Social Media | B2B Voices

Spotlight on Healthcare from HIMSS 2011

Filed under Discussion by Aaron Pearson on 28 February 2011 at 11:26 {2 comments}

I got back Wednesday night from the HIMSS Show, which is essentially the Consumer Electronics Show of the health IT industry. It’s a good opportunity to share what I’m seeing in marketing to healthcare providers, including at HIMSS specifically.

It’s a hot market. Thanks to both the HITECH Act, which provides funding for the meaningful use of electronic medical records, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which brings millions more Americans into the healthcare system and encourages the creation of new kinds of entities like health insurance exchanges and accountable care organizations, providers have a lot to deal with, and of course vendors are rushing to their aid.

This wasn’t a market that saw much or any recession, which meant the pick-up now is all the more pronounced. The show broke a record with more than 31,000 attendees and 900 exhibitors. And the vendors didn’t hold back, with booths at Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and featuring in-booth 3D videos, a Back to the Future replica DeLorean and a Tesla sports car.

Here are just a few of the trends I saw at the show:

Tablets are Everywhere. It might be that the B2B industry where tablets can have the most impact is healthcare, and that was certainly apparent on the show floor. This is an industry that’s all about fast collection and access to information and yet almost nobody is sitting at a desk. Doctors, nurses, and lab technicians, not to mention the patients themselves, and been slow to let go of paper, and no wonder. But the iPad and emerging Android tablets may finally get us there.

Interoperability is Key. One of my own clients, IEEE, played a key role in setting up an acre-sized interoperability lab at the show, along with about 80 other organizations and vendors. HIMSS notes that a typical 100-bed hospital utilizes hundreds of interfaces to transfer patient data from department to department. For all the wonder of the innovations from the vendors on the main show floor, it was at least as important to see them working together in Hall E.

Strong Social Media Presence: Healthcare is still served by a robust ecosystem of healthcare trade publications, but social media influencers like Dr. David Kibbe and Dr. Jim Marks at the Health Care Blog or the anonymous blogger at HIStalk have made coverage more social. The #HIMSS11 hash tag was scrolling fast and furious on Tweetchat throughout the show. A professional journalist staffed the HIMSS YouTube channel, shooting many videos with a simple flip cam. There was even a large Social Media Center on the show floor with its own track of sessions.

A warm-weather break for HIMSS conference-goers, such as snow-bound yours truly. I didn't have time to sit at the pool but lunch outside was glorious.

Deadlines and Challenges: There are several looming IT challenges facing the industry. For instance, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) were a result of the ACA and are designed to be provider-led organizations that are responsible for improving the health of the populations they serve while controlling costs. Particularly in educational sessions, payers, providers and other industry stakeholders were struggling to envision what this world might look like. Another is the adoption of ICD-10 coding, which is sort of a Y2K moment for healthcare, as 14,000+ new codes for describing various diseases, conditions and other diagnoses must be adopted system-wide. And of course, many providers are struggling to demonstrate “meaningful use” of EMRs in a three-phase process between now and 2015.

I love health IT – it’s such a dynamic, challenging industry and the potential impact on people’s lives is high. The industry may be in something of a bubble, however. Dollars will get tighter and consolidation is likely. The industry also stands to become more global as countries around the world look to best practices wherever they can find them. Hang on.

What’s on tap for the B2B Voices team in 2011?

Filed under Discussion by Allan Schoenberg on 25 January 2011 at 06:03 {no comments}

With a new year comes new priorities and objectives. Each of us at B2B Voices decided to share with you what we’re working on for 2011, and hopefully in December we can all say we’ve achieved our goals. Share with us in the comments what you hope to accomplish as well.

Allan Schoenberg

In January I relocated to London for CME Group to take on a new role and new challenges for the company heading up all of our international communication efforts. While I will still be managing our presence in the social media landscape, we obviously are looking to expand in that area overseas as well. As our business continues to grow throughout Europe and Asia, we have been aggressively pursuing more ways to communicate our brand attributes and strengths of our business. My expanded role at CME Group is an exciting time professionally and personally for me. So this year expect to see more regular media coverage of CME Group throughout Europe and Asia, including profile stories, product and service news, and having the company more woven into the fabric of the London business scene.

