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.

Are you a brand ambassador?

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 6 June 2011 at 08:52 {no comments}

Source: Dictionary.com

Since moving to London I’ve had two great opportunities to to meet with and interact with members of separate US embassies.  Both times I was impressed with the openness and genuine interest from the representatives in what I do. This clearly had me thinking about ways that we can all be better ambassadors for our brands. Here are my thoughts:

  • Elevator Pitch. As a brand ambassador you meet a lot of different people from various walks of life. Therefore, it’s incredibly important to know how to succinctly tell who you are, what you do and why your organization matters. In addition, if you want an ambassador to remember you, because they meet a lot of people, having your pitch down becomes important. Do you have your pitch ready?
  • Ask Questions. Ambassadors are curious and inquisitive. They ask good questions not because they are trying to move the conversation along, but because they are good listeners and sincerely interested in what you have to say. Whether you are heading to an industry event or an internal cross-functional meeting be prepared to ask thoughtful questions. But remember, you can’t ask good questions without listening.
  • Follow Up. As ambassador you meet a lot of people and you receive a lot of requests. It seems simple, but following up on requests goes a long way when you know the answer. More importantly, if you don’t have an answer finding someone who might and connecting those two people or doing a bit of research on your own goes even further. Setting up some type of a follow up system and reminders will be key as you turn the act of following up from a task into a habit.
  • Personalization. A good ambassador will make things personal for you and toward you. Think of the people you know who do this well and you will know what I mean.
  • Everyone is an Ambassador. Keep in mind that being an ambassador doesn’t mean you need to be a CEO or CMO.

If you enjoyed this post you may also want to read:

The most important question you can ask

A discussion with Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications

Book Review: Empowered

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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We’re All Publishers Now

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 4 October 2010 at 19:04 {no comments}

Well the advertising and PR worlds are abuzz with the news of Forbes’ new AdVoice offering, which enables corporations and other organizations to blog under the Forbes banner under some sort of paid arrangement.  The two primary takes by industry watchers so far are that the sky is falling and this is the end of journalism and a great journalism brand or that this is nothing more than an incremental variation on advertorials.

Pontificating on whether this spells the doom of journalism and forever tarnishes the Forbes brand is probably a little outside the scope of this blog but I will say that it is hard to see much of a fundamental difference in principle from advertorials. Moreover, in many ways, Forbes is not the first publisher to take this step. We have noticed our clients getting increasing requests to blog on trade media sites already, and those publications aren’t even asking for compensation!  (Though there is a presumption that we’ll avoid overt production promotion in the blogs.)

Photo Courtesy Matt Miller, Flickr

Similarly, let’s take what’s probably the top and most respected consortium of enterprise tech bloggers, the Enterprise Irregulars. Sure, many of them are industry analysts and other traditional pundits. But Anshu Sharma, VP of Force.com platform product management at salesforce.com is also an Irregular, as is Craig Cmehil, senior product specialist at SAP AG.

In other words, the bigger observation for B2B marketers is that AdVoice reinforces what’s been a growing trend towards companies becoming media publishers. The fact is that in the social media world, good content is good content as long as there is transparency around conflicts of interest and who the real authors of that content are. It doesn’t have to come only from members of the professional journalism community.

Former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski writes about Silicon Valley business trends and the intersection of technology and media. An excerpt from his post at www.EveryCompanyIsaMediaCompany.com:

Our media has also become much more complicated — more fragmented. We used to have “mass media” where a small set of media companies and channels, in TV, radio, newspapers, trade press — hosted much of our media communications.

Those days are gone. The reality is we now live in a multi-platform, multi-channel, micro- media world, and the trend is moving towards ever greater media fragmentation — vidcasts, podcasts, blogs, micro-blogging, Twitter, etc.

It is no longer possible to operate a business the old way — such as sending out a news release on Businesswire and briefing a handful of journalists, and sitting back.

Today you need to do that … and more, much more. Every company needs to master these media technologies, and the best media practices, of a rapidly fragmenting media world.

Traditional media relations opportunities are ever-fewer, especially for smaller or niche brands.  Yet conversely, the Web creates compelling long-tail opportunities to connect specialized audiences with specialized content in exciting ways, with video, slideshows, podcasts, tweetchats, e-books and blogs.  If you’re Apple or Google, you might not have to do this – though you should. If you’re almost anyone else and you want to connect effectively and consistently with your target audiences, you must consider yourself a media publisher.

