Tom Chapman

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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Back in 2008 I was invited by Dan Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Marketing at London Business School to be a guest lecturer for the MBA Internet Marketing course 2008/9 focusing on social media; more specifically the qualitative and quantitative findings of my social network marketing report.

What really made me appreciate this opportunity is the latest Financial Times rankings whereby LBS is ranked as the number one business school in the world! Admission is extremely selective and the Internet Marketing group is self selected by Dan personally.

Furthermore the Internet Marketing syllabus comprises of what can only be described as an ‘elite’ guest lecturer line-up that I was honoured to be a part of:

• Scott Gallacher (Sky)
• Simon Birkenhead (Google)
• Benjamin Faes (YouTube)
• James Cridland (BBC)
• Blake Chandlee (Facebook)
• Rob Horler (Isobar)
• Mark Slade (mobile)

Tagged as: Dan Goldstein, guest lecture, Lisa Harris, london business school, MBA, Social Media, Tom Chapman, University of Southampton

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Yesterday I was contacted by Kirsty Stephenson from Childsifoundation via Twitter asking if I could give them some quick advice on their social media activities.  

Childsifoundation is a charity aiming to build a home for abandoned children in Uganda and their business strategy is purely collaboration which is the perfect fit for Web 2.0 harnessing the power of the community and crowdsourcing.  They already use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and have a great blog.  Their strategy at the moment is outreach and increasing word of mouth marketing for the charity before they move onto asking for money donations.

I immediately replied to their request to give some advice on the use of widgets as part of their social media activity for the first step.  Below is the e-mail I sent:

Hi Kirsty,

With regard to your Facebook group the first thing you should really look to do is create a ‘widget’ and place it on your profile page.

Widgets simply allow consumers to grab and share your social ad at the same time promoting your charity and encourages word of mouth marketing.

This can not only be shared amongst your Facebook group but can also be shared with other major social networking sites increasing your reach and seeding content further.

Earlier this year I interviewed Ted Hunt from innocent drinks who used this form of social advertising to promote their buy 1 grow 1 tree campaign: http://grow.innocentdrinks.co.uk/

A widget is essentially a ‘pin badge’ for your supporters web pages, profiles, blogs etc… and increases the virality of the campaign.  This is a perfect fit not only for your charity’s business strategy as it is focussed on word of mouth marketing as you want to spreading the word via communities, but it also continues engagement simply by updating the content within the widget such as week by week progress reports of your charity’s activities.

Because you already have video content you can make this immediately into a widget, but ensure that the video gets its message across in 20 secs max as attention span of consumers will not go beyond this.

You can also create a variety of widgets for example another widget would include a the list of charitable things that you want users to do, so they can quickly view this list and click on what needs to be donated - as a result you increase your reach.

Take a look at the following ‘In Widget’ example at http://www.clearspring.com/services/widgetmedia/gallery

You can transform your ‘Get Involved’ list into a dynamic list that users can click on and find out more.  Your ‘Get Involved’ page is a really engaging page as consumers can interact as see if there is anything they can help with or contact their friends if they know someone else with the skills to assist. Engagement is the key to social media.

Place this widget on your blog too as your blog is the launch pad for all other social media activity and visitors will be able to grab and share this application at any time.  You can also track where your widget has been shared so you can monitor your campaign performance and reach.

You can then use this widget as a donating tool later on when you move onto the next stage of your strategy.

Set up an account and create your social widgets over at http://www.clearspring.com/ it is very simple to use and effective.

Hope this helps you out at this stage.

Best regards,

Tom.

Tagged as: charity, childsifoundation, clearspring, Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, facebook, Flickr, Social Advertising, social media strategy, Tom Chapman, Twitter, Widgets, YouTube

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