SXSW: When Creative Content Projects Go Awry

Posted on 11 March 2013 by Aaron Pearson

Sometimes all you need is 15 minutes.

In a mini session at SXSW Interactive yesterday, Craig Peters, CEO of Awasu Design, provided some great tips to keep creative content projects (digital or not) on track. As this has become an increasingly important part of what we do in this era of branded content, I paid close attention.

The premise is this: We act like our clients (and even if you’re in-house, you most definitely have clients) know all about the steps involved in launching a website, developing a video, whatever. Why should they? And so then we’re surprised when we go through the wireframes in a roomful of people, and things start going badly. We may get the “product” produced in the end, but can be left with a sense that the overall engagement wasn’t what it should have been.

Complexity of the engagement story can vary. This example is fairly simple. Courtesy Awasu Design.

Peters, in “How Design Leads Set Up Projects for Success,” simply contends that we partake in a little storytelling for our own projects. Ever deal with “swoop and poop,” in which a well-meaning exec drops in on a project to provide that’s either off-base or inappropriate for the project stage? That doesn’t have to happen if you lay out the story of the project for all the stakeholders at the beginning, letting them know what’s going to happen and how we’re going to get there.

Of course, he has a couple tricks to help, which is nice. These include neat little one-pagers describing said wireframes and other parts of the project (why we do them, what’s going to happen, etc.) as well as a variety of timeline formats that visually and creatively tell the story of the engagement. I’ve provided samples here for your enjoyment.

One-sheet overview of a wireframe explaining what happens and why. Others can be created for stages like mock-ups or usability testing. Courtesy Awasu Design.

One more day for me! Love to hear your own SXSW experiences, either here or via twitter.

Aaron

SXSW: Vertical Communities Seeing Growth

Posted on 10 March 2013 by Aaron Pearson

I attended a SXSW session yesterday called “Professions Go Social,” which looked at how new profession-based social networks have emerged to extend B2B social networking beyond LinkedIn, moderated by Altimeter Group’s Rebecca Lieb. Some of the networks are doing quite well.

For example, Jay Hallberg, the co-founder of Spiceworks, said they have built a community of more than 2 million SMB IT pros, supported by 1,500 advertisers. Spiceworks designed a very user-friendly place where these pros can talk to IT vendors about what to buy, and also talk among each other. It’s sort of an iTunes for IT. Hallbert says there are no barriers put up to discourage IT pro engagement – no freemium tricks, no charge for charge for support, just totally free.

Another panelist, Kirk Simpson, is a co-founder of Wave, which makes small business financial software, but also launched the Wave Pro Network as a community for these professionals to connect with real professionals in accounting and bookkeeping.

One of the key points was that these specialized communities have been built with the unique workflows of their industries or professions in mind, something a LinkedIn can’t do. I had an opportunity to develop a proposal for a company that wanted to market to golf course superintendents, a niche community if there ever was one. Do they have their own vibrant online community? You bet they do, TurfNet! Their forum not only covers niche topics like irrigation system pressure monitoring, integrated with educational webinars, and with a mobile version for an audience often on the course rather than in an office.

The key with all these sites is to get to a point where a lot of pros feel like they need to be on them. From the in-depth conversations I had with golf course superintendents, I know Turfnet made it, and they actually use a paid membership model. Hallberg indicated that reaching three percent of the addressable workforce segment might be the point at which those positive network effects kick in.

SXSW: Consumerization of IT Trend Shows No Sign of Slowing

Posted on 9 March 2013 by Aaron Pearson

I was able to hit two sessions yesterday afternoon in the Four Seasons here at SXSW, apparently ground zero for us more sober “enterprise” types, one on enterprise mobile apps and one on gamification + Big Data (“datagamify”). What connected them, in my mind, is the consumerization of IT. This is the concept that employees are increasingly expecting their experience with technology in the workplace to be as simple, fun and engaging as their experience with technology in their personal lives.

Long crowds await the SXSW Interactive opening keynote.

Eric Lai from SAP observed that 80 percent of the Fortune 500 has adopted iPhones and 65 percent of them iPads. Predictably now, the fastest growing category of apps in the Apple App Store is enterprise apps, and by 2016, that market will be worth more than $7 billion a year (IDC data). And yet Alex Williams from TechCrunch noted that most of these enterprise apps are ugly and that hurts usage. Employees don’t want manuals to learn how to do things anymore.

Meanwhile, the gamification advocates are motivated by a sense that life is a game. Plotting your career, for instance, is viewed in some ways as a game. We can now use apps and Web experiences to enhance these gaming aspects of our lives, to encourage our audiences to learn and engage.

One of the areas where these trends both come into play for B2B is around online customer communities. I suspect that tolerance for complicated, dry, blandly designed internal and customer communities by the users of those communities will wane. It won’t be enough to have one that functions. Making it work – in other words, generating great engagement – will require more attention paid to elegant design and fun experience.

