Social Media

The following post is taken from my monthly collumn over at B2B Marketing

B2B lead generation in its traditional form consists of many outbound marketing activities; for example ads, telemarketing, email marketing, and pay-per-click. All of these are broadcast in their very nature. However, some of these activities are now increasingly becoming ignored by prospects who favour one-to-one communications. This shift in behaviour effects not just the success of lead generation but your future marketing budgets.

Savvy marketers now regard social media as an important channel of the marketing mix whereby conversations and content referred to as ‘inbound’ marketing can attract, engage and nurture leads.

Cost effective
The value of social media used for lead generation in comparison to outbound marketing activities is a lot more cost-effective. What this means for small and medium sized businesses is that they can now compete with larger corporations because they can leverage social media to their advantage through effective engagement and creative content at lower costs. For larger corporations the risk is that, if they do not adopt or engage in social media, they will lose a slice of the prospect pie.

When looking to generate leads through social media, the first step is to get heard by cutting through the noise. This is where your social media brand outposts such as Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn communities are important as they are the launch pad for creating interesting conversations and engaging content.

Both the conversations and content you are producing can be promoted through seeding, sharing and optimisation throughout social media. This allows your content to be found through social search and increases your chances of prospects engaging with content and spreading it further throughout their own social networks.

Traditional processes still work
Marketers should look to revise traditional lead gen processes such as scouring newspapers and trade publications for new business opportunities by using social media tools. For example, you can now use RSS readers to pool RSS feeds from trade publications as well as from competitors. The RSS readers enable you to keep up to date with industry announcements and potential opportunities that you can add to your prospect database and follow up.

At the same time it is essential that you have a listening strategy in place whereby you can monitor conversations taking place within blogs, forums and most importantly Twitter so that you do not miss out on opportunities. Expanding upon your listening strategy further, effective monitoring of conversations will provide you with the intelligence enabling you to engage in discussions within Yahoo Answers, Facebook groups and LinkedIn Q&As.

You should look to develop networking opportunities using social media, for example you can search for prospects within Twitter. Once you have added them to a list, you can create bespoke content for specific leads in order to create conversations and optimise this content to spread further through your other brand outposts and social networks to increase the potential of reaching more prospects.

Make sure that you balance all content with conversations so that the dialogue is not one way to ensure you are not reverting back to the traditional broadcast marketing methods.

Securing future social media budgets
Once your conversations and content are discovered, the goal is to funnel visitors/traffic toward target destinations such as a bespoke landing page whereby the user can enter in details via data capture and become a prospect. Social media activity inevitably costs money in terms of both time and resources, therefore in order to secure a budget for future social media spend you need to generate as many leads as possible that will eventually result in sales.

Some of the best tactics used to generate leads are value-added, for example creating blog posts offering advice on how to carry out business processes that compliment a company’s products and services thus increasing subscribers and increasing ratio of leads. It is important to remember that the quality of leads is controlled by the quality of the content and targeting.

As with all marketing activity, and social media is no exception, it needs to be measured in order to determine success and increase business intelligence. Use multivariate testing within your communications, analyse the data to track visitors, leads and customers across every channel that you are using within social media. This information will help inform where future budgets are best invested and what content works.

Tagged as: b2b marketing magazine, chartered institute of marketing, cim, lead generation, marketing, Social Media

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I’ll provide you with some examples:
Promote - customers talking together about the products they want to buy on your site/community. The more enthusiastic customers are about your products and services the more you will sell. Reviews and recommendations are an example of this, and you can look to create a customer network around service.

Innovate - Intel connect this is a recent example. Apparently there are 15 billion devices connected to the internet of which Intel have a large share so they are looking for ways to best increase. This use of ideation is very similar to Starbucks and Dell Idea Storm but with Intel and they are looking to pay out for great ideas to get customers exchanging ideas on their behalf. If you’ve read Wikinomics, Don Tapscott provides more depth to the subject of crowd sourcing and co-creation.

Support - the most common use for social CRM. With traditional CRM it is very much focussed on internal processes. With social CRM it is focussed on external and social dynamics for example understanding user behaviour and why they would support users amongst the community for free.

Introducing the social business
Begin by building a vibrant customer community and then leverage the community to generate leads and ultimately transactions.
First step is to start off with social search engine optimisation looking for people based on what they search for, and social media monitoring to understand where to find people talking.

Look at Social SEO within the community as the more content you have within the community you need to ensure that it can easily be found through search.

Make sure that you build communities that dont exist in silos but that they can all collaborate and talk with one another.
Again great customer service starts with search. Your search within your site/community must return all results federated so that they do not have to search in multiple places.

With regard to management information, in practise you can monitor from a customer service point of view those problems asked, problems answered by existing content, resolved by community and resolved by agent. As the community evolves you should solve more problems with existing content thus increasing the return on investment.

To measure success of community you use metrics such as page views, posts, registrations, searches, new threads, accepted solutions, user sessions. Improvements can be made based on content, interaction, traffic, members and responsiveness.
The main question for marketers at the moment is how do I connect social web technologies to my own CRM? As social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Communities scale in terms of positive network effects you cannot expect to have your employees watching this all this time.