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Channeling Your Inner CIO

Filed under Application, Discussion, Resources by Allan Schoenberg on 27 April 2010 at 10:27 {no comments}

Ever since I was introduced to CIO magazine several years ago I was immediately drawn to the similarities faced by both CIOs and chief communicators. Perhaps it’s just me, but I read CIO magazine not necessarily for the IT information (which I also enjoy), but with every article I substitute CIO with CCO or CMO. Go ahead and try it. Here’s one that recently caught my eye:  From the CEO: 5 Questions CIOs Need to Answer.

cio-logo_180x109

I’ve taken those five items and listed them here, but with viewpoint of someone in communications:

1. Do we understand what we broke, and what is our plan to fix it?

If you have the perfect communications team than you can skip this point. If not, keep reading. Most discussions with CEOs revolve around helping the business and with communications that’s no different. CEOs always challenge us to improve, to be better than the competition and to find solutions to win customers. This also can apply to your company’s reputation. How do your customers view you positively and where can you improve? These are issues CEOs look to us to fix.

2. How do we get full potential from discretionary spending?

How often do you review your budget and make changes? Are you maximizing that discretionary spending? And where can you improve your budget in order to help the organization achieve its business goals. In today’s economy in particular, CEOs want to ensure every department across the enterprise is getting the best return on investment. Are you?

3. How will we drive unnecessary complexity out of IT?

This point obviously speaks to complexities of software and hardware, but this still applies to communicators. Where is complexity in your department? Are  you sharing metrics? Are you maximizing events? Is social media a cross-department effort? We all have complexities that we can tear out of our marketing and communication systems, but finding them and fixing them takes time and effort.

4. How will we take better advantage of “good enough” solutions?

Yes, your news release is good enough — you saw the stories. Your web site too since people are visiting. And I’m sure your advertising is good enough as well. But you’re competitive, right? What will you do to take the risks to really make your brand stand out? We all have a lot of “standard” communication tools available to us, and no where is this more evident than with social media. We all have these “free” tools but where are you excelling?

5. How do we make outsourcing more strategic?

That new agency you hired — are you tapping into their best resources? Do you go with size and depth of the big agency or lean and nimble from the small agency? These are key decisions we all need to make as the playing field becomes more competitive for us. If your agency isn’t constantly challenging you to do the right/best thing, actively reviewing your activities and asking you tough questions than maybe it’s time you need a more strategic partner.

I am a huge supporter of working as close as possible with your IT team (my earlier post on working with InfoSec) and I encourage you to work more closely with them as well. I think you will be surprised at the number of similarities.  There’s an entire list of email newsletters available at CIO and I would encourage you to sign up and read CIO Leader and CIO Insider, but read them from a communicators perspective. I think you’ll find yourself thinking differently and developing some new ideas for implementing your strategy.

Let us know your thoughts. And if you happen to pass your CIO in the hall offer to take him/her to lunch. They can probably learn a lot from you as well.



More Reasons to Like Posterous, especially in a B2B setting

Filed under Toolbox by Kate Brodock on 11 March 2010 at 18:53 {6 comments}

I recently wrote about using Posterous as a tool for social media marketing, and I wanted to take some time to comment on why it’s a great tool specifically for the B2B space.  Three of the nine reasons I had given really stand out to me:

  1. SEO. Whether you’re a cutting edge research firm that only transacts with other businesses, or you’re in a more traditional industry like manufacturing, there are just plain fewer opportunities to really leverage SEO… people aren’t necessarily searching for you in the ways that B2C organizations get searched on.  The concept of outposts comes into play heavily here, and the simple fact that having more places for people to search for content related to you – and ideally from you – the more opportunities you have to associate that content with your website, and the more qualified traffic you can drive to your site.  You can very appropriately (and deliberately) assign keywords to your content that is directly linked to your website, and thus your company.
  2. Inbound linking. Many B2B companies also don’t have a lot of opportunities for inbound linking, especially in the more traditional industries  or instances when you may be just one piece of a long supply chain.  Inline with SEO opportunities, Posterous allows a pretty easy inbound linking opportunity….and one of high authority.  If you’re on a fledgling website strategy and need to boost that inbound link count quickly and effectively, Posterous is a great way to do that.  Additionally, these types of young or underdeveloped websites may have a low authority, and supplementing that with Posterous inbound links can do a lot for your organic SEO.
  3. That means more thought leadership potential. See, it makes a nice little equation, doesn’t it?  With higher SEO, more content sharing opportunities and more inbound linking, it means all of your valuable content is all pointed back to your brand.  If you’re good at what you do – which you probably are – and you identify effective internal content to share, this could mean the start of some great thought leadership opportunities.  And this is where people in more traditional industries can have a big advantage…. if you’re among the first to start really thinking about this equation, you can make huge and long-lasting strides ahead of competitors who aren’t as “up-to-snuff.”

