Social Networking

The foundation of social media is conversations.  As a B2B marketer you should look toward social media, in particular communities as an opportunity to create dialogue between your organisation and customers.  

Marketing is, after all, about understanding and satisfying customer wants and needs.  What better way to do this than to provide your customers with a community where like-minded individuals can come together and interact with both the company and each other.  

Great organisations such as Dell, Oracle, IBM, already use communities as a channel to communicate with their customers on equal terms.  At the same time providing a collaborative work space where their clients can provide feedback and assist in the development of future products and services. 

Where to start?
Well I’m certainly not going to follow the tired formula of ‘build it and they will come.’  B2B marketing is all about initiating the program, pulling the strings and orchestrating the story so here is the best way of building a community for your company:

First, as with any plan you need to define your business objectives; do you want to co-create future products/services with your customers, build stronger relationships or identify current trends and understand how your products or services are used?  Next you can look at resources and what investment you can realistically dedicate to the community as time and effort play a large part in the success of a community.

The cost to develop a community can be minimal and can be launched immediately for free using tools such as Facebook brand pages or groups.  So, if budgets are tight or, you do not have time to wait for budgets to be signed off for a bespoke interface as part of your corporate website, you can start building your community immediately.

Create a stir
Having identified your objectives and platform you then need to target your key influencers; these will usually be the customers who provide regular feedback to your company via e-mail, surveys or have an active presence through blogs and will be willing to participate in a community.  Furthermore these key influencers will help you to build the community through dialogue with other members. 

Contact the key influencers via e-mail informing them about your new community and invite them to join first.  Seed content such as company information into the community to kick-start the conversation and educate the key influencers on how the dialogue should take shape.  When the community starts to buzz, use your CRM e-mail database to inform all your customers about the community and invite them to participate in the discussion.

Promote, promote, promote
Once the conversation is taking shape you still need to maintain the momentum.  To do this you can run promotions or competitions amongst the community.  Set up a tiered system whereby members are ranked or rewarded based upon their contribution to the community.  Make the recognitions public to encourage other members to follow suit.

If you gather real insight into emerging trends within your industry via the community why not write a report and issue a press release to raise awareness of the community’s value.  Through effective digital pr you can boost community activity whilst at the same time recruiting new members.

Integrate other business units
Your community should shape what your business will eventually become – open, honest and highly effective.  More importantly the community should be integrated with not just marketing but other strategic business units, for example: customer service/support, product development and finance, this is because all units can benefit from the knowledge, insight and collaboration of the community as they are all brand touch points.

Fundamentally history shows us that those businesses that go on to succeed and reap the benefits are authentic.  If you provide a platform where customers can share values with your company, meaningful conversations with different business units and interact with other community members then they are more likely to stay loyal to a brand.  We’re all well aware that it costs twice as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer.  A community based approach can help lower costs at the outset but when budgets are tight they may increase rewards when (if) success blossoms.

Tagged as: b2b marketing, Communities, Social Media, strategy, Tom Chapman

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The following text is taken from my recent article for B2B Marketing Magazine in the UK:

Twitter is the perfect example of social media – an online tool powering conversation. B2B marketers have the potential to use it more effectively than B2C, not only due to the length of sales cycle but more importantly the long relationship cycle.

As a business marketer, you need to find out if your customers are talking about your brand, products, services and indeed competitors on Twitter. If they are, then you need to engage with them and be there before the sale. If not, then register your brand’s ID on Twitter and get involved before your competitors do.

With any communications tool, you should have a strategy in place to effectively handle the relationships with customers. Here are guidelines on how to best communicate your brand on Twitter.

1. Register your brand
Don’t get brand jacked – register your company name on Twitter! You can then link this account to your company blog so you are integrating your communications and syndicating content.

If your organisation does not have a blog, consider using Twitter – it can be cross-platform integrated, easier to maintain and your customers can see what you are up to.

Your sales and marketing team should also look to register their personal Twitter accounts. Dell employees use their personal name and company Twitter ID (e.g. JohnatDell) to reinforce transparency.

2. Find your customers
Using the Twitter search tool you can find users who mention your brand, product, service, industry or competitor, and then follow them.

They hopefully will check out your website or read your ‘tweets’ and follow you back. Even if they do not follow you back immediately, you can earn their following by answering any related questions adding value with an ‘@reply’.

Do not fall into the trap of using ‘auto-follow’ tools or following everyone who follows you, keep focussed on your strategy and your audience.

3. Set your brand apart from the noise
Thinking of what you should ‘tweet’ about? Twitter gives you 140 characters to answer the question ‘what are you doing now?’ so make it relevant and remember that anything you tweet will be indexed by Google.