You can use tools such as Lithium (I promise I’m not being paid by Lithium). They have technology that allows you to take a tweet and set it up as a thread within your own community to continue the conversation.
This technology taps into social behaviour aswWhen people use Twitter they want it to become a social response. A twitter user may not think that anyone is listening to their complaint, enquiry but instead they are alerted that their tweet is now visible and being listened to by a whole community so they should receive a response to their tweet.

You can then take that conversation which may be discussing purchasing a product or service and integrate it into your CRM system such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.

In summary you need to integrate your social media strategy to your CRM strategy to become a social business. You can listen, leverage brand outposts, engage, create conversation, manage reputations and build social media community through the use of technologies and then link this to your CRM strategy.

Tagged as: intel, lithium, Social Business, Social CRM, social customer, Twitter

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OK, first off let’s start with a few random Twitter stats:

• The average Twitter user has 126 followers - (Guardian)
• Largest demographic on Twitter - 45-54 year olds (Social Media Library)
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%) - (Sysomos)
• Twitter’s most active celebrity based on no. of tweets - Perez Hilton (Brian Solis PeopleBrowsr)

For me personally the above stats amongst all the many others add up to one important and obvious fact: this platform is sticking around for a while.

If you, your client, company and even dog (check out Jeremiah Owyang’s dog) are not using Twitter to its full potential, then it is about time you got involved, brushed up on the latest tactics or even re-visit that Twitter profile you abandoned a few months ago when you first joined.

For those of you who need even more reinforcement or just want to hear the latest case studies from some of the UK’s top twitter brands, then the Media 140 event in London on Monday 26 October is the place to be enlightened (thanks to Sejal for the invitation to the event which unfortunately I cannot make). Everything a brand needs to know about Twitter and real-time social media features a top line-up of Twitter brands including Easyjet’s Paul Hoskins @easyjetCare and someone who I respect very much and have had the pleasure of tapping into his brain last year,  Innocent Drinks very own Mr Ted Hunt.

Oh, and if you’re not already following me on Twitter then shame on you! Go on follow @TomChapman say hello and I’ll follow you back (please note: Mafia Family invites via Twitter do not apply).  I personally can share with you some great Twitter case studies that Headstream have been involved in with leading brands such as Guitar Hero, Samsung, Galaxy Radio and UKTV to name but a few.

Tagged as: conference, easyjet, event, headstream, innocent drinks, media140, seminar, Social Media, Twitter

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Conversations about your industry concerning buying decisions are taking place regularly within social media spaces. In order to have an influence over these conversations you need to be active within social media.

However, in order to make an impact, you need to ensure that your voice within these spaces is one that represents value, respect and trust. Many marketers have taken a bold step in entering social media, only to receive a backlash from a community. Others have given up on social media outposts that have already been set up because they have not delivered immediate results.

The following guidelines will assist those already operating in these spaces and help those considering getting their hands dirty:

1. Beware of a lack of understanding
If you have not done so already, educate yourself on the seismic shifts in communication when it comes to ‘mass broadcast’ versus ‘conversation’. Read case studies to help understand what has worked.

Marketers who want to use social media must be part of social media. You need to be out there commenting on blogs; contributing to communities and using social media outposts such as Twitter and LinkedIn.You cannot execute successful campaigns if you do not understand the platforms you are using.

2. Develop a social media strategy
It goes without saying that your organisation should have a social media strategy. This should be a company-wide strategy with all business units contributing.

A well-designed social media strategy can be used as a roadmap for your organisation. At the same time, the strategy will be used to benchmark tactics against objectives showing results and return on investment.

The most important element of the strategy is listening to the conversation. By listening you are able to understand where the conversation is taking place and what challenges your clients and prospects face. Then you can produce content and start a dialogue.

Most importantly, the process of listening enables you to understand the marketplace and competitor movements.

3. Be open and honest
Social media is all about open and honest communication. This means you need to be transparent in everything you do. Instead of building a wall, come forward and admit mistakes, learn from the experience and move on, ensuring that transparency becomes a corporate objective throughout the entire organisation.

Social media has the habit of finding skeletons in closets so honesty from the outset will earn you respect in the long-term.

If you have corporate social media outposts – for example Twitter and blogs – then look to communicate who is behind them so you give clients and prospects a face and a name to communicate with. Ideally, CEOs should contribute guest blog posts and staff members should be involved in the conversation.

4. Avoid short-term engagement
Forget the quick-win scenario; with social media you are in it for the long-term. Your social media strategy will help map out forthcoming activity and include campaign activity to maintain the engagement.

If you have social media outposts that are left out-of-date then it allows your competitors to move in. Revisit your strategy regularly and plan activity that will create dialogue. This dialogue can comprise of individual short campaigns, but they must all link into one another to form one large consistent campaign. The benefits of investing in long-term engagement should not be underestimated.

5. Poor creative = poor engagement
If you are struggling for ideas on how to maintain long-term engagement then you need to look at investing in and creating social currency that will kick-start the conversation and continue the engagement. Engaging content is essential to support word-of-mouth activity. An example would be to invest in research that can be produced as a white paper and offered to the community. Similarly, branded entertainment can create social currency.

It is important to note that social media is definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. Every company and industry will be different in terms of strategies and tactics, but the underlying principles are the same. What is consistent, however, is the time and effort required for planning a social media strategy and campaigns and this should not be underestimated.

Tagged as: branded entertainment, marketing, Social Media, strategy, tactics

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