B2B Creativity is Not an Oxymoron

Filed under Discussion, Resources, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 28 November 2011 at 07:39 {2 comments}

One of the myths around B2B communications is that the industry lacks creativity – or the drive to be creative. I can’t think of anything that’s farther from the truth. And while it’s true that B2B companies don’t buy the flashy Super Bowl ads or use various mascots to win over customers, we are challenged day in and day out to think differently.

Another Lego creation at home.

Just like with B2C companies, creativity can be driven by a company’s culture. We’ve always been focused as an organization on innovation, which is why we’ve been so successful at trying new things, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and mobile devices. Ben Parr over at Mashable posted last year how B2B companies will be using social media as part of their creative campaigns. And Aaron Pearson just posted here on B2B Voices a post on world-class B2B social practices that’s a must read.

But there are some rules and guidelines to follow.

  1. Your ideas should always be in line with the brand you are trying to convey. Don’t be creative just for the sake of being creative. While this can work more in the B2C space, it rarely works with B2B companies. We have fewer opportunities to sell our products and services and every opportunity counts. In addition, B2B purchases are usually long-term investments by companies and they want to trust you. Any creativity — whether its very smart and interesting or immature and insulting — will reflect back on your organization.
  2. Study the competition — and be better — don’t copy or instigate them. Your competitors can always give you new ideas and thoughts, but I’ve seen B2B companies try to take on their competition head to head in ads and direct mail. That’s hard to pull off successfully (it can be done) and I always feel it’s better to focus on your strengths than your competitors weaknesses in paid campaigns. Save your competitive arguments for non-paid mediums such as your website and the media.
  3. Always be thinking about driving sales for the organization — this means being fully integrated. We know in B2B the sales process and cycle is much longer than in most B2C decisions, so you will need to think long-term for your campaign. If you are thinking of a new creative campaign it needs to play out online, at trades shows, through direct mail and in person. “One hit wonders”, like a weekend sale, are simply not the norm for B2B campaigns.
  4. Take risks, but know your limits. Good creativity helps you to stand out, but as you think about how creative you should be and how you will use the ideas read points 1 – 3 above.

Here are some other ideas from Marketo on being creative in B2B communications. It’s worth a read if you are looking to learn more about this topic.

I’ve been lucky to work on both national and international B2B and B2C campaigns in my career and personally I’m glad I’ve gravitated into strictly B2B. The creative challenges are different. They are more demanding. They require more time to succeed. And they need more buy-in from the organization. Not to take anything away from B2C creativity, it’s still demanding, but I’ve always liked that challenges and pressure as a professional of being more creative in B2B communications.

If you enjoyed this you may also want to read:

Finally, a comprehensive B2B social media study

World-Class social practices for B2B companies

Are you ready for a real-time B2B world?

Using social networking sites in B2B businesses?

LinkedIn Becomes More Relevant for B2B Communicators

Filed under Application, Discussion, Resources by Allan Schoenberg on 11 November 2011 at 06:20 {3 comments}

LinkedIn continues to be enhance its platform for B2B communicators. Last month the company announced that companies could stream news and information from its corporate page. That was a small change and a much needed addition. But a much bigger change has just happened.

When LinkedIn went public I wrote about some new things for the company to invest in and focus on, and one of those was a dashboard. Yesterday, the company announced that an analytics dashboard is now live within groups. This is a game changer for LinkedIn but also for all of us.

LinkedIn Dashboard

It’s no secret that I am a believer in the power of LinkedIn Groups. We use them extensively at our company. But the lack of data and information have made them a guessing game for marketers and human resource managers. LinkedIn says the dashboard for groups will be updated every day — something that would be expected and critical to the success of this tool.  The addition of data points about group members can help in two key ways:

  • Demographics. You can now see by title, demographics, industry and function who is in your group. For highly targeted product groups like we do, if you’re trying to reach senior managers in the Ukraine in the agriculture market you now can get a clear view. For larger groups that are more focused on a topic, the dashboard gives you an accurate display of who is interested in order to help better facilitate conversations and connections.
  • Discussions. Views on comments and discussions posted help show how active the group is and if you are facilitating conversations among the group. While this is a great view, this part of the dashboard still needs work in order to better drill down. I would like to see the dashboard to start to include information on who is most active at posting, commenting and sharing information. It would also be helpful to see which posts are most read by the group in order to focus further content.

