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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeannie Walters, Founder, 360Connext

Jeannie Walters, Founder, 360Connext

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you want to be a B2B communicator? Know your customers.

Filed under Uncategorized by Allan Schoenberg on 17 April 2009 at 13:50 {no comments}

As an adjunct professor it never comes as a surprise that the majority of students I teach do not know what B2B communication requires, let alone even define it (Hint: it is not Back to Beer).

So let’s discuss what I feel is one of the key distinctions of doing successful B2B versus B2C communications – understanding your customers.

As communicators one of our basic mantras is to know who the end users of our products and services are in the marketplace. All of our strategies and tactical outputs should remain focused on communicating our messages and delivering on our brand promise to end users. No matter if you sell consumer goods or technology services, you need to recognize your customers’ wants and needs. That is a value-add from our efforts to our companies and clients.

So what makes B2B customers different? Here are five distinctions I see of B2B v. B2C customers

1. Customers in the B2B space typically have longer purchasing cycles. So instead of purchasing your products or services in a day or week it may take weeks or even months. This presents great opportunities to drive home our messages and value proposition, but at the same time it allows your competitors to do the same. The focus during this time now becomes building trust and differentiating our brand against our competition.
2. Customers in the B2B space often buy from our competition and can even compete with our other customers. We need to emphasize in our communications that we have to treat our products and services individually to each customer in order to build trust, loyalty and deliver on their needs. Remember, it is a long purchasing cycle and over time you can build strong loyalty or lose it all.
3. Both B2C and B2B customers are interested in customer service. The difference is that B2B customer service begins well before any sale is ever made or even considered. From a communicator’s standpoint we need to build our winning argument with case studies/references as well as third party endorsements during this time. These “outside influencers”, such as industry analysts, become a key component of our efforts to build trust with potential buyers. Find the people outside of your company that matter to our customers is always an ongoing initiative.
4. A B2B customer is typically more sophisticated than a B2C customer and has a deep understanding of our products or services (which means they also can be very skeptical). Since there already exists a great degree of knowledge or a high interest in learning about our offering, we must communicate in a way that talks specifically to them. This means you need to have a very complete understanding not only of what your company does but what your customer needs.
5. B2B customers buy your products because they will use them to help their company grow, become profitable, and stay competitive. This means you need to stay focused on communicating the value of your offering to them. They will not be entertained by funny animal mascots or snappy slogans. They want (need) a product or service to keep them competitive.

Even though this is a brief list, it feels like asking someone to name the top baseball or hockey players of all time. The list will change or evolve or could even be missing something. So tell us what you think.

Allan Schoenberg
Director, Corporate Communications
CME Group — A CME/Chicago Board of Trade/NYMEX Company
www.cmegroup.com
@allanschoenberg
@cmegroup

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