Social Media | B2B Voices

It’s Time for B2B Social Media Marketing to Generate Leads

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 23 January 2012 at 14:16 {no comments}

A B2B Voices Q&A With Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen

I just finished reading The B2B Social Media Book: Becoming a Marketing Superstar, by Kipp Bodnar (day job at HubSpot) and Jeffrey L. Cohen (day job at Radian6), hot off the presses this month. I recommend it. Despite the title, it doesn’t try to encompass everything you need to know about B2B social media marketing. Rather, it tries to open the lock box to social media lead generation. Frankly, that’s the way we’re going to get a lot of B2B companies to start to take social media more seriously.

I’ll follow up with a longer review but I had a chance to ask Kipp and Jeffrey a few questions after reading the book, and here’s what they had to say!

Aaron: You both obviously have a lot of passion for B2B marketing in general, and social media specifically. Why? Where did that come from?

Kipp: It is what I have always done. Since the beginning of my career I have worked with B2B companies mostly at marketing agencies and then here at HubSpot. I love the challenge of B2B. B2B marketing is the ultimate in problem-solving and storytelling. It is awesome.

Jeff: I, too, have always worked for B2B companies, including marketing agencies that focused on B2B and companies that sold through distribution. It is more exciting to live in a world where the product quality and company knowledge are the basis of a sale, rather than the correct Pantone color. The longer sales cycles require companies to build customer relationships that can be nurtured, rather than offering promotions and discounts.

Aaron: What is most misunderstood about B2B social media marketing?

Kipp: For me it is reach. In traditional marketing, B2B companies obsessed over narrow targeting because executing marketing tactics was expensive. Social media has changed this. Narrow targeting hurts B2B companies online. Bigger reach is needed to generate word-of-mouth and leads online. Even if a social media follow isn’t a potential fit as a customer, they have the opportunity to share your content with someone who is, but this is impossible to predict. Thus the need to actively build reach online.

Jeff: The notion that social media marketing is a business-to-consumer-only activity is most misunderstood. Many conservative B2B companies think that just because there is less volume of conversation around their company, products and industry, that social media is not for them. This ignores the benefits that social media brings to search, and the ability to leverage and share the knowledge and expertise imbedded in B2B companies to build and nurture relationships required for lead generation.

Aaron: Why the intense focus on lead generation in the book?

Kipp: Lead generation is the genesis of B2B success. Marketing must generate leads and revenue to survive. Yes, branding, public relations and other aspects of marketing are important, but they can’t compensate for the lack of a solid lead generation strategy. If lead generation is sound, all of those other aspects of marketing can supercharge it.

Jeff: We know that social media adoption is very slow for B2B companies, no matter what online surveys say. We chose this important slice of social media activity, lead generation, because when success, it demonstrates real value of social media. It is much easier for C-Suite executives to endorse rolling out social media across an organization if it has already generated revenue through this one approach.

Aaron: I especially liked your more integrated focus on bringing prospective customers along a path from initial reach to signing on for content (like liking a page) to ultimately responding to a call to action and becoming a lead. Give us an example or two of who does that well.

Kipp: Breaking Point Systems down in Austin, TX is crushing it. They sell network testing equipment, which is a high-consideration and long buying cycle B2B purchase. We featured their vice president of marketing, Pam O’Neil, in the book. They have an awesome blog, a website that is super SEO-optimized and a social media presence that is engaging and drives traffic and leads back to the website. Pam told us that they have a 2800% ROI from their online leads.

Clear Risk is a finical services company in Canada that is also doing a great job. They have an awesome Facebook page, Twitter page, LinkedIn Page, blog as well as a calls-to-actions and lead generation offers.

Aaron: What about nurturing existing customers? Private B2B communities are big in some industry segments like enterprise software, for instance, but this seemed to be less of a focus in this book. Why?

Kipp: Honestly, that is another book. You’re right. Lead nurturing as well as customer retention is huge revenue-centric application for social media. We just didn’t have the real estate to cover it properly in The B2B Social Media Book, so we decided to save it for another one. We think that having a solid customer generation strategy is the right first step, and too many companies still need to improve that. Lead nurturing is the next step.

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

How do you reach the guy with the wallet?

Filed under Application by Kate Brodock on 5 August 2011 at 12:35 {3 comments}

When you market in the B2B space through social channels, a large part of your audience can often times be non-decision makers. I had a client who works in the production/post-production technology industry for the film, advertising and broadcast verticals – straight B2B transaction- ask me what the benefits were of using tools like Twitter were for selling a product that’s tens of thousands of dollars directly to a production house or film team.