SXSW: We Still Need to Get Together in the Real World?

Posted on 8 March 2013 by Aaron Pearson

How ironic that 25,000 digitally connected interactive pros have to fly to Austin each year to network with each other and find out what’s new, right?

Actually, it’s not ironic at all that SXSW Interactive should be so valuable to them, and it’s worth understanding why as we consider the continuing value of customer events and trade shows in the B2B marketing mix.

SXSW Interactive Opening Party 2012 – Credit: JoJo Marion

Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman point out in their excellent book, Networked, that research shows we are actually seeing more friends offline at least once a week. Moreover, heavier Internet users appear to be the ones most significantly increasing the number of friends they see in person. The Internet and social technologies do not replace in-person meetings. Rather, they reinforce relationships and create new relationships that must be strengthened by at least the occasional in-person meeting. Otherwise, those ties remain weak.

Meanwhile, virtually every study I’ve ever seen shows the most influential source of information in B2B purchases comes in the form of word-of-mouth from people the buyer knows and trusts. The more we can strengthen and reinforce the relationships within our customer communities and from our best customer advocates to other people, the better off we’re going to be! (Assuming, of course, we have an awesome product or service that’s generating said advocates.) It’s the power of our audiences talking to each other, not just brands talking to audiences.

Bottom line: Creating and activating a strong customer community means using periodic live events – organized for networking and engagement – to grow strong relationships, and then sustaining them with smart social media engagement strategies the rest of the year.

B2B Voices @ SXSW

Posted on 6 March 2013 by Aaron Pearson

Kate and I will be down in Austin the next few days with 40,000 of our close personal friends to see what’s what at that SXSW Interactive thing. I’m going to be paying particularly close attention to the conference from a B2B point of view of course. (Follow me on Twitter!)

I’ve noticed that although social media has been a hot topic now for a few years, it seems like it’s becoming more disruptive to the status quote just over the last few months. For example:
• Increasingly we’re incorporating paid into our traditionally earned media focused campaigns. It’s now the norm.
• Agency roles are getting all mashed up. The client doesn’t care what you call yourself but only whether you can be effective at helping them grow audience engagement.

Instagram Co-Founder Kevin Systrom interviewed by TechCrunch Co-Editor Alexia Tsotsis at last year’s SXSW Interactive Conference. Photo by Carlos Austin

• We’re getting better access to the website analytics we need to understand how our communications programs are changing who comes to the website and what they do when they get there.
• We’re measuring success not just by the volume of mentions but on the nature of conversations.
• We’re getting far more analytical and tech tools are becoming more sophisticated.
• Brand journalism is absolutely exploding.

In addition, we (as an industry) are also shifting conversations beyond just “new ideas” to changing business processes and organizational structures within agencies and within client marketing and communications teams. This change management focus is a natural function of moving beyond pilots and tests to full scale program and campaigns.
So that’s the lens through which I’ll be looking at everything down in Austin. Stay tuned!

What’s Ahead? The Changing Role of Communications

Posted on 4 March 2013 by Allan Schoenberg

Last week I was fortunate enough to speak at the first TechXplore conference in Belfast, which featured a number of topics from raising capital to social media. It was a good event and I met several really interesting people who are pushing the envelope in terms of ideas and thoughts on the digital space.

TechXplore merged discussions on digital technology and business strategy among businesses, the public sector and entrepreneur’s in Northern Ireland.

As part of my presentation and panel discussion, I was asked to comment on the future role of technology. This is difficult to fully assess without looking at the way technology has changed the profession of communications (e.g. advertising, marketing and public relations). In fact, I focused on the very disruptive nature of all things digital to our jobs.

If we think of the way we do our jobs today there really is very little that has not be affected by technology. We network with people via LinkedIn. We search for news and issues through streams on Twitter. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are changing the way images shape our thinking and influence what we read. And blogging continues to be a way that we read a diverse set of opinions (including from B2B Voices) on news and trends.

The Financial Brand blog posted today Five Traits of High-Performing Financial Marketers, and some of these I touched on last week in my discussion. What’s happened is that the traditional silo roles of communications – advertising, marketing, PR – have been further blurred by technology. Integrated communications is now the norm for professionals, but technology has also pushed professionals to expand their responsibilities to the business.

Here are the new job functions that digital has evolved the way we need to think as communicators in order to be influential internally and externally:

Technologist: This goes beyond just using social media. We need to not only build our strategies around social media for our brands, but we also need to focus on building robust CRM systems and understanding how our stakeholders use technology. CIO magazine has been covering marketing v IT spending and the convergence of digital marketing and IT systems management regularly and it is worth following. Everything around technology in communication is moving toward inbound and real-time relationships and you should understand how they work.