One thing I also like is that you can see the data for any group. LinkedIn did not fence this data just for group managers. As a member of several groups on LinkedIn, I like that openness and transparency since I can now better determine which groups are worth my time and effort.

It was only a matter of time before this tool became available and there’s no doubt more changes will be coming. This initial launch was well done by LinkedIn and has already helped me get a better understanding of the groups we manage and how we can further achieve our sales and marketing goals.

If you enjoyed this you may also want to read:

CME Group Builds Impact on LinkedIn Using Exclusive Groups

Don’t Overlook the Power of LinkedIn Groups

What the LinkedIn IPO Could Mean for B2B Communicatons

What’s your “I” in social media?

Why LinkedIn’s Company Pages Now Matter More

Still Pitching to Use Social Media? Here are Three Steps to Take

Filed under Application, Discussion, Resources by Allan Schoenberg on 14 October 2011 at 05:55 {4 comments}

Social media in B2B continues to rise in use. In fact, research from BtoB magazine shows that more than 90 percent of B2B companies are now using some form of social media to communicate with stakeholders. Before you present that B2B social media plan to executives or a client, the best thing to do is prepare. Here are three ways to ensure your pitch is a success:

  • Benchmark: Do your research first and look at not only what your competition is doing, but look at other companies in the B2B space that you emulate. Ask yourself what you like and what you would improve for them.
  • Be the Brand. I’ve always said that social media is not a silver bullet. While the tools are great they are not going to fix or anything alone. In the early days of social networking this could have been the case (e.g. @ComcastCares), but today you need to think about your entire brand story and how social media will fit into it. You will want to demonstrate that social media is not a silo taking resources away from other initiatives, but show how it complements, improves and is a part of what the company is already doing.
  • Back up your pitch. Executives are interested in facts and proof points. You should prepare yourself for an in-depth discussion not just about social media and what you want to do, but know who you are targeting, how they already use social media, and what business objective (not communication objective) you are working toward. Also, enlist the support of others in the organization — legal, research, products and IT. Showing that you have support from other parts of the company will help bolster your plan.

If you enjoyed this post you may also enjoy:

Are you ready for a real-time B2B world?

Need a Strategy? Start by Playing Games

Using Social Networking Sites in B2B Businesses

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.

Social Business? I Have Just the Award for You

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 7 June 2011 at 20:02 {no comments}

Constellation Research announced its new Constellation SuperNova Awards yesterday, and yours truly is the PR agency lead and on the judging panel for the Social Business category.  I’d love for you to submit your work!

Constellation Research is the firm of a long-time analyst friend of mine, R. “Ray” Wang, who managed to make it cool to be an enterprise software analyst at Forrester Research, before joining Altimeter and now leading Constellation. He’s recognized the hard work involved in being truly transformative with technology, so he’s created a great new award program for leaders who have overcome the odds to successfully apply emerging and disruptive technologies for their organizations.  In addition to Social Business, there are also categories for Cloud Computing, Mobile Enterprise, Emerging Tech, and Advanced Analytics.

In April I had the opportunity to co-teach a social media marketing class at the University of St. Thomas in downtown Minneapolis for their executive education program. While it was hopefully not a complete waste of time for the students, I know it was a great experience for me because it forced me to go beyond my own direct experiences to pay more attention to world-class work out there, whether Weber Shandwick had anything to do with it or not, and to give some deeper thought to the common threads those programs shared.

One of those threads is the right kind of internal champion. I did a book review post here on Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, which talked a lot about how to nurture HEROs in your organization. These Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives can be truly transformative in the ways they use social technology and concepts to transform the business if management and IT supports them. It’s a reminder of how the concept of social business is so much more than about marketing communications. It can encompass training, customer service, product development, employee communications, and of course marketing.