My answer, simply put? Finding the users of that product/service, highlighting the pain point and our solution, creating a buzz and a demand from the bottom up.

FIND THE PRODUCT/SERVICE USERS

Using this example, when an extensive piece of technology is implemented across a large enterprise, the decision to do so doesn’t usually involve all the users, but a handful of decision-makers that head IT, Finance and maybe a few other departments. In other words, most of the users of the product/service have little say in the purchase of the product/service, but they’re the ones most affected by the implementation.

These users are the ones who’s daily processes will be changed and improved by said technology implementation.

HIGHLIGHT THE PAIN POINT AND YOUR SOLUTION

Because these users are the ones who’s lives you’ll be ideally improving, you’ll want to make them directly feel their existing pain point, and communicate to them that you have the solution.

CREATE BUZZ AND DEMAND FROM THE BOTTOM UP

Now that they know you have the solution, part of the process of you reaching the decision-makers comes from upward pressure from the users. In part, the decision-makers pain point becomes the users – their employees – clamoring for a solution to their own pain point (which they’ve found from you). If you’re top-of-mind for the users, it’s likely this will reach the decision-makers.

It’s a simplified model, and only part of the sales and marketing process that goes into the equation, but something to think about as you’re contemplating the ways social media can help your B2B marketing.

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

Relaunching an Online Newsroom

Filed under Case Study, Discussion, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 21 April 2011 at 05:06 {no comments}

In 2006 I took a leap of faith and decided it was time to outsource a key part of our website — the media room. At that time PR Newswire was partnering with The Fuel Team and provided an outsourced solution. When we launched the new media room later that year we had a more dynamic landing page for journalists, analysts, educators and customers who were interested in reading news from the company.

Part of that redesign allowed us to immediately add social media functionality, video content, integration between the newswire and our site, and the company’s first RSS feed. The site has evolved over time but for the most part has retained the same look over the years.

Fast forward to this week. Our media room receives hundreds of visits every day, so making this site relevant, easy to navigate, and more useful to our broad range of stakeholders remained an important objective of the team when we decided last fall to relaunch it. As part of the relaunch, one of the very first things we did was a tremendous amount of research benchmarking our media room content and design not only against our competition, but also against some of the world’s leading brands such as Toyota and Cisco.

After our benchmarking phase, our objective was to keep things comprehensive, yet simple to navigate. In addition, we heard requests from a variety of journalists on how we could improve our content to provide more timely and key additional resources. We continue to use PR Newswire and outsource these pages and last week after many revisions and tests with our internal website team we hit the “refresh” button.

Here are some of the key highlights of our new page at CME Group:

Get the News You Want

Receiving news from CME Group becomes easier as stakeholders can now choose which content you want delivered to you via email – corporate, commodity products, financial products, OTC/clearing — or via an RSS feed.

Banner Updates

When you come to the page online you will immediately notice four large banners at the top. These banners will be updated regularly and point to some of the key news, issues and trends that we feel are important and timely.

Featured Videos

On the right-hand side of the page the latest video content will be posted. These are updated as we add new content and showcase commentary from our management and product teams. We have also made it easier to share this video content through a number options controlled by the user.

Single-page Content

We have made the content expand horizontally rather than vertically, which means users no longer have to scroll down the page for what they need. We did this by placing the tabs across the screen for news, speeches, research and other resources.

Integration with Open Markets and Social Media

When we launched our blog Open Markets in March 2010 we were excited to have a new resource for journalists to gain insight on our thoughts. Open Markets is now linked to our Media Room via our “Keep up to Date” tab in the right-hand corner, which also includes links to other social media platforms we use. We’ve worked hard over the years to build our presence in social media as a financial services firm so it was a nice surprise to view our home page this week showing how “right” the decision was to use these resources.

Like all things online our media room will continue to evolve. This current phase has helped us utilize many of our internal resources to build a better and more integrated site for our many stakeholders. Since we just went through this process what questions do you have? Post them in the comments.

If you liked this post you may also enjoy reading:

Finextra Review — The growth of social media in financial services

Integrating Social Media With Corporate Website: How far can we take this?

