B2B Companies Need to Be Prepared for Crises Too

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 18 January 2012 at 21:42 {one comment}

I attended a Minnesota Business Marketing Association breakfast yesterday that served as a reminder that crises can happen to B2B companies too, not just cruise ships. Unpleasant things happen – planes with executives crash, workers strike, products fail, plants close, tornadoes strike.

The speakers were Jon Austin, former spokesperson for Northwest Airlines and now with his own firm, and Paul Omodt, VP at Padilla Speer Beardsley and a former PR person for the Northwest chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association. When I was in college in the Twin Cities, I saw Austin in the local media more than I saw the White House press secretary. You can imagine the issues they had to deal with.

Jon Austin at Minnesota BMA on Crisis Preparedness for B2B

Here’s the quick takeaways:

First, yes you probably need some kind of crisis plan, even as a B2B company. Think of Arthur Anderson.  Respected, in business for like a hundred years, and then thanks to the Enron collapse, out of business in the blink of an eye. Austin noted that what killed Arthur Anderson was not the lawsuits filed, because those took 10 years to get through the courts. Instead, in the first month or two after the Enron collapse, they had clients calling them up say, “We love you guys and know you didn’t have anything to do with what came down in Houston, but we just can’t have you signing off on our financial statements.” Reputation damage killed them.

As Austin put it: “Dinosaurs were pretty dominant at one time, and now they’re pretty damn dead.” Don’t be a dinosaur.

Second, drill on crisis plans. It’s time-consuming to put these things together and it can be a relief just to finish but without practicing their implementation, they are still likely to fail you. For one thing, people panic. Is this a crisis?  Do I really pull the trigger on this plan now?  Practice makes them comfortable. Second, it’s a great way to learn if it really works, if the roles are all covered. You don’t want to find out you haven’t adequately prepared for the likely contingency that your CEO will be oversees, your phone system will be swamped, and your email wil be down. It’s a chance to be comfortable with the plan and identify any weak spots in it.

Remember 9/11? Austin was with Fleishman-Hillard by then, working on the United Airlines account. The crisis plan called for flying all the key crisis team members to Chicago as a central coordination point. The team hadn’t considered the possibility that U.S. airspace could be completely closed down. Fortunately, Austin was able to drive to Chicago from Minneapolis, but you can bet all those airlines learned from that experience.

The more realistic the rehearsal the better. We have a great product offering that I’ve written about before called Firebell  for drilling on a crisis. The strength of Firebell is it’s been designed to simulate a crisis on a social world, letting you see not only what happens on the local TV news but also what happens on your Twitter account, Facebook and other social channels. (blog post on it or email me)

Finally, keep the plan refreshed. A reorg can eliminate a team of people important to executing the plan. New products are developed and old ones are sunsetted. New markets are entered. Crises are not viewed the same all over the world.

Interesting comment from Omodt – some insurance companies will lower your company’s premiums if they know you have an effective and up-to-date crisis plan in place – something to look into.

In closing, says Austin: “Be a mammal. Don’t be a dinosaur.”

Digital on the Rise in B2B, But Audience Engagement Lags

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 5 December 2011 at 23:40 {no comments}

Recent research from Forrester has good news and bad news, from my perspective. On the one hand, Tracy Stokes, in “Marketing Budgets for 2012 Expose a Fear of Commitment,” notes that B2B marketers are moving to digital even faster than their B2C counterparts. Unfortunately, how they are doing so seems to be putting immediate gratification (i.e. leads) over the kind of richer relationship-building enabled by social media and creative digital programming.

First, the good news. According to Forrester’s research, which I would treat as directional rather than quantitative because of its small sample size, more than half of B2B marketing leaders see an economic recovery in their industry next year, compared to less than a third of B2C marketing leaders. Also, digital media now comprises 28% of B2B marketers’ budgets, ahead of their B2C counterparts (22%).

Are you investing in the long-term relationship?

Wow, right? Except what are they spending it on? Not innovation, which is expected to be cut in half from an already small base. Not brand building. Not relationship building. Transactions. Or at least that’s where the emphasis is.