I think it’s fair to say that in the Social Business category, the Constellation SuperNova Awards are about recognizing those HERO leaders. Joining me on the judging panel to select these rock stars of Social Business is, fittingly, a real all-star group:

  • Jeff Ashcroft, VP, Constellation Research
  • Barney Beal, Managing Editor, Tech Target
  • Paul Greenberg, President, The 56 Group, LLC
  • Esteban Kolsky, Founder, ThinkJar
  • Marshall Lager, Managing Principal, Third Idea Consulting
  • David Myron, Editor-in-Chief, CRM Magazine
  • Jon Schwartz, Technology Reporter, USA Today

The submission process: Web-based and simple

The site: Here

The deadline: July 31

Go to it.

What the LinkedIn IPO could mean for B2B communicators

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 18 May 2011 at 07:03 {6 comments}

Tomorrow marks another milestone for social media with LinkedIn’s IPO. You can catch up on the latest news here: Forbes, Fortune, Deal Journal, TRB, Term Sheet, Mashable. But as this story in Bloomberg details, LinkedIn gets “70 percent of revenue from business subscriptions, a model that’s similar to Salesforce.com.” So perhaps instead of treating LinkedIn like social media perhaps its future is more like the CRM model. With that in mind I wanted to offer my thoughts on how it can make improvements as a better resource for marketing and sales.

For those of you who read this blog regularly and know me, I am a long-time supporter of LinkedIn. The network, more so than other online platform, is a transparent resource for businesses — I can see your work history, your real name and what people are saying about you through recommendations. With a reputation for catering to recruiters and job seekers for so long, the company has really made some great improvements in the last two years to become much more useful to communicators. And they will continue to build these services out post IPO.

With a fresh round of cash in its coffers expected tomorrow — estimated at $340 million — what’s next for the social med…er…CRM company? Here are a few things I hope they are considering:

Company Pages

The company pages section in my opinion seems to be the most lacking in functionality for LinkedIn. You are fairly limited as to what you can do on this page and I would like to see that expanded. For instance, having our Twitter feed on this page would seem like an easy add-on given their partnership. As much as I understand this is a career networking site, the profiles they feature are not very useful. What would be helpful is if they could show those people’s status updates, groups they’ve joined and other relevant information. The space these profiles are taking up is valuable real estate. I would also like to see the ability to add more RSS feeds. Finally, I would to have the ability to customize this page — let me choose which items I add and where to put them. The analytics they provide to this page are excellent and I hope they continue to build that out for the benefit of recruiters and marketers.

Group Pages

We use the Group Pages functionality in many ways and I’ve written here about not overlooking groups for B2B companies. One change they made for groups that I wish they would use in Company Page is the scrolling headline of posts. This is extremely useful to see who and what’s been posted. And similar to my thoughts on the Company page, I would like to have the ability for more customization. One thing that Facebook has done really well with the company pages is just this — the ability to add and delete tabs and features. Facebook makes me feel as if our company page is our company page. On LinkedIn I still feel that our pages are us on LinkedIn. LinkedIn also needs to look for more add-ons to the group pages. I honestly feel like we could do so much more with polls, events and even careers. Finally, where they really need to step up is in analytics for group managers. This option is simply non-existent and the company needs to figure our a better way for us to analyze, evaluate and measure our group pages. At this point it’s a guessing game with no historical evidence or info to measure against.

Build a Dashboard

The company clearly does a great job at connecting people, but they need to do a much better job at connecting information. What I mean is that I wish they would do a better job connecting all of the things I do on LinkedIn. Not only do I manage several of our group pages, but I’m also a member of other communication groups, formers employers’ groups and university groups. I would like LinkedIn to figure out what all of this means not only to me but to the people and groups I’m connected to. For the most part, I feel inundated with information from LinkedIn — from email notices by groups and posts, connection notices, the stream on the site, the addition of the news feature — forcing me to make sense of all of this does no one any good. In reality, the company should build a dashboard that I can customize (e.g. think MyLinkedIn as your home page) and view with real-time information.