Book Review: Empowered Is More Than Empty Words

Filed under Resources by Aaron Pearson on 11 April 2011 at 21:02 {one comment}

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler’s New Book Is a Practical Guide for Unleashing Social Innovation by Employees

I have one more book review post for a while – this one being Empowered, by Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. This is a follow up to Bernoff and Charlene Li’s well-known book Groundswell, and was published late last year by Harvard Business Review Press.

Let’s get right to it: I highly recommend this book. It’s the best one I’ve read in a while. It dispenses with “social media will save the world” hype and gets on with the very real-world challenges of just how to go about encouraging social media-led innovation in your organization. In fact, it’s more a guidebook for supporting any kind of innovation involving technology in this era of “consumerized IT.”

Bernoff and Schadler introduce the concept of HEROes – Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives, who are the key to helping stay ahead of the competition and keep up with your customers in the social era. You can shut them down or you can nurture them along. Obviously, we hope you opt for the latter.

Most of the social media books out there focus on how to connect with customers successfully via social networks. As important as that may be, those efforts won’t scale at a larger company without the support of senior management and IT. The focus on those internal dynamics is what makes this book particularly valuable. That leads to what the authors call the HERO Compact. In short, they note:

“IT is responsible for supporting HEROes with technology innovation, giving leaders the tools to manage risk, and scaling up successful solutions.

Managers are responsible for making customer-focused innovation a priority, establishing the governance structures to support HEROes, and working with IT to manage the business risk of technology.

HEROes are responsible for knowing what customers need, experimenting with technologies that solve customer problems, and operating within the safety principles established by IT and managers.”

Helpfully, they then provide a Pledge in the HERO Compact for each of those three audiences (e.g. IT will focus on technology innovation as a core skill so they can counsel HEROes when they come with technology ideas, etc.).

My favorite story was how HERO Rob Sharpe of Black & Decker sales training turned to YouTube to transform training on their products into an engaging, collaborative experience in which training time has been cut in half and the salespeople themselves are submitting a lot of the videos. Interestingly, the IT staff has learned from Rob and is now employing online video for their own training.

If you find yourself in a larger company with inevitable organizational complexity and in any of those three HERO Compact roles, this book gives you some great material for ensuring you are effectively moving innovation forward – quickly, strategically and safely.

Finextra Review — The Growth of Social Media in Financial Services

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 11 April 2011 at 08:36 {no comments}

Last week I had a great opportunity to speak on a panel and also moderate a panel at the 2011 Social Media Days London hosted by Finextra at Thomson Reuters. The event’s next stop is New York on May 18. There were three key themes that I noticed being discussed during the day:

Measurement and Evaluation: Most of the questions and “water cooler” conversation focused around measuring social media efforts. I was surprised to hear so many people ask about how social media is driving B2B sales. While ultimately all things we do in the marketing/communication mix should be to increase sales, I’m not sure focusing on sales is critical at this stage. Sales measurement in the B2B space for communicators has always been a challenge. While I’m hopeful that so much data being produced can give us better insight and we will continue to be better at measuring our efforts in social media, I am still of the belief that focusing on supporting the brand and building your presence for now is key. Like all things, this will take time and the brands who understand this will do a better job of using the data. For a look at some of the leading brands at what they are doing in social media I found the Social Brands 100 study helpful.
Who Owns It?: There was a good discussion around who owns the strategy and process of social media at a company. A social media team? Corporate communications? Marketing? Advertising? The individual? Or all of the above? Usually we’ve seen strong individuals take the lead at companies and they come from a variety of backgrounds. We continue to move rapidly toward a model where everyone can play a part and contribute through providing content to distribute or monitoring conversations. I continue to be impressed where more and more people at CME Group pass good content over to us to distribute and help us monitor the conversations. This should be the case for most companies moving forward. As for what department internally should run social media there is no simple answer. Due to culture, structure and processes there really is no “one” model that works better than another. But finding the “right” model should be the focus of chief communicators.
International Growth: With the conference held in London there were a number of questions on how to reach stakeholders not just throughout Europe but also in Asia and North America. I enjoyed some of the commentary about new technologies coming to bypass translation, but the fact that moving the social media needle to expand corporate content into a 24/7 cycle is going to be a challenge. It’s a topic like this that makes the challenge of using these resources so exciting, and something I am certainly going to research more.

I also had a chance to sit down with Liz Lum of Finextra who organized the event. You can watch my interview with her here.

If you liked this post you may also enjoy:

What a Wonderful “Mesh” We’ve Made

Beyond Social — What’s Next?

Socialnomics — The Revolution is Us

Integrating Social Media With a Corporate Website