I understand, I’m empathetic, really.  If you don’t win today, there is no tomorrow. But that’s a little like the federal government cutting taxes to spur economic growth without a plan to address long-term deficits. Ultimately, there’s a nasty price to pay.  What are some of those costs? Here’s four:

  • Commoditization
  • Reduced customer loyalty
  • Declining pricing power
  • Reduced market focus

Ouch. As with everything in life, success is about finding a healthy balance of investment through the marketing funnel – and beyond it to nurture customer advocates too. I’ve been part of award-winning communications plans that piled heaps of interest into the top of the funnel only to be plugged up at the bottom, and that’s no good either. But we have great opportunities now to do build stronger B2B brands and increase customer and prospect engagement all while effectively driving sales.

Building an positive and engaged bond between your brand and your customer is a powerful defense against commoditization. Leveraging social media to improve product development and customer service grows advocates and reinforces loyalty. A real commitment to listening to customers through social channels is effective (and cost-effective) at reminding you what your brand really is all about, and what it’s not about, so the organization stays focused on where it can be most successful. Here’s to a digitally engaged 2012!

Mission Impossible: B2B Blogger Goes Rogue

Filed under Case Study by Aaron Pearson on 8 September 2011 at 00:02 {2 comments}

Update: Folks, my previous version implied mom bloggers are in it for opps with Wal-Mart, et. al. Obviously, that’s not true and wasn’t intended and moreover there’s some great opportunities for partnerships with those companies if handled properly. My apologies – my wife blogs too and there’s a lot of great stuff out there, which is really my point.  Look forward to meeting you all Saturday.

Saturday is the 2nd Annual Minnesota Blogger Conference in Minneapolis. I happened to be looking on Twitter when a batch of tickets was release and decided to take the plunge and nab one.

Folks, I’m going to be the ugly duckling at this gig. You’re all B2B marketing people, so you know what I’m talking about, right? What we do is often not pretty, almost never glorious.  Mainstream appeal, not so much. We’re hawking servers, or accounting services, or industrial filters for heavens’ sake. We think this stuff is big-time important, but our kids don’t particularly care.

But so what? I believe there are principles of good blogging that transcend these differences and I intend to find out what they are. In fact, I’ve set a goal for myself:  Be Like Allan Schoenberg.

Plus, I'm on a mission!

Our little operation here at B2BVoices Nation is not big but we do okay – 4,700 views in June has been the recent high water mark.  And Allan’s posts seem to be consistently tops in readership. What if I could be like Allan? What would that do for us, if I pulled my weight for once?

My mission, if I choose to accept it (well, okay) is to try to generate Allan Schoenberg blog post readership. It’s to your benefit folks because it means this stuff will be more interesting for you! Plus, in my last post, I noted blogs trump LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter on influence over business technology purchase decisions, so hey, this could benefit some of you too!  Stay tuned.

Business Tech Buyers Are Using Social Media, But Twitter? Not So Much

Filed under Discussion by Aaron Pearson on 5 September 2011 at 22:06 {no comments}

I’m at least a month late in reviewing Forrester’s annual 2011 Social Technographics for Business Technology Buyers report, by Kim Celestre (@kcelestre). As I was last year. :-)  It’s still worth doing. Forrester has conducted this survey for three years running and for those of us looking for the impact of social and digital media on B2B tech, this is about as good a study as we have available to us.

Here’s Forrester’s blog post.

This year’s report appears to show a real maturity in the behavior of technology buyers in social media. Basically, there was no substantive change in what percentage of their audience were social media spectators, critics, conversationalists, creators, etc. I’d venture to say that the average buyer here has pretty much found their comfort zone with social media engagement and is settling in on a specific style of engagement.

Twitter and Facebook are at the bottom of about a dozen online and offline sources.

The good news is that the average level of engagement is higher than for a typical consumer. For example, nearly a third are content creators online (for business purposes), while only 23% of the general population describes itself as such.

Where are they, though?  Forrester also looked at the sources of information these business technology buyers use, and guess what?  Twitter and Facebook are at the bottom of about a dozen online and offline information sources. (Only 5% claim they use Twitter for business purchase decisions.) It turns out more traditional channels like your website or conferences remain hugely important, if someone less so each year.  However, there are real opportunities to find larger segments of your target audiences if you can find niche communities online (LinkedIn does a bit better for instance) or if you can create a private community of your own customers.  For what it’s worth, e-newsletters remain important too.