I also wanted to throw out a technical note on calls-to-action.  Again, in the B2B setting, calls-to-action can be a lot more difficult to achieve.  It’s not like someone wants a new pair of running shoes from you.  By using outside content on Posterous, and providing a link of some sort – preferably in the form of “For more information on X systems….” – you can still drive people to your own products or services related to the content you’re posting.  As long as the content is relevant to your company, this is still a good way to be found by qualified leads.

So, a couple To-dos for B2B Posterous users:

  • If you have a blog, post every post up on Posterous, with a link back to the original.
  • Think about calls-to-action, and make sure that every post has one that brings your products/services to the readers’ attention.  These don’t need to be overt (and really shouldn’t be), but can be very effective.
  • In some of the more traditional industries, it may actually be better to have your call-to-action right at the top.  If someone is searching for “copper tracer wire” and really just wants a quote or a price (which is usually the case with a purchaser behind the desk) and they come to your Posterous page in their search results, make it really easy for them to get that done…. through you. They may not have the patience to read through your entire post….
  • Use outside content, and find a way to incorporate an association to your company.  This is an easy one, as the fundamental goal of content production is to provide valuable information to your audience.

What else have you found helpful about Posterous in the B2B setting?  Are there any other To-Dos you have? Do you have a Case Study you’d like to share with us?

5 Ways to Combine Traditional & Social Media in B2B

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 3 December 2009 at 13:20 {5 comments}

I continue to be disturbed by the frequency with which social media is treated as this isolated specialty area, with the result inevitably being that social media messaging and strategy is cut-off from other marketing communications programs, leading to redundancy, mixed messages, wasted money and blown opportunities. I can’t speak for consumer products companies but in B2B I can only implore you to never go this route.

Instead, as I’ve preached before, our point of view is that a B2B purchase decision is an “inline” journey – that prospects using a mix of offline and online sources of information and influence to ultimately become a buyer and hopefully an advocate. As University of Pennsylvania sociologist Keith Hampton said in an article about the myth of urban isolation, “Online and offline life are inherently connected.”

handSo here are 5 thought starters on just how to do that:
1. Bring Offline Conversations Online. You’ll get more return on your investment in live gatherings of customers, prospects or influencers if you encourage online conversations to run in parallel. They will help engage people in live attendance more intensively, provide important contextual information (such as online videos or collateral that complement live presentations), and pull in a lot of people who otherwise couldn’t attend.
2. Be an Inline Thought Leader. Most B2B public relations campaigns have a strong thought leadershp component because when you’re making an expensive, complex purchase, you’re more likely to do so with a vendor with demonstrated expertise, not just because they’re running a “buy one, get one free” sale. Make sure your online thought leadership efforts are thematically in sync. One of our consulting firm clients targeting banks did this by complementing news releases and bylined articles (traditional PR tools) with online video interviews of subject matter experts and a Twitter presence that linked to both their own and third-party content that was topically consistent.
3. Activate Your Intelligence Network. Leveraging social media doesn’t just mean trying to connect with current and potential customers. It can also include creating an internal network or a partner network designed to facilitate intelligence gathering about competitors, sales trends or sales and marketing best practices. Tools like Yammer, Delicious, iGoogle and Radian6 can help and even more sophisticated ones are coming onto the market.
4. Ignite Advocates. Word of mouth remains the No. 1 source of influence in B2B, according to most of the research I see from Forrester and others. A lot of that is happening through pretty traditional channels – face-to-face, phone and email mostly. You can arm your advocates for those conversations by sharing information specifically designed to help them tell your story, via Twitter perhaps, or even a password-protected online advocacy toolkit.
5. Work With the Media – and Be the Media. We’re still going to be pitching stories and working with media and bloggers, but we can self-publish good content ourselves too and the evidence is that good content will be embraced even if it comes from a vendor. For example, a vice president at one of my former clients covered their industry trade show with video and regular blog posts, and was included in an industry trade round-up story as one of the individuals “covering” the event. It gave a big boost to his blog traffic. As journalist A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is guranteed only to those who own one.” Now you can.

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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