Aaron Pearson

In January, I shivered in the cold while watching with envy as Allan relocated to London. I have a couple big professional priorities for the year. First, I’m hoping not to bomb out teaching an executive education class on social media marketing at the University of St. Thomas with Weber Shandwick Digital Strategist and Vice President Andy Keith (builds on this course). That’s partly why I’ve been doing more social media book-reading – I need to make sure I have a good handle on perspectives and experiences beyond my own. Second, as the head of our vertical market segment, I’m trying to focus a great deal on growing our healthcare IT work. It’s the hottest B2B vertical market out there and we have a good base of experience to tap. Finally, we’re trying to take more of our clients’ B2B social media efforts beyond pilots to full-fledged efforts that deliver measurable impact. Social media engagement really is perfect for connecting niche B2B audiences into global communities, and yet there’s a lot more experimentation and innovation today on the B2C side. I have a major client playing in a blurry space between B2B and B2C and that should be a great sweet spot for showcasing how this can really work – stay tuned.

Arik Hanson:

For me, in many ways, 2011 will be a building year. On the business side, I’ll be building on the first year of my new digital communications consulting business, ACH Communications. Year one exceeded almost every expectation I had–but in 2011, I’m looking to take that success to the next level. That doesn’t necessarily mean growing my business (although that appears to be happening whether I want it to or not). It means finding ways to work smarter. And stay ahead of the digital curve. And, finding ways to deliver outstanding value for my clients. Professionally, I’m hoping to build on a number of events I helped run or found in 2011. I’m working with PR leaders across the country to formalize the Help a PR Pro Out (HAPPO) organization a bit–we will have big news to share about a great Feb. event soon. I’m working with my colleague and friend Melissa Berggren to take the MN Blogger Conference event and build that out a bit with additional events in 2011. And, I’m hoping to play a key role in BlogWorld again this year (I helped organize the Social Media Business Summit last fall). Finally, personally, I’m hoping to build on our family successes (OK, so the metaphor doesn’t really work here . I’m planning to take more time with my daughter and son to help them discover their interests and passions. I’m hoping to spend more time with my wife as we continue to explore more restaurants and haunts in Minneapolis (we’re amateur foodies). And, I’m also looking to spend more time on myself as I seek to read more (trying to read 26 books in 2011) and get back in shape (working out 3 times a week–a big jump for me).

Kate Brodock

In January, I transitioned from full-time to part-time at the family business in Rome NY, a manufacturing plant, in order to focus entirely on my social media marketing and content production consulting firm, Other Side Group. I’ll be reworking the formula I had from 2008 until now, and will be adding a focus on reputation management for high-profile individuals, in addition the existing social media marketing for organizations. Luckily, my family still loves me, and I’ll be also taking their marketing to a new level. I’m excited to “get back” into the space full-time, and look forward to working with B2B and B2C customers alike. I also hope to renew my focus in Girls in Tech in my new role as CMO of Global, and in Meta-Activism Project. Lastly, I’d like to increase my number of speaking and writing opportunities, as those are two things that really drive me. Oh, and have a ton of fun in life… of course.

You can also follow all of us on Twitter: Allan, Aaron, Arik, Kate or connect with us on LinkedIn: Allan, Aaron, Arik, Kate

Socialnomics: The Revolution is Us

Filed under Case Study by Aaron Pearson on 17 January 2011 at 12:34 {2 comments}

A Book Review

If you didn’t read Socialnomics, by Erik Qualman, when it originally came out in mid-2009, a revised and updated edition just came out in November. It’s worth checking out.

Qualman is an unabashed cheerleader for all things social media, which for someone with a skeptical bent like myself can be a little hard to take at times, but most other social media authors are no different – as Gartner analysts would say, the depths of the “Trough of Disillusionment” for social media are not yet upon us (though 2011 may be the year). This book is written primarily as a guide to social media for marketers and entrepreneurs. Like most, it comes at it with a B2C emphasis, with the rare exception. But that’s nothing new. The fact is that B2C is still ahead in social media so those of us focused more heavily on B2B need to learn from those experiences.

Here’s Qualman at a recent TedX event.

The Good:

