Book Review: UnMarketing

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

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

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

End of the cold call, start of authentic relationships.

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

What Really Works:

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

What Doesn’t:

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

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

`You can follow Stratten on Twitter at @unmarketing.

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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.

Measuring Outcomes in B2B Social Media – Part II: A Model

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 17 May 2010 at 06:56 {2 comments}

A few days ago, I blogged about the B2B roundtable we had here at Weber Shandwick Minneapolis, “Social Media and ROI: Dare We Talk About It?” And we did!

In that post, I summarized the first half of our message to attendees, which was that it was not a big deal to ignore ROI in our trial social media efforts of the past year because a small Investment required only a small Return. Now that we want to get serious and scale this, you better believe we need to talk about measuring real business outcomes.

But how do we do this?  A survey of our attendees showed most simply didn’t know where to start. Interestingly, Jim Estell blogs here that you can’t measure ROI for marketing at all, much less for social media, because it’s too complex. I’ll be the first to admit the proof of impact isn’t always definitive but if you’ve done the research to know your audience well, then this is certainly a do-able task in B2B because there is typically a defined purchase process where our efforts can have a clearer impact.

We have a measurement model for communications in general and it works for social media too.  (In other words, if you can measure business outcomes impact for any sort of marketing communications effort, you can certainly do it for social media. ) It’s called ARROW (see our little graphic).

ARROW Model for Communications Measurement

ARROW Model for Communications Measurement

A = Activities. These are the things we generate. In social media land, that includes blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos or simply the number of web properties we are maintaining.  They get at a measurement of effort. On their own, however, they are meaningless.

R1 = Reach. Essentially number of eyeballs of our target audience we are reaching. We may measure this by Twitter followers or Facebook “friends” or blog page views. Important, but are we changing how our target audiences thinks or behaves?

R2 = Relevance. We sometimes use the word Resonance too. We want to measure that a message got through to our audience and that it connected with them. Relevance measurements can include key messages in third-party blog posts or tweets, number of retweets, blog comments, increases in site traffic or click throughs on a corporate blog to resources on your web site. Still not a business outcome.

O = Outcomes. Ideally, this is when our audience enters the sales pipeline in some way by requesting information or registering on your web site (i.e. becomes a lead) or when you sell more stuff, or when the quality of your leads improve or when your sales cycle shortens.

W = Any of the measures above divided by cost.

Ultimately, the goal is to find a corrolation between reach/relevance measurements and business outcome measurements. We are looking at evidence that the reach and relevance measures are in fact creating a better environment in which to sell. Don’t stop at measuring ARR!

If, despite a significant investment in marketing communications or social media efforts, no corrolation can be found, then you are right to question whether your dollars are being put to good use. What we’re looking for in choosing our reach and relevance measurements is whether or not they are precursors to ROI. How do you know?  Well, you can take the trial and error route to see if there are any corrolations, or better, you can conduct some good audience research before launching a major social media campaign to define what I’m calling the Awareness-to-Advocate Process Path, the average compositive path a prospect takes from awareness of the product category or your brand to being an advocate for your brand. That research significantly helps mitigate your risk of making a big investment in a program that delivers no return.  You still must measure the result to determine the strength of the impact.  More on that in another post!

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

4 Great Reasons to Start a Social Media Program as a B2B

Filed under Application by Kate Brodock on 3 April 2009 at 11:12 {5 comments}

A lot of B2B marketing professionals or departments have wondered what, if any, benefit they would get out of adding social media components to their marketing plans. Isn’t that for consumer-facing companies?

Here are 4 ways to start thinking about incorporating social media within your company:

Thought Leadership

  • Provide valuable information that establishes your company as an innovate thinker in your industry.  The end goal is to position yourself as an industry leader.
  • You could post a blog on useful industry information, again providing timely and innovative content to your readers.  Kinaxis has done a good job at this with their blog, The 21st Century Supply Chain.
  • Develop a complete content production program with such things as eBooks, white papers, webcasts etc and utilize social media channels to disseminate your information.
  • Part of the concept of a content production plan is that the information that you’re outputting is ultimately connected to your brand in the eyes of the reader.

Research

Marketing Profs has a great post about the benefits of social media for B2B companies.  I won’t re-invent the wheel, as they did a great job in explaining it. They focused primarily on the research advantages it offers, with the following highlights:

  • Conducting research to understand more about a prospect’s or client’s “buying desires.”
  • Finding decision makers for certain products and services.
  • Extracting names from a given community for lead generation.
  • Getting answers to questions, reaching out to other experts.
  • Finding joint-venture marketing partners and creating various “cooperative opportunities.”
  • Connecting with past customers, keeping them up-to-date.

Brand Outreach

  • People often gather online around common interests or professions.  Many are employed in their field and, if not in a decision-making position, are at least closer to the decision-maker than you may be.  Join in their conversation in a valuable way.
  • Sponsor groups or networks that offer a forum of exchange and engagement for people that might be in what you consider your “target company” (see above).

Communication and Customer Service

  • The ability to connect with customers and clients in a way the offers 2-way communication and conversation can greatly increase relationships between parties.  Rethink the way you communicate with your clients.
  • Use new technologies to streamline the flow of information. Offer a platform to discuss pertinent issues and share knowledge on such topics as R&D, sales, supply chain, production and marketing.

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