg on 25 March 2010 at 17:13 {10 comments}

I like studies and research. Maybe it’s the inner economist in me who likes to constantly explore behaviors. Maybe it’s because I like to read various points of view. Or maybe it’s just because I’m always curious and trying to learn.

One thing I continue to notice is the lack of B2B research available on social media. That’s why it’s refreshing to read this study from Business.com entitled 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study. Written by Ben Hanna of R.H. Donnelley Interactive , It’s a very comprehensive look at social media from 3,000 North American professionals who are using (or not using) social media and why. You can download your copy here after you register.

The study isn’t breaking news (it was released in November 2009), but it clearly focuses on what I want to know. In fact, here’s a listing directly from the report as to what you will learn:

To what social media sites do business people turn when seeking the information they need to do their jobs on a day-to-day basis? And what are they looking for?
What do people consider to be the most useful social media resources for business information (and, therefore, the most valuable social media sites on which B2B companies should participate in order to reach their target audience)?
What are the most popular types of social media initiatives among B2B companies, and is the impact of these initiatives visible in business results?
How do B2B companies judge social media success?

[Source: Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study (http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study)

I won't give away any surprises, but all of us at B2B Voices would be happy to discuss in the comments section your thoughts. In the meantime, you can follow Business.com on Twitter and read their blog here.

Business.com's 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study

Using Social Media in the Banking and Financial Sectors

Filed under Resources by Kate Brodock on 9 November 2009 at 21:10 {10 comments}

Allan wrote a post in July on building a social media marketplace in financial services. There have been a few posts in recent news that highlight this issue of using social media concepts and tools in the banking and financial sectors, so I thought I’d take a moment to highlight a few.

Banks & Social Media – Will Slow & Steady Win the Race? (B2B Bliss) “It’s clear social media is changing the industry. But, engagement is a different story. Regulations and compliance issues still hamper many banks from embracing the truly “open transparency” social media requires.”

5 Ways Banks are Using Social Media (Mashable) “By embracing the most popular tools available, the industry has also been embracing the best of what social media culture has to offer, and smaller, community banks seem to be leading the charge when it comes to social media innovation.”

Integrated social media + financial marketing (The Financial Brand) “The Financial Brand sat down with Tim McAlpine, president and creative director of Currency Marketing, to talk about integrated social media marketing for financial institutions.”