Word of Mouth to World of Mouth: This is the heart of Qualman’s thesis and it’s hard to argue with. As I’ve said on this blog ad nauseum, every bit of research I’ve ever encountered shows word of mouth as the most powerful influence on the purchase decision-making process. This is at least as true for B2B purchases, and maybe more so. But traditional word-of-mouth influence is slow and each individual only influences a few of the people they know. Grease word-of-mouth with social media and suddenly reach and speed explode with little loss of impact. He calls that “World of Mouth.”
Silence is Not Golden. Qualman cites a study by the Strategic Planning Institute that found that 96 percent of dissatisfied customers don’t bother to complain, and yet 63 percent of those silent dissatisfieds will nevertheless not buy from you again. Yikes! Thanks to social media, it’s getting much easier for those customers to complain when something doesn’t go right. The author emphasizes for skittish companies that this is An Opportunity, a chance to take that feedback to make your product or service the best it can be. Of course, you also don’t have a choice because you can no longer hide the things that aren’t working. It’s better to face up to reality.
Stats. Those of us who have to give presentations on social media are always trying to keep track of key trend stats, and not only has Qualman peppered the book with many, as you’d expect, he did us the courtesy of assembling most of them in the last chapter of the book under Eye Opening Statistics. Oh, okay, I know you want a couple right now. One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media. Also, 50 percent of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. There are pages of these handy stats. (Too bad they’ll all be hopelessly out of date in a year, but so it goes. Maybe he’ll keep updating this.)
Thoughtful Case Studies, without clear villains, just like real life. Sometimes the big companies get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, sometimes there’s more than one winner, and sometimes it takes two tries to get it right. And when we think we get something right, inevitably hubris sets in. I loved the travel example, where ACME Travel, a big player, gets something right on Facebook, but not quite right. A newcomer, Where I’ve Been, one-ups ACME. In turn, TripAdvisor tries to buy Where I’ve Been, but the latter gets a little greedy so TripAdvisor builds their own travel sharing app for less than it would have cost to acquire Where I’ve Been. In the end, TripAdvisor ends up with the most users. Fascinating story.

The Not So Good:

It’s Not All Rosy. Although Qualman does acknowledge that there may be some downsides to social media, he doesn’t try very hard to think of many. I’m certainly a fan of the concept of “Socialnomics” but the fact is there are threats posed by social and digital media besides the possible decline of interpersonal communications skills in some young people. One of the great things about social media – really the Web in general – is we can really open our eyes to new ideas if we want to. On the other hand, you also have the opportunity to surround yourself only by people who think as you do and to read news and information that only conforms to your narrow point of view. This can actual reinforce socioeconomic and cultural isolation. Here’s a New York Times piece about that from way back in mid-2009.
The Future is Not the Present. This is mainly something for marketers to be cognizant of. Qualman will often state emerging trends as if they are already the current state of affairs. He notes, for example that the media now do interviews via email instead of by phone or in person. Well, some industry media do, in some instances, but certainly that’s not the way any tier-1 journalist conducts interviews today. (The Washington Post ran such a story today on Chinese President Hu Juntao, but not because THEY wanted to. Rather, Hu insisted.) The author also says, “People are now living their own lives rather than watching others.” Presumably, because you see other people doing cool and amazing, you’re less satisfied spending days working, washing clothes and mowing the lawn, and are now taking up skydiving and treks to the South Pole. I’m sure some are but it feels more like wishful thinking.
Search Engines Subsumed by Social Media. Qualman’s concept here is that I care more about what my neighbor thinks than what Google thinks (true) and so we don’t need to go hunting around on search engines. I would note that most searches on search engines are not for products. Look at Bing’s top 10 searches of 2010 and none were product-related. And most of what we buy, we never did find on search engines. A B2C example: I want a new car. I don’t know about you but before social media, I wasn’t punching in “four-door sedan with good gas mileage” into a search engine. I was talking to my dad over coffee and emailing my friends. Doing that via social media doesn’t strike me as a radical change. A B2B example: Did I ever hire an accounting firm by trolling search engines? I don’t think this trend is as big as he makes it out to be.
It’s Weber, Weber! Sorry, I’m the only one who cares about this, but in his Social Media Rolodex, Qualman gives a nod to Larry Weber, who founded the Weber Group, which merged with us to become Weber Shandwick. But it’s “Larry Weber” not “Webber.” Had to be said.

Bottom Line: If you read a lot of books on social media, you’ll have heard most of this before. If not, this is one of the better ones for describing the fundamental impacts of the social media era on business and society. Plus the sources and references in the back are handy. Just go easy on the Kool-Aid.

You can follow the author on Twitter at @equalman.

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:

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.
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.
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.
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:

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.
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.
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.

Beyond Social – What’s Next?

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 24 November 2010 at 16:19 {2 comments}

Study after study continues to show that companies are integrating social into their communication plans. This year’s study by Chief Marketer found that 64% of 1,300 respondents said they were already integrating social media into marketing campaigns, and 22% who currently are not will be doing so in the next year.

And SmartBrief just recently partnered with market research firm Summus and released The State of Social Media for Business. You can access the top line themes of the study here. One key point from the study, 66.5% of businesses have adopted social media in the past 18 months, but less than 15% of businesses are measuring the ROI of their social media efforts.