Make Me Pay

Yes, that’s right. I’d pay. Similar to the model for recruiters who have to pay for services this model should be used for marketers as well. If the company goes down the path of integrating with Salesforce.com, provide deeper analytics and gives me useful options to add content I’d pay.

What did I miss? Let me know what you think.

We’ll see how well the market receives the listing in 24 hours. And of course, if we aren’t connected on LinkedIn let’s do so. You can find my profile here.

If you enjoyed this you may also want to read:

Don’t overlook the power of LinkedIn Groups

What’s your “I” in social media?

Using social networking sites in B2B businesses

Finally, a comprehensive B2B social media study

Other Voices: A Discussion with Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications

Filed under Discussion, Other Voices Interview by Allan Schoenberg on 29 April 2011 at 03:13 {2 comments}

 

I have been fortunate enough to get to know Mark Ragan more closely during the past few years. Mark, as you may know, is CEO of Lawrence Ragan Communications and one of the leading figures in the public relations industry. For more than 30 years, the company has been the leading publisher of corporate communications, public relations, and leadership development newsletters and information to the industry. When The Ragan Report launched in 1970, the company made the leap ahead of the industry to position professional communicators as business leaders. Today, the Ragan brand now includes more than 16 targeted newsletters, MyRagan.com, PR Daily, HealthCare News and HR Communicator. In addition, Ragan produces several communications conferences, workshops, and senior-level forums. If you’re on Twitter you probably already know and follow @MarkRaganCEO. Here are the highlights of our discussion.

What is the mission of Ragan and what do you and your team hope to achieve?

We want our customers to think of us whenever they need a question answered or a problem solved.  We want to become their top information source for news, information and practical, real-world advice. But we also want them to think of us as in indispensable resource for training. Need to learn more about social media strategies? Come to us.  Want in-depth analysis of IBM’s new approach to content curation? You’ll find it in our archives.  Looking for staff training on social media policies, listen to our webinar with Shel Holtz.

To support this mission, we’ve adapted the content curation model.  This means we produce original content, but we also ‘curate’ content about PR, social media and internal communications from around the globe.

We launched this new model with the redesign of Ragan.com last year and the re-launch of PR Daily last February (Disclosure: I am a contributor to PR Daily). The results have been overwhelmingly good.  Traffic to Ragan.com has doubled to 160,000 visits a month. PR Daily’s traffic has gone from 40,000 to 250,000 for the North American edition.  PR Daily Europe is growing, but we’re new to this market, so we’re content with our average of 15,000 visitors each month.

This summer, we’ll introduce the new redesign of HR Communications News and Health Care Communications News. Both sites will be designed off the early success of Ragan.com and PR Daily. In the fall, we’ll be launching a new Brand Journalism news site.

Ragan has been around since 1970 when your father launched The Ragan Report. We’ve come a long way as an industry since then. Where do you see the industry headed? Are there trends we need to watch?

The smartest companies are turning their organizations into media outlets. No longer content to wait for traditional media to write about them, these companies are providing news and information about their markets directly to consumers. American Express, IBM, Best Buy, The Mayo Clinic, Southwest Airlines—this is just a short list of companies that have begun to practice what is increasingly being called ‘brand journalism.’ Many of them are scooping up reporters from traditional media and building news sites around their brands. Like Ragan, they too are using the content curation model of mixing original content with aggregated content from bloggers, traditional media and other online sources.

On the internal side of the business, companies will continue to rely increasingly on user generated content produced in internal, collaborative networks, so-called Facebook-type sites behind the firewall. The smartest among them are building mobile platforms so employees can access their Intranets from home or while on the road.

You are a huge advocate for social media. Why has it become so important to the public relations industry?