Economist: Our jobs now mean we need to analyze, follow and interpret trends in the economy. If you think about your company’s value chain — from incubation of ideas to end users — what are the micro and macro economic issues that could positively or negatively influence your brand? We need to think like economists. Understanding the behavior of your company’s ecosystems will help you better interpret how your marketing and messages need to react.

Analyst: We are swimming in data; perhaps even drowning in it. How do you separate the good data from the bad data? What really matters to your business? Interpreting data and understanding success and trends can no longer be left to web clicks and pageviews. We need to think differently about data and move communications into a more robust process focused on understanding what matters to our stakeholders and what we should deliver.

Strategist: Competitive threats are constant and knowing the landscape is a must. There are a number of ways social media can help manage and monitor this ongoing stream. More importantly, interpreting and understanding what is happening and working closely with your business teams to equip them with the perception of the market is vital. How do you package and deliver this information to your internal stakeholders?

Lawyer: Answer this question: is your social media policy just plain useless? Disclosure, transparency and privacy are all regular discussions now. If you are not having these meetings regularly internally you are setting your brand up for a crisis.

If you enjoyed this post you may also want to read:

What drives your social media strategy?

Blogging isn’t supposed to be easy

How Well Do You Know Your Social Network? Probably Poorly

Five lessons learned after five years of B2B social media

Do most online communities fail?

Are you ready for a real-time B2B world?

Still pitching to use social media?

What drives your b2b strategy?

Tuning into your industry

So, What do Financial Marketers Want?

Posted on 26 February 2013 by Allan Schoenberg

Last week in Chicago, I was able to participate on a panel discussion at the The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing (JFAM) conference titled, “Big Year: What do Financial Marketers Want in 2013?” There are lots of areas to focus this year (I have my targets), but some common themes continue to be discussed. This event was no different, but the level of details continue to change and remain interesting.

My panel discussed themes around social media in financial services and there were three key takeaways.

Content. There was an entire panel before mine devoted to content management — ways to deliver it, measure it and find it. I’ve learned a lot about content and I felt that our panel on social media could also have been devoted to this topic. Content helps us to differentiate our brands, create discussions and build loyalty among our stakeholders. I view content as our biggest competitive advantage and it has quickly become the key driver of our social media strategy versus which platform to use. We are now moving toward a point of matching content to customer and building our social strategy around niche communities, which helps to deepen relationships and positioning of our brand.

Data. As we build more content, we increase the amount of data that needs to be evaluated. There is clearly no shortage of data and this will only grow. As marketers, we need to find ways to better make sense of this data. That means we need to better align ourselves with the business teams and IT and learn new ways to think about online engagement. We’re now learning ways to not only track success, but we need to find ways to sift through false data. I believe metrics and evaluation will be a key theme not only this year, but in the years ahead we need to find ways to find the metrics that matter to help us better connect themes and issues for the business. If you are not thinking about ways to manage data or ways to better understand what you are doing than you are creating a competitive advantage — for your competitors.

Trust. There’s no lack of information about the issue of trust in financial services these days. Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer and APCO’s Champion Brand Index demonstrate with research the need to focus on trust. Everyone on the panel seemed to agree that using social media as a way to build and repair trust in the industry was imperative. I wrote last year in CorpComms magazine about the Trust Economy. This means having conversations — listening and responding — and providing open, transparent information about what you are doing is more critical than ever. There are obstacles to overcome with internal processes, but we are at the point now where not doing social media is more of a risk than doing it.

If you enjoyed this post you may also want to read:

What drives your social media strategy?

The most important question you can ask

Is motivation the key to success?

Blogging isn’t supposed to be easy

How Well Do You Know Your Social Network? Probably Poorly

Five lessons learned after five years of B2B social media

Who are Your Content Superheroes?

Posted on 12 February 2013 by Allan Schoenberg

More and more the focus around communications centers on content. While the platforms for communicating to our stakeholders remain important, having the right content to talk with customers and tell our stories remains one of the main topics of most industry journals.

Content members assemble!

I started reading Chief Content Officer when it first was published as the growth in online discussions started to rapidly rise. One of my favorite issues was the November 2012 feature on content heroes — three people who are doing unique things to build strategy around content. If you are the least bit interested in content I suggest you read the story (and the magazine).

I’ve written before on my lessons learned and the ways to leverage content, but that didn’t answer the challenge of where to find it and who can help.

Where does content for your organization or clients come from? How do you mine it? Who can help? If you are trying to do this all from within your communications department you are no doubt going to fail. From my experience, if you want to build great content your customers will read then you need to identify content superheroes. And just like in the comics, finding the identities of these heroes is not always easy.

Here are a few ways for you to find the superheroes you need to develop great content all year for your organization.