As both of these studies show, we are getting closer and closer where all companies in some way are utilizing social tools. Here are a few things I see developing by the end of 2011.

Vendors: We’ll see more, not less, of vendor offerings in the social space. As companies continue to use these tools more vendors will emerge with tools and services. Resources for measuring, tracking, managing and content management will not only showcase the rising importance of social media, but also point to an enormous accumulation of data. The challenge for communicators will be choosing the correct vendors to work with based on strategy and content. Your choices will be so you consolidate services with one vendor or do you work with multiple vendors? Both choices have their benefits but they also have disadvantages, so are you starting to plan?
You will thank Apple: From the iPhone to the iPad more and more applications are being developed. That’s great, but what’s really been helpful is that more and more C-level executives are using these products. The result is they are asking, “What can we do using apps?” (Read this from CIO Magazine: CEOs to CIOs: We Need the iPad!). Even if your company is based on the popular BlackBerry device they too have a tablet being developed. If you aren’t thinking about apps, now may be a good time to do some research. I suggest taking your IT and website teams to lunch and start benchmarking what other companies are doing.
More integrated social communication: Social media has given a lot of capabilities and in some cases responsibilities to the individual. While your job responsibilities and titles will stay the same, more and more companies are trying to figure out whether to have a centralized or a decentralized social media strategy. I think truly successful companies will adopt a model that works for them culturally (neither model is right or wrong), but also learn that everyone in communications needs to think of how to leverage these tools. By the end of 2011 more people will have social media in their job descriptions but not necessarily their job title.
Speaking of jobs…: I think by the end of 2011 we’ll see fewer and fewer job openings at corporations (not agencies) for Social Media directors. There’s a two-fold reason for this: 1.) Most of those jobs will be filled already 2.) Companies will just expect communicators to think and implement social media – it’s just part of your job description, or if it’s too specialized it will be outsourced.
Data tsunami: If you think you have too much data now just wait. More of your customers are coming online, more are using social media, and more are expecting you to be social. All of this means you need to have someone (e.g. staff member, consultant) or some tool (e.g. Omniture, Hootsuite – we use both at CME Group) to help you wade through it all. Good communicators will know what they are looking for and how to find it, so start thinking about that now. In addition, if you’re a consultant in the measurement business 2011 will be a very good year for you.
Crisis management v. risk management: There is a difference between crisis management and risk management. For crisis management, your team will need to be on top of what’s being said and how to rapidly respond. In order to manage risks you’ll need to integrate social media listening into your existing issues management plan. And you do have both a crisis and issues management plan already, right?

So what are your thoughts? Am I on the right track? Are you seeing something other than what I’m seeing? And of course let us know what you think will happen in this space in 2011.

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):

Making your Corporate Website Relevant

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

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:

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.
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!

How Well Do You Know Your Social Network? Probably Poorly

Filed under Application by Aaron Pearson on 26 October 2010 at 23:49 {2 comments}

I had a great time at MarketingProf’s Social Tech 2010 conference today, getting a lot out of every session I was in. I have a rather diverse client base, so pretty much name the challenge and I have a client dealing with it. Getting so many different perspectives seriously helped.

The biggest eye opener for me today had to be the session on “Using Social Network Analysis to Leverage the Dynamics of Social Media Interactions Inside and Outside Your Organization.” In addition for winning the award for longest and most awkwardly named session, I’m sure it was also probably the most baffling for anyone trying to follow on Twitter. But the message I took away is that most of us have been flying practically blind when it comes to understanding our social networks, and that’s sure not going to cut it in the future.

Tweets of #futureofbirth by marc_smith created in NodeXL

Talk about a brainy line-up of speakers: Dr. Marc Smith is chief social scientist for the Connected Action Consulting Group and the author of Analyzing Social Media Networks With Node XL. Lawrence Liu is a product manager for Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform business unit. Thomas Lento is a data scientist for Facebook where he builds statistical models to understand the behavior of Facebook networks. And Michael Wu is principal scientist of analytics at Lithium Technologies and a Ph.D. in biophysics from U.C. Berkeley. I was in awe of these people but really had to concentrate to keep up with them. They know each other well and the interplay among them was fun.