Social networks allow PR pros to deliver messages directly to consumers. They provide an alternative to the classic ‘beg-the-media-to-write-about-us’ strategy.

Why wait for someone to pick up our news release when we can cover and deliver our news through social channels and online sources?  A great example of this occurred this week when an airplane slid off a runway at Midway Airport in Chicago. Southwest’s PR team covered its own story by getting making sure that consumers got information from its NutsaboutSouthwest blog first. Time will tell if companies can build credibility with this approach. To succeed, brand journalism must be honest and transparent. If it isn’t social media will turn against the organization and ‘out it’ for pushing false information or withholding key facts.

You’ve been busy at Ragan Communications the past year — global events, a new website, additional staff — what’s been the most exciting project for you and your team?

Watching our newly designed news sites take off and become increasingly the top sources for corporate communications news. PR Daily is now the #1 news site for PR pros in North America, though few people realize it. Any check of any web traffic monitoring site proves it out. This has been very rewarding for our editorial team. They’ve worked hard at making Ragan.com and PR Daily thorough, entertaining and conversational.

On the conference side of our business, we’re the most proud of the trust placed in us by the two-dozen companies that now host our events. Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, SAS, ConEd, Cisco, SWIFT in Brussels, The Mayo Clinic, NASDAQ,  and many others.  Their confidence in our events team, and their trust in our product, has helped us reach our goal of providing the best conferences in the industry.

We focus on B2B topics here on this blog. When you talk with communicators what do you think are the major differences between those in B2C and those in B2B?

B2B communicators have a tougher time proving the value of social media. If you’re a company making steel bolts, it’s hard to post big numbers on your Facebook and Twitter pages, and it’s an unfortunate fact of life that the C-suite continues to believe the big numbers equate with social media success.  And yet, B2B communicators actually stand to gain more from social media and content curation. They can build content-rich sites that quickly establish them as leaders in their markets.  The smaller the niche, the bigger the chance that you’ll dominate the news and conversational markets in your industry.

B2B social media has really come into full swing in the past year and companies are doing some interesting things. What are your B2B customers telling you their biggest challenge is when it comes to social media?

Getting budgets approved that divert advertising dollars from traditional media to social media and content marketing programs. However, this is changing rapidly. I am working with a hospital system now that may invest up to $2 million in building its own news and information site—a content site that is integrated into social media and traditional news sources.

You’ve been a big fan of the Flip cam and of course Cisco’s recent announcement must have been a surprise. But let’s be honest, video certainly isn’t going away. Where do you see the role of video in the enterprise?

The Flip is certainly not going away.  Much has been made of Cisco’s fear that smart phones will replace pocket cameras. This may be true with teenagers, Moms and other consumers, but you won’t see internal communicators shooting roving reporter features with their iPhones.  Flip’s competitors—like the far superior Kodak Zi8—will continue to rack up big sales in the corporate communications industry, as will other cam corders designed for higher quality videos.

I also believe that videos will become shorter as editors and producers embrace the reality that people want to ‘snack’ on information. We’ll get to a point—if we haven’t already—where a 90-second video is almost too long.

As for enterprise video, sometimes known as YouTube behind the firewall,  this trend will continue to grow. I met a marketing director at a small, 30-employee firm who is now required to post 60-second video summaries of meetings she attended so others could get briefed on important news. In other organizations, companies are mounting cameras on computers and asking employees to share their expertise with others by posting short videos on ideas and news. Skype and other voice-over-Internet services will continue to be used to bring far-flung employees into global conferences and internal communication summits. And virtual conferences, like the one I participated in at SAS two years ago, will all make use of improvements in worldwide video streaming.

Most people in the PR industry know you via your work life and Twitter feed. So how does Mark Ragan unwind and relax from a busy day in the office?

Well, it helps to have a four-year-old.   We live in a television-free house where the only computer is locked away in my basement office. I try to put my online life away when I arrive at home, but it’s difficult. I am the CEO of a media company in a world that no longer provides convenient news cycles.  What I have done is hire more people, including my first social media editor. She has helped take a huge load off my back by creating our first LinkedIn  communities and keeping up with trends, new tools and strategies. And, of course, large pints of ale  always help. But you would know that, Allan.