Sales staff: Look no further than the people in your organization who are talking with customers daily. If you don’t know the people or teams who are the key components of your business goals and drivers you need to find them. Some people will find you because they want to help and they understand that getting their name around good content will help their sales efforts; others will be harder to find and identify. I would suggest you take them for coffee, connect with them on LinkedIn and use whatever CRM tool your organization leverages. And make sure you are sharing with them not only the content your company is posting, but become a vital industry resource for them. This is going to take time and effort, but in the long run you will quickly build up a team of ultra-content providers. I consciously make an effort every week to connect with someone on our sales team to run ideas by them for blog posts and research.
News and blog content: Once you have identified some of the key people in your company and you have begun building thought leaders around your business goals, you should continue to look for third-parties who can help shape ideas and thoughts. These superheroes come in the form of bloggers who are deep experts in your product and service offerings or news outlets that report on your industry. For me, Google Reader has become my content headquarters and Twitter lists let me follow a number of content providers by topic.
Your content team: Don’t underestimate the power of your own team as we all have superhero qualities. Regular editorial meetings to discuss and plan content around news events, conferences and other information will help you shape your strategy and develop new ideas. And if you’ve done your job and connected with your sales team and reviewed third-party sources, you should see your content evolve into richer and more appealing context over time.

If you consider yourself a master of content and knowledge for your organization I hope this post will help you discover new ways to contribute to your powers. With an evolving economic environment and new tools to collaborate with stakeholders, the challenges for communicators may never be greater. Or if you just want to become your own superhero then try the Marvel Superhero Creator.

Good luck in your adventures.

If you enjoyed this post you may also want to read:

What drives your social media strategy?

Tuning into your industry

Social media management

Blogging isn’t supposed to be easy

Five lessons learned after five years of B2B social media

Three Areas for B2B Communicators to Focus in 2013

Posted on 30 January 2013 by Allan Schoenberg

Another year and another post to avoid making predictions for next year. Frankly, there are too many…some good, some not. Last year, I used this space to talk about what actions were on my calendar for 2012, and I’m confident to say we accomplished many of my objectives. This year, I want to take this space to talk about the things we should focus on for 2013.

And there are some interesting trends to watch this year. The idea that your B2B brand

Do you find time to focus?

needs to think like a media company is one that is changing our landscape as communicators. Even CIO magazine has provided thoughts on how social media is affecting the IT enterprise. And reading Armano’s thoughts on what to watch in the year ahead is always a must read.

And to look forward sometimes you have to look to the past. I’ve learned a lot from the past five years of managing social media, which has made me think about what I need to do next year. Doing this is no easy task as there have been a lot of moving pieces in the world of communications in 2012. We’ve seen the rise in how powerful photography and images and

We live in interesting economic times. As the economy continues to struggle, communicators are being asked to do more with less. Our landscapes are much more competitive as our customers are prioritizing where they invest. We’re seeing more opportunities to communicate as social media allows us to deliver our message across many many platforms. So, as we struggle with priorities and marketing investments, we are provided with an enormous amount of options. You have to get better at making choices. This means you really need to roll up your sleeves, collaborate across your company (e.g., HR, IT, legal, marketing, sales) and understand the key drivers of your business, the competition, opportunities and outside threats (a.k.a, SWOT analysis). Maybe now is a time to really dig through your company’s intranet and read what is happening (I make time every week to do this).
Learn good data management. I don’t mean organizing all of your data into columns of traffic trends, but I mean really learn to understand it. Are you tired of hearing about big data? Yeah, me too. But the reality is that we live in an era of expanding data and most of it is ambiguous. We need to fine tune our analytical skills to better understand what works, what doesn’t and who to reach. Google Analytics can help us better calculate ROI. I feel that we still need to get better at social listening and gaining better insights from our audiences. That means turning data into actionable items. I’ve found that focusing on a few things helps to provide better thoughts and knowledge.
Ask the right questions. Good business people, not just communicators, know that asking good questions can reveal a lot and open doors. I wrote before about the importance of asking questions, and I can’t emphasize it enough. You may accomplish a lot if you don’t, but if you don’t focus and come prepared to ask tough questions, push the boundaries and think differently you are just implementing everyone’s ideas. I like to think our role as communicators is part cultural detective where we piece together the stories, participants and stakeholders to find the solutions.

We have a lot to do and a lot of choices. Prioritizing what we do and how we do it will be critical to our success as communicators not just in 2013, but in the years to follow. What are you focused on in the coming year? Let us know in the comments.

If you enjoyed this you may also want to read:

The Three I’s of Social Business Media

Five Lessons Learned from Five Years of Social Media

Is motivation the key to success?

The Trust Economy

Getting Your Degree in “Business Acumen”

How Well Do You Know Your Social Network? Probably Poorly