Social network analysis (SNA) is very comparable to past references I’ve made to what our partner Community Analytics does to map influence networks. In this context, we’re talking specifically about influencer maps in an online social media setting. You can read the Wikipedia definition here but what we’re talking about is a network map per the image here of nodes, which are typically people, but sometimes ideas, and edges or ties that connect them, which might represent advocacy or simple education but are very topic-specific. Software like the open source and free Excel add-on NodeXL lets you take social media data sources and create these maps (give it a try if you’re geeky enough). Ultimately, they enable you to spot the real influencers in your network and identify the roles they are playing. One example from Marc Smith: Let’s say you have a node, an influencer, with lots of other people connecting to that influencer. That’s good, that’s a key person. But if none of those other people are connected to each other, then if the influencer were to withdraw, the whole network would collapse. Another example from Lawrence Liu: You can find a cluster of connections suggesting a virtual “echo chamber,” which is notable. But if someone in that echo chamber is also well-connected with others outside the echo chamber, that makes them the key to extending your reach beyond your usual suspects.

Smith warns that it’s not enough to just count the number of connections. As in real estate, where it’s about location, location, location – in the social network world, it’s about those critical people who have the connections others don’t, who can be the gatekeepers to key new relationships. He described the job of the community manager as a park ranger. You’re really talking about nurturing a social network ecosystem. Continuing to add more bears doesn’t necessarily make a nature ecosystem healthier and just ramping up connections doesn’t make a social ecosystem automatically better either.

There’s a lot more to this and I won’t go on about it but the fact is we no longer need to just guess about what these influencer networks look like and as social media programs continue to scale up, we’re really going to need to take a hard look at these more sophisticated, automated ways to analyze what’s happening out there. Gut feel won’t be enough.

You’re Not Marketing to a “B”, so How Well Do You Know Your “P”?

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 3 October 2010 at 23:52 {no comments}

Do we do enough research into our target audiences? What are they reading, who are they listening to, who do they trust, why do they buy, what do they care about? Consumer marketers do. I don’t think we do enough. Why isn’t it as culturally ingrained in B2B marketing communications programs to get the kind of research to really profile our audiences that way? Maybe we think we’re selling to companies or institutions.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
Peter F. Drucker

We’re not. We like to go on and on about how B2B is different than B2C, but the fact is, who’s the B? It’s a person. Actually, it’s probably a team of people. And as such they’re all different and they relate with each other in complicated ways, with a mix of respect, trust, suspicion, envy, aspirations and worries. And every B you target presents a different mix of such people. As Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer has said, “B2B is more P2P – people to people.” We’ve got to get into their heads and sort these relationships, motivations and interests all out so we have some chance of getting all those Ps to give our products or services a chance.

Every day I preach how we need to explain in a clear and compelling way how that product should resonate with the ever-evolving critical business challenges of the industry being targeted. But that really isn’t enough. We need to resonate with regular people. Our P2P-focused social media tools only make this more apparent.

B-to-B Marketers Must Think Like Consumer Companies (forbes.com)

5 Ways to Increase Engagement With Your Content [Cross Post]

Filed under Toolbox by Kate Brodock on 19 August 2010 at 07:38 {3 comments}

This was originally posted as a guest post on the EditMe blog. I thought the content would be valuable for our B2B Voices audience! “EditMe is a wiki where regular people build websites. Add, edit, and delete every web page, image, and attachment from within your web browser. Pick from our gallery of web designs, or customize your own.” Consider checking out their blog and their site.

We’ve all been there: we’ve got a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, you name it…..you’ve got traffic….. but no one’s giving you any love. No “comments” love. No “click” love. No “Facebook Like” love. No “Twitter Retweet” love.

Is it you?

Well, it is, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that your content is bad itself. It may mean you haven’t given people a good enough call-to-action, a reason for them to do more than just read what you put out there and move on. It doesn’t mean that they walk away dissatisfied, or unfulfilled. In fact, you may very well have left a good impression on them. But you could be doing more to get them to interact.

So, you ask, what are some ways I can make people want to *do* stuff with my content? How can I get them to react to it, or even to share it? I’ve listed a few ways below, and would love to hear from you some of your success stories.

Way Number One: Question Them

Assuming that your content is actually good and offers value to your readers, and that you’ve distributed your content enough that it has eyes reading it, getting your audience to take that one step further and process your content increases the likelihood that they’ll want to react to it in some way. What I’ve found to be an effective tactic – as a practitioner and as a reader – is asking a question.

Whether it’s in the middle of a blog post or at the end, or as part of a conversation on a social networking platform, a question forces your reader to pause and think about what’s being discussed. Quite literally, the act of reading a question provokes your brain to actually ask it of itself, and therefore mull over answers. This is a much more active process than simply reading, which can sometimes be very passive as we skim, consume, and move on through the piles of content we see each day.