If you enjoyed this you may also want to read:

Visualizing B2B Social Media Marketing

Is Motivation the Key to Success?

Getting Your Degree in “Business Acumen”

Integrating Social Media With Corporate Website: How Far Can We Take This?

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 28 October 2010 at 12:10 {4 comments}

I had a great time at MarketingProfs’ SocialTech 2010 conference earlier this week drilling into B2B social media for high tech companies. I was particularly impressed by the big-name brands represented at the event, from Facebook to Cisco, Microsoft to Xerox. For what it’s worth, I did not see a lot of large agencies represented.

Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group had the opening keynote. Unlike the keynotes from Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki later in the day, which seemed weighted more towards bemusement and social media curiosities (not that we weren’t ready for a mental break by then), Owyang kicked things right off with a challenge to improve integration between the corporate website and social media presences. I agree. At Weber Shandwick, we sometimes call the website a “home base” property and social media sites “outposts” of the brand. The two need to work together a lot more than they do today in almost every case. In fact, according to an Altimeter Group survey from earlier this month, social integration onto the corporate website is the No. 1 social strategy objective of 2011.

Jeremiah Owyang (photo courtesy Thomas Hawk, flickr)

It’s a bit of a no-brainer but one challenge is the teams are usually different. And in the case of social media, especially at a larger company, there may be multiple teams all over the place, at the corporate level, at the product or division level, at the country level. Compounding it is the fact that, technologically, social media properties are designed to be agile, radically scalable (most are cloud-deployed), and interoperable, leveraging published APIs. In contrast, a lot of website platforms feel like extensions of the enterprise application architecture, with lots of custom programming and integration to back-end systems.

Fortunately, Owyang shared an eight-step framework to let us get there in stages, learning as a team and evolving our technology along the way.  I don’t have a full presentation I’m at liberty to share but I did find a Slideshare presentation from earlier in the year that does outline the framework (albeit with just B2C examples):

Essentially, we’re talking about moving from no social integration all the way to seamless integration where a visitor doesn’t see a difference between being on a home base or an outpost. Nobody’s really there yet. In fact, most are only one or two steps in.  The problem with being at no integration is that people are having conversations about your brand and your website isn’t supporting those conversations in any way.

A couple interesting examples:

  1. Cisco Support Community is integrating the brand with social channels so no matter where the audience goes, they have a consistent brand experience. You can check out the Cisco Support Community across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to see what that looks like.
  2. HP Labs is aggregating discussions on their corporate site, which surely would scare some brand owners.  Instead of just having conversations about your brand taking place out on Twitter or Facebook, aggregate those conversations on your website, so the site is the first place your audience thinks to go. Now we’re really making the corporate site a lot more influential and putting supplemental information at the fingertips of our audience without separating ourselves from the authenticity of those social conversations. But it’s a leap to make because there is a loss of control over just what shows up on that site. has been able to do it.

I was talking with Laura Ramos, another former Forrester analyst now at Xerox, afterwards and she pointed out that for many B2B companies where the audience target is known and small, the highest priority may not be seeing how advanced you can get with this eight-stage framework. Perhaps building a dynamic customer community with something like Jive might pay bigger dividends.  But I have one client with a very substantial audience to reach and it’s pretty easy to see the need for improved integration in those cases. Unfortnately, having the organizational structure and governance to head down this path is a challenge. There needs to be a better spirit of cooperation between IT, marketing, advertising, public and corporate communications, sales, and customer service. Wow, has this gotten that complicated?  I’m afraid so – everything is going digital, so all these groups have legitimate stakes in how this integration happens. There needs to be a brand champion looking out for the best interests of the brand, but in my mind that person is a coach and a convener, not a dictator, and someone who can remind all these parties that ultimately  your customer decides what your brand really stands for.

I’m looking forward to keeping the conversation going!

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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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