I would also note that blogs appear to be fairly important sources of information. (Of course, I would say that!) This longer-format, “old-school” social media channel may be particularly well suited for discussing the complexity of B2B technologies. I would also argue Twitter is often a great channel for reaching influencers and opinion-leaders.

Bottom line:  Technology marketers should assume their target audiences are using social media, and probably more than just for consumption. However, they should consider nurturing more targeted online communities and ensure social media engagement efforts are seamlessly integrated with other marketing channels, including media relations, events, advertising and the website.

We’re All Publishers Now

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 4 October 2010 at 19:04 {no comments}

Well the advertising and PR worlds are abuzz with the news of Forbes’ new AdVoice offering, which enables corporations and other organizations to blog under the Forbes banner under some sort of paid arrangement.  The two primary takes by industry watchers so far are that the sky is falling and this is the end of journalism and a great journalism brand or that this is nothing more than an incremental variation on advertorials.

Pontificating on whether this spells the doom of journalism and forever tarnishes the Forbes brand is probably a little outside the scope of this blog but I will say that it is hard to see much of a fundamental difference in principle from advertorials. Moreover, in many ways, Forbes is not the first publisher to take this step. We have noticed our clients getting increasing requests to blog on trade media sites already, and those publications aren’t even asking for compensation!  (Though there is a presumption that we’ll avoid overt production promotion in the blogs.)

Photo Courtesy Matt Miller, Flickr

Similarly, let’s take what’s probably the top and most respected consortium of enterprise tech bloggers, the Enterprise Irregulars. Sure, many of them are industry analysts and other traditional pundits. But Anshu Sharma, VP of Force.com platform product management at salesforce.com is also an Irregular, as is Craig Cmehil, senior product specialist at SAP AG.

In other words, the bigger observation for B2B marketers is that AdVoice reinforces what’s been a growing trend towards companies becoming media publishers. The fact is that in the social media world, good content is good content as long as there is transparency around conflicts of interest and who the real authors of that content are. It doesn’t have to come only from members of the professional journalism community.

Former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski writes about Silicon Valley business trends and the intersection of technology and media. An excerpt from his post at www.EveryCompanyIsaMediaCompany.com:

Our media has also become much more complicated — more fragmented. We used to have “mass media” where a small set of media companies and channels, in TV, radio, newspapers, trade press — hosted much of our media communications.

Those days are gone. The reality is we now live in a multi-platform, multi-channel, micro- media world, and the trend is moving towards ever greater media fragmentation — vidcasts, podcasts, blogs, micro-blogging, Twitter, etc.

It is no longer possible to operate a business the old way — such as sending out a news release on Businesswire and briefing a handful of journalists, and sitting back.

Today you need to do that … and more, much more. Every company needs to master these media technologies, and the best media practices, of a rapidly fragmenting media world.

Traditional media relations opportunities are ever-fewer, especially for smaller or niche brands.  Yet conversely, the Web creates compelling long-tail opportunities to connect specialized audiences with specialized content in exciting ways, with video, slideshows, podcasts, tweetchats, e-books and blogs.  If you’re Apple or Google, you might not have to do this – though you should. If you’re almost anyone else and you want to connect effectively and consistently with your target audiences, you must consider yourself a media publisher.

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There’s No Such Thing as B2B Social Media

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Aaron Pearson 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 Aaron Pearson 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.

Thinking Beyond Products

Filed under Application, Discussion by Allan Schoenberg on 22 January 2010 at 16:25 {2 comments}

Every now and then I take time to think beyond our product offerings. It’s a nice exercise and usually leads to some unique and creative ways to think about positioning the exchange. One area that we like to pursue and where we have been successful is in the area of technology. I’m sure we’re not alone in this area, but we try to balance talking about technology as well as our people in technology. So what are some areas that go beyond just products in helping to promote your B2B brand? Here are some quick thoughts.

question mark

Technology:

I like talking about technology. I like talking with our technology team. I’m a tech geek like a lot of you. And I do believe that marketing IT matters – I wrote about it here and earlier this year on B2B Voices about the importance of partnership with information security here.