Additionally, asking a question invites your readers to a discussion, and shows them that you want to have that discussion, while also empowering them as capable and knowledgeable contributors to the discussion topic.

Way Number Two: Connect and Share

One of the biggest ways you can get people to interact with and pass along your content is if you make it super easy for them. Seems obvious, right? But it requires taking a good look at each separate platform, recognizing how your content is being presented and the ways in which people can interact with your content from a technical standpoint. Often times, it’s small details that make the difference.

Have you made it easy for people to leave you a comment, or is it a hassle to do so? If there are a bunch of barriers up that make it difficult for me to leave a comment, I’m not going to do so. A simple form and one click says to me “we welcome your input!”

Have you made connecting with you in various ways as easy as pie? Think about how people can contact you further, follow your RSS feed, sign up for newsletters, follow you on other social networks, etc. ”Interacting with your content” doesn’t necessarily have to mean that it’s one particular piece. If you get people to continue to come back to future content easily, that’s great.

Are your sharing options clear, and do you have some control over how your content is presented once it’s shared? For instance, if you have a button on your blog posts that people can click and share on Twitter, you not only want to make sure your readers do as little work as possible, but also that your content – your blog title, URL, etc – are as clear and attractive as possible when shared.

You get the picture here. You want to make sure that people can connect to you easily, can engage in conversation with you easily, and can share your content easily, while also keeping your content in the rocking form it should be.

Way Number Three: Buck the Trend

Sometimes “taking sides” gets the juices flowing. There’s no denying it, so, if you can, you might as well embrace it. Now, I’m not saying you should write every post from ontop of a soap-box. But often times, companies and organizations back off from taking sides because it’s safe to be neutral. However, if there’s a topic that fits into the theme(s) of your organizations “reason for being” that you feel you can comment on with some authority and take a diplomatic, professional stand, this is usually a good hook for people.

This tactic should follow an internal discussion of your content strategy as to where the line is between “taking sides” and “creating controversy” (which can be detrimental). This again also needs to be aligned with your branding and your Voice.

Remember, a good way to present your side is to also make it a welcoming conversation for anyone from any side. This can be done by combining your stance with questions, and asking people what they think.

Way Number Four: Involve Them

This will seem like a pretty easy one once I explain. Creating a more “official” process by which people can directly interact with you makes them a lot more willing, especially if there’s something in it for them. Asking them for their stories relating to a particular topic or running a contest on your blog are sure ways to get more participation.

The tricky part here is to make the call-to-action applicable enough to “what you’re all about” so people aren’t just coming, participating, and then leaving and never coming back. I’ve seen too many iPod give aways that had no thought put into whether or not the participants would come back or not. They only came for the iPod, and then they left. The reason to act was not compelling enough to have them stick around. Some of the more successful campaigns have been something like submitting a story on a particular subject area that fits your organization’s “thing” and offering a prize to the best (whatever you determine best to be) submission. If you can engage them through company/organization-related issues, they’re more likely to come back after they’ve responded to your official call-to-action.

Way Number Five: Think About the Conversation

Have you ever read an informative, but professionally (read: rigidly) written blog post and really really wanted to interact with it? If you’re anything like me, the answer is probably no. I feel more likely to engage with content that sounds like I’m talking to a person. Now, this doesn’t apply across the board, because your Voice ultimately needs to be aligned with your brand, but I’m of the general ilk that adding a little bit of informality to some of the content you have on social media platforms can have its benefits. This can complement your more formal pieces of content quite well.

In general, thinking about your content as a piece of a conversation can be helpful in putting it together. How would you talk about a particular topic?

If you choose to adopt any of these, remember also that it doesn’t mean you’re applying it as the heart of your content production strategy (unless you really want to). These are meant to be tactical level ideas that support your strategy. You can use one way one time (or never!) and be done with it. You can think about doing two of them at once, or try one every few weeks.

There are plenty of other ways you can get people giving your content some love, and I’d love to hear from you what you’ve found most successful, so please leave a comment!

Content Marketing Optimization – SES San Francisco (bruceclay.com)
The 5 NEW Rules Of Social Media Optimization (SMO) (rohitbhargava.com)

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Thoughts on B2B marketing and PR in the new age…..

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Way Number One: Question Them

Way Number Two: Connect and Share

Way Number Three: Buck the Trend

Way Number Four: Involve Them

Way Number Five: Think About the Conversation

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