Give some thought to your tone of voice. I would recommend that your tweets are conversational.

As with any social tool it is your contribution to the community that will set you apart from the noise and encourage followers to engage with your brand. Offering social currency such as links to industry white papers, reports, case studies, hints and tips may earn your brand social endorsement in the form of a ‘retweet’, a powerful feature of Twitter of online word-of-mouth marketing in action.

Twitter is a business ecosystem bringing together people, conversations, offerings and entire industries into one busy marketplace where the savvy can extract value and form long-term relationships.

B2B marketers should look toward Twitter as a cost-effective way of getting closer to customers. The question you should be asking yourself today is ’should I be looking to extract value from social media tools such as Twitter now, or play catch up, spending more time and effort later on?

Tagged as: b2b marketing, Social Media, Tom Chapman, Twitter

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Despite being in possession of a ticket to London’s Global charity event Twestival; standing outside in the freezing wind and snow waiting to get into the venue in Shoreditch was unavoidable.  Looking back it showed true dedication on my behalf to the fastest growing social media phenomenon: Twitter.

With an annual growth rate of 813%, Twitter has well and truly surpassed the all important tipping point and is now ranked as the world’s third largest social network (even if it is technically defined as micro-blogging) behind Facebook and Myspace.

The Twestival event primarily was for the charity ‘water‘, however for me it was all about getting together and blurring the boundaries between online and offline communications by being able to meet the real faces behind the computer generated avatars.

I actually had some time away from the Twitter interface and did not tweet once during my time at Twestival.  I was too busy communicating in person with new acquaintances and friends.  Consistent with my Twitter behaviour I was hopping around from person-to-person getting involved in the conversation that was somewhat less formal than my Twitter conversations about social media and other musings.  This was true offline social networking.

Tagged as: guardian, london, Social Media, social networks, twestival

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Having become a heavy Twitter user these past few months I can now classify myself as an individual within a tribe.  The Twitter tribe I belong to consists of groups of individuals such as myself who share a common interest (Twitter) and unite to form a parallel social universe.  
In my own case I’m interested in following those with a shared passion for social media and our universe is supported by rituals, for example sharing links to blog posts, pages etc… in the form of TinyUrls, retweeting ‘tweets’ that we identify with as well as asking questions and responding to others.

Decline in the use of social network sites such as Facebook
Like myself, using Twitter I’m sure has now become a habit for many.  Not only do I regularly tweet throughout the day but in an evening I regularly use Twitter and enjoy doing so because I’m learning, engaging, participating all at the same time with like minded people.
I have seen the stats of my use of social network sites such as Facebook rapidly decline.  I rarely login to check what is going on with my friends and family on Facebook, not because I’m not interested, but because I want to spend my time engaging and interacting with like minded individuals (people like me) in my own parallel universe on Twitter.  
My very close friends and family would be bored to tears listening to talk about social media marketing and engagement marketing, but with my Twitter tribe we can all tweet for hours about a subject we feel passionate about.   So is the Twitter tribe starting to replace a certain role once provided by my family and friends via Facebook?

The inner workings of the tribe
Taking this further can the Twitter social universe that I’m a part of be defined as a church where we all congregate to celebrate what we are most passionate about, which for myself is social media?  I’m not going to use the word ‘cult’ to associate this to my tribe as there are negative connotations associated with the word, however the behaviour displayed by some Twitter consumers comes very close to that of a cult.

Twitter could be seen as a place of worship of icons that we admire within the social media world where many individuals are increasingly likely to conform to the influences of their peers.
These icons for me such as @jowyang, @ChrisBrogan, @ScottMonty are evangelists of social media whom represent both a career and passion for many.  
It is not uncommon when these icons reply to followers they feel that they have been blessed, which further encourages their need to particpate in the tribe, continuing their journey on Twitter enlightenment!
Many tweets I have witnessed publically declare they “cannot believe that @Scobelizer has replied”directly to them or that @StephenFry “just tweeted me back” - but this is just one part of the enjoyment of using Twitter, other Twit fun includes building up your social graph, discovering great content, tools and research.  

One tweet I have used to sum up Twitter that has been retweeted by many who also identify with my sentiment is:  ”I cannot believe how addictive twitter can be - it is voyeuristic as well as participatory.” 

Come and Join me in my social universe at: http://www.twitter.com/tomchapman

Tagged as: chris brogan, facebook, jeremiah owyang, Micro-blogging, scott monty, Social Media, Tribe, Twitter

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