Human Resources:

Have you integrated recruiting into your social media campaigns yet? There are some simple and effective ways to do this, such as starting out with posting exisitng job openings. But you should also think about how to fully leverage LinkedIn for your recruiting efforts. By the way, have you looked at your company’s profile on LinkedIn yet? It may be in need of some help (another easy victory for you with HR).

R&D:

Positioning your research team members can help showcase some of the great minds at work within your company. These are probably the people that already have a blog or read blogs. Getting these people to post on popular blogs about innovation and technology can help position your organization as leader in either very broad or niche topics.

If you need ideas on how you can do this go back and read Aaron Pearson’s post on how to combine tradition and social media in B2B here and Arik Hanson looked at what to do if you hit a social media roadblock here. And of course share your ideas with us on how you look beyond products to promote your company or clients. What are some ideas that have worked? Or failed? And where do you get your inspiration?

Sorry for Being a Social Media Buzzkill

Filed under Discussion by Arikhanson on 16 June 2009 at 23:29 {one comment}

A fellow PR pro in the Minneapolis/St. Paul community, Aaron Pearson works as a senior vice president and vertical markets segment leader for the Global Technology Practice of Weber Shandwick, a leading public relations firm.With 15 years of B2B and technology communications experience, Aaron has spent time in the manufacturing, enterprise software, data storage and telecommunications industries. Aaron is also a member of the Business Marketing Association and holds an MBA in marketing from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. Without further introduction, take a read from this B2B Voices guest poster:

It’s interesting to me that so many of the conversations on Twitter among communications professionals concern social media – Twitter chief among them.I do appreciate many of them, (hey, Beers Who Twitter – Thanks @PaulDunay!) But there is a disconcerting, anything-can-work, dot-com boom feel about it.  

To be clear, I’m a huge cheerleader for the potential of social media and, more broadly, digital communications to elevate B2B communications programs. Who wouldn’t want to embrace communications channels that tend to be more measurable, more transparent, and more conversational? Research consistently shows that the most important form of marketing communications is word of mouth, and social media benefits from many of the personal, trusted characteristics of word of mouth.   

And yet, eight years after the dot-com bust, most of us still buy our groceries in a brick-and-mortar store even if we don’t make a mall run to buy music CDs anymore. There’s going to be a shake-out in social media (a real Twitpocalypse?) as people realize days are still 24 hours long, we have a finite amount of time to interact with each other, and in the face of competition, the business models of weaker communities show their flaws. (See Bloomberg, “MySpace Fires 30% of U.S. Workers.”) 

Our new online social web is here to stay, but for B2B marketers, it is no magic elixir to cure bad products or vague value propositions. We still need to use a battle-tested strategic planning process. What business outcome do we need to achieve? What insights does research give us into the needs of our audience, who they listen to, how they buy? Given those insights and our own creativity, what’s the right strategic approach, and how can we harness tactics both traditional and new in creative ways to ultimately accomplish those business objectives?

This may be boring and disappointing for some, but the alternative is costly failures like the Skittles experiment in the B2C realm as Razorfish’s Steven Cisowski outlined for us last week in Ad Age. Directionless innovation run amok.

According to a Feb. 20 Forrester report, “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers,” 68 percent of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes, a number that’s probably only grown since that information was collected in Q4 of last year. (Read more about it from analyst Laura Ramos’s original blog post.) And yet, social networks rank seventh in influencing technology purchase decisions, after web sites, sales people, traditional online or print media, trade shows, and of course, word of mouth.  

What I take away from this isn’t that digital communications and social media are relatively unimportant, but rather that they are increasing in importance rapidly yet the established channels aren’t going away.  Personal preferences for how individuals want to receive marketing information are fragmenting. Moreover – and this has always been the case – for complex, B2B purchases, the typical buyer is influenced at different stages in the buying process by different influencer channels. Fail to invest in one and you will fail to optimize your marketing dollars by missing leads you should have gotten, paying too much for them, or failing to convert enough into revenue. Invest in the wrong one – or do so unstrategically – and you basically just burn money (unless you get lucky). It’s getting harder, folks. 

As I was writing this, Phil Baumann, a registered nurse in Philadelphia, tweeted that, “Using Twitter as a be-all tool for healthcare is insane. There’s tons of ways to use it, but not w/out a brain.” Amen, and that goes for marketers, too.  Good